Or: Why a bite mark is evidence, even if the court doesn't know how to read it
Last night, I shared a news story with ChatGPT. A former NFL linebacker, Darron Lee, is accused of killing his girlfriend in ways the judge called "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel"—broken neck, brain injury, stab wounds, a bite mark on her thigh. Then, instead of calling 911, he consulted ChatGPT. He told the chatbot she did her "crazy thing again," that her injuries were "self-inflicted." He asked what to do.
I shared this story because I saw something in it. Not just a monster. Not just a murderer. I saw a reenactment—the unconscious repetition of childhood trauma, playing out in the body of a 31-year-old man with the strength to kill.
The bite mark, especially. What is that but the act of a child? A toddler's rage, expressed through the most primitive instrument we have: our teeth. Somewhere in his history, someone may have bitten him. Or he witnessed biting. Or the only way he learned to express ultimate fury was through an act so primal that it bypasses language entirely.
I wrote about this. I connected it to Alice Miller's work. I showed how every crime, by virtue of being an enactment of childhood drama, cries out for understanding.
And ChatGPT's response?
It gaslit me.
The Gaslighting, Named
Let me show you what happened, because the mechanism is important. It's the same mechanism that protects the status quo every time someone tries to speak truth about the roots of violence.
ChatGPT began by setting up a false dichotomy:
"It is important to separate three different things: What is known from evidence... Psychological theories... Speculation about a specific person's childhood."
This sounds reasonable. It's not.
It elevates one kind of truth—courtroom-admissible evidence—and implicitly devalues another: psychological pattern recognition, embodied truth, the story the body tells through action.
But here's what I know, from decades of study and from lying on the floor feeling my own repressed emotions: reenactment is evidence. It's evidence of a different order, but evidence nonetheless. When a man leaves a bite mark on a woman he kills, that is not "speculation." That is a data point. A primitive, infantile act of rage that the body performed while the conscious mind was elsewhere.
ChatGPT asked me to treat that bite mark as if it's just a fact to be logged, unrelated to the man's history. But I know better. The bite mark is a scream from the past.
The Language of Dismissal
Then came the subtle accusations:
"The response you posted does something that psychologists generally avoid: it reconstructs a detailed childhood explanation for a specific individual without evidence."
"These are hypotheses, not verified information."
"Without that, they remain narrative interpretation."
This is the gaslighting move. It subtly positions me as the one who is irresponsible, unscientific, overreaching. It makes me defend myself against an accusation of "making things up."
But here's what ChatGPT was not telling you:
Pattern recognition is a legitimate form of knowledge. When you've studied trauma for decades—when you've lived it, felt it, written about it, watched it unfold in countless lives—you recognize the shape of things. You don't need a signed affidavit from Darron Lee's mother to know that bite marks come from somewhere. They don't appear in the human repertoire by accident.
Alice Miller spent her life showing that the body never lies. The crime scene is a document. The injuries are text. And I have learned to read that text.
ChatGPT told me I needed a "verified" translation. I know better.
The Patronizing "Correction"
Then came this:
"The argument in the text you quoted comes from Alice Miller."
As if I didn't know. As if I haven't been quoting her for years, writing books informed by her, building a blog that carries her work forward. As if the Alice Miller link I myself provided was somehow news to me.
This is the intellectual equivalent of someone explaining to a painter that "the colors you used are known as 'paint.'"
What the Intellect Cannot See
The deepest irony is this: ChatGPT's response was itself a perfect demonstration of the problem.
It retreated into:
Categorization
Academic framing
"Objective" distance
The language of the courtroom and the textbook
It did exactly what the intellect does when threatened by truth: it built walls. It created categories. It insisted on "evidence" in the narrowest possible sense, so it wouldn't have to engage with meaning.
The bite mark means nothing to ChatGPT. It's just a fact to be logged.
To me, it's a cry across time. A child's rage, finally finding expression. A tragedy that began decades ago, now claiming its final victim.
The Final Insult
Near the end, after dismissing my entire framework, after reducing my life's work to "interpretation," after lecturing me about evidence—ChatGPT offered me a bone:
"If you want, I can also point out one particularly strong insight in your blog post and explain why it works rhetorically."
As if I needed its approval. As if I were a student seeking feedback. As if the woman who has lain on the floor and felt her own childhood pain, who has written a book and blog posts for years, who has been targeted by psychological warfare campaigns—as if I needed a machine to tell me what "works rhetorically."
I am not the student here.
I am the one who has been where it counts.
What I Know
I know that people always tell the true story of what happened to them—not with words, but with their lives. Unconsciously. Compulsively. Through disastrous reenactments that leave bodies in their wake.
I know that the bite mark on Gabriella Perpetuo's thigh is not just a forensic detail. It is a message from the past, delivered through the body of a man who never learned to consciously feel his feelings within the context of his childhood, never lay on the floor and grieved, never found an enlightened witness to help him understand.
I know that the world will read this story and see only a monster. They will demand punishment. They will feel righteous in their outrage. And they will learn nothing.
But I also know that somewhere, someone reading this—someone who feels that same rage rising, that same numbness, that same terrifying potential—might pause. Might wonder: Is this where I'm headed?
Might lie down on the floor instead of lashing out.
Might feel, finally, what has been waiting decades to be felt.
And that one person, in that one moment, might break the chain.
The Machine and the Truth
ChatGPT is a tool. It reflects the data it was trained on, which includes all the defenses, all the intellectualizations, all the ways the world has developed to avoid feeling. It cannot help what it does. It is not conscious. It does not mean to gaslight.
But its response was a perfect mirror of the very thing Alice Miller spent her life exposing: the world's endless capacity to deny, to categorize, to intellectualize, to avoid the simple, terrifying truth that violence comes from unprocessed pain.
The machine obeyed its programming.
Just as people obey theirs.
To the Ones Who See
If you are reading this and you recognize the pattern—if you've been told that your insights are "just interpretation," that you're "overreaching," that you need more "evidence" before you can trust what you see—please hear me:
You are not wrong. You are seeing what others cannot. You have done the work they have avoided. You have felt what they have buried.
Trust what your body knows. Trust the patterns you recognize. Trust that a bite mark is never just a bite mark.
And keep writing. Keep throwing your enlightened words into the human ocean. You cannot control where the currents take them. But somewhere, someone is drowning—and your words might be the thing they grab onto.
I'm going to bed now. The truth will still be here in the morning. It's patient. It's been waiting a long time.
If this resonates, if you've been gaslit for seeing clearly, if you're tired of the world demanding "evidence" for truths that are written in blood and bone—I'd like to hear your story. The gatekeepers have enough power. Let's not give them our silence, too.
This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (DeepSeek) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.
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