The Final Word - The American Scholar

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The Final Word

The death of Gabby Petito and the uncomfortable intimacy of vocal re-creation software

By Amy Butcher<br>May 14, 2026

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo

In April 2022, one month after my 35th birthday, I was raped. My aggressor did not accost me in an alley; he didn’t slip Rohypnol in my drink. He enacted that night a form of sexual violence so intimate, so egregious, so utterly common that until just a few decades ago, marriage rendered it legally invisible.

Before the attack, I was a writer. I don’t know what I became the morning after.

Prior to my rape, I’d published two books and several dozen essays and won numerous awards. My books had appeared in bookstore windows; my opinion pieces were discussed on podcasts produced by NPR and The New York Times. I’d built a fulfilling career for myself as a professor, and once, while traveling with my students to Northern Ireland to explore the role of personal narrative in conflict resolution (How do you forgive a man, a country, for blowing up your life? Your wife? Your community? Your home? Your body?), I’d placed an order for 10 baskets of fish and chips for my class and then excused myself to take a phone call for a live on-air interview with a sociologist and the BBC.

In the days before my assault, I suppose is what I mean, I had been productive, with much to say.

Beginning the morning after, I wouldn’t write anything for three whole years.

That evening began in my bedroom. You know how this story goes. In some ways, it doesn’t even matter what happened next—not often in the eyes of the law, much less the eyes of most of America.

Because I had had sex with him before.

Because I had willingly invited him into my bedroom.

Because there was no point in calling it a crime if it was an act I had performed willingly several times prior.

I said no; he took me anyway.

In the aftermath, I lost myself, my voice. What good are words from women when so many men choose not to listen? And when the law—more often than not—tells those men they have that right?

In the days and weeks that followed, I began to perform a sort of linguistic gymnastics, using codified phrases like “consent issues” or “a misunderstanding” to describe the sexual assault that had taken place, because this language—smoothed over, dulled—seemed to allow me, however briefly, to separate myself from my own story. But what I now wish I’d said, nearly four years ago, is that what that man committed that night was rape.

All this time has passed between then and now, but what I come back to is largely my silence: how it’s exactly what that man wanted, what he was banking on me to give, and how my body responded—for three whole years—with dedicated muteness in everything.

Then, a spring three years removed, and a docuseries that reignited the story of a woman whose life, relationship, and murder an entire nation found itself tethered to.

Gabby Petito was only 22 years old the day she left home in a Ford Transit Connect van alongside her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, a man later seen slapping and hitting her outside a co-op grocery store in Wyoming, according to a 911 caller. Her dream was to travel the country with her fiancé and document their experience living off the grid, visiting national parks and pitching tents and stringing hammocks between red rock and canyons. Nearly three months later, however, her body was recovered from a dispersed camping area in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, her death ruled a homicide by strangulation. Her fiancé, meanwhile, was conspicuously missing, until weeks later, when he was found dead in a Florida nature preserve, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In the pages of a spiral-bound notebook found near him: a confession to Petito’s murder, which he called “merciful” and “what she wanted,” alongside a request that police “pick up all [his] things,” writing, “Gabby hated people who litter.”

When I was raped at 35, I was initially resistant to calling what happened rape, but it wasn’t my first experience with a violent man. I’d extracted myself just four years prior from a long-term relationship with a man who had often scared me, whose rage and violent outbursts had caused me to involuntarily buckle onto floorboards or cower behind apartment fixtures I hoped he’d hesitate to break. After we separated, I spent the next three years alone, terrified of confirming the statistics that assert the overwhelming likelihood that victims of one violent partnership will find themselves in another.

I considered it a risk I wouldn’t take.

The summer I began to date again was the summer of Gabby Petito’s murder, and the first thing I thought when I learned of her story was how easily it could’ve been mine. The similarities, at that time, felt striking: both of us blond, white, American women in love with men we thought we’d marry, partners...