What Happened to Gabby Petito? An Unsettling New Netflix Documentary Attempts to Answer.
Briefly

Netflix's documentary American Murder: Gabby Petito dissects the media's role in Gabriel Petito's high-profile disappearance, addressing the issue of 'missing white woman syndrome.' It highlights how Petito's life as a social media influencer provided extensive documentation of her experiences, contrasting her visibility with the frequent neglect of missing persons of color. While the series employs a familiar true-crime style, it emphasizes personal narratives from Petito's friends and family, allowing their accounts to shape the storytelling, thus fostering deeper audience connections and reflection on societal biases in media coverage.
Filmmakers Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro explore 'missing white woman syndrome,' examining the media's obsessive focus on cases like Gabby Petito's.
The abundance of social media documentation from Gabby Petito created a unique narrative, highlighting the contrast between her visibility and the invisibility of many missing people of color.
American Murder: Gabby Petito leans on the perspectives of her family and friends, utilizing personal video content to shape the narrative around her tragic story.
The documentary critiques true-crime media, emphasizing the captivation surrounding Gabby Petito as both an influencer and a victim, contrasting the treatment of visible versus invisible cases.
Read at Slate Magazine
[
|
]