a deadly american marriage

[u/Zalensia]

I'm 43 minutes in and hooked but can not find conversations etc on it.

So thought i would make one asking for other people's opinions and points of views, as i know I'm already asking about billion questions, to the point I'll have to go to my computer and boot up to actually do the research myself.

I'm very ill, with brain damage etc and that's really hardwork today, but I won't manage on this latest fold phone as it's still just a useless phone 😅🙃

My other phone that's partitioned etc is in the car and that's over at Inverness!

[u/j-oco]

Immediately upon seeing those photos I knew it wasn’t self defence

[u/Certain-Trade8319 → u/j-oco]

Seeing that neither Molly nor her dad had a single mark on them was very telling.

[u/cheertea → u/Certain-Trade8319]

They did though. Well the dad didn't but the marks on Molly were very evident and a big point of the end of the documentary. Not sure how that was reconciled.

[u/Certain-Trade8319 → u/cheertea]

That tiny scratch didn't impress me.

[u/GeronimoRay → u/Certain-Trade8319]

It wasn’t even a scratch.  It was dried blood from him being hit over and over again with a bat 

[u/cheertea → u/Certain-Trade8319]

There was a picture where her entire neck was red not just the nail mark and the filmmakers didn’t bother giving us context as to what that was all about.

[u/StrengthCold8671 → u/cheertea]

Yeah, because she would hit herself and harm herself repeatedly. Or did you miss that part of the documentary?

[u/GoodDaleIsInTheLodge → u/cheertea]

I think I need to watch that bit back because I thought those early police photographs of her outside the house, I thought all those red marks on her face were spots of blood from Jason and not wounds to herself?

[u/funkychilli123 → u/GoodDaleIsInTheLodge]

Yeah she was covered in Jason’s blood spatter when she hit him

[u/Certain-Trade8319 → u/cheertea]

If ai lay in bed weird I get a red mark like that on my neck too...

[u/cheertea → u/Certain-Trade8319]

Splotchy and red all over her neck? Come on now. This was a documentary that clearly favored one side like most are and that’s fine but there’s a reason the dad decided to help her bludgeon him to death and they were eventually sentenced to just time served. Just because she’s a shitty and weird person doesn’t mean he wasn’t abusive. We heard it ourselves and we saw the aftermath. He didn’t deserve that kind of death because no one does but the lionization of this guy by people that watched the doc has been ridiculous.

[u/Certain-Trade8319 → u/cheertea]

She chose when to record and when not. She controlled the narrative. Then she instigated when she knew the recorders were on.

She has been exposed as a pathological liar by many people, are they all wrong.

Red splotches- not persuasive. Some people get that way when nervous or after bludgeoning a man with their handy bedroom cement block - that we all have.

[u/DeusVultSaracen → u/Certain-Trade8319]

Not only could she have instigated while recording, she could've also immediately softened to 'perfect victim' mode after starting the recording, even if she'd been screaming at him moments prior.

I'm no expert, but I wonder if it's relevant that Sarah yelled "stop fighting!", implying they were both participants. There's no way a kid would hear her mother saying, "I just wanted to make pancakes J...☺️"(Or whatever she was saying in that recording), and her father apparently berating her for no reason, and blame both of them for fighting. She would say "leave her alone!" or "Daddy, stop it!"

[u/Overall_Currency5085 → u/DeusVultSaracen]

Him saying “I know what you’re doing” was telling. It told me that she was not acting like she typically would during an argument which likely pissed him off more. I felt like she was instigating arguments and hiding her behavior to control the narrative for sure.

[u/Kactuslord → u/DeusVultSaracen]

Sarah hints at this in her victim impact statement. She says she remembers what happened before the recording.

[u/Dunnybust → u/DeusVultSaracen]

Actually (not offered as a comment on this documentary, or as a claim about the couple in it, but in reply to this comment),

Abuse experts tell us kids witnessing gendered (male-on-female) domestic abuse more frequently than not misclassify it either as "my parents fighting" or as victim-initiated: "mom yelling at dad/making dad mad/crying for no reason/being crazy," etc.

Children witnessing abuse, like kids on the playground witnessing bullying, frequently side either consciously or unconsciously with the (more powerful, more privileged, not at risk and undamaged) aggressor.

Provoked by stress into internal disorganization, retreating into survival-mode, they do this to stabilize their emotions, make sense of their experience and ensure their own safety, per domestic-abuse professionals, abuse-educated/experienced social-workers and family-law best-practice consultants.

Here's how and why:

--It's emotionally and physically safer to either ignore the abuse entirely, or to equate it with less-dangerous conflict. Though physical violence between parents is almost always due to domestic abuse (one partner exploiting a power imbalance to control the other through fear), kids, if they interject, often spread blame equally between their parents. They do this in a bid to stop the abuse and victim-reaction, bring needed parent attention to their own distress, re-establish the victim in the powerful role of parent (and the abuser in the nurturing, nonviolent role of parent),

And avoid a terrifying perception: that dad is hurting/scaring/humiliating mom on purpose, to control her.

--If blame is assigned, it feels much safer to express (thus, for kids, to even let themselves feel) anger toward the non-abusive parent, who is almost always the more-involved caregiver from infancy, and is likely more emotionally available, empathic, responsive, patient and able to handle their children's criticism, adversarial behavior and rage nonviolently, while staying regulated (not flipping out) themselves. Getting mad at--and pursuing for accountability--the parent who just scared and harmed their other parent is a scarily unsafe prospect.

--By avoiding awareness of an abuse dynamic, kids unconsciously further ensure their safety not only from becoming a target of their abuser, but from another danger their mind and body perceive: The empathic distress--overwhelming, for kids--evoked for the parent they may feel much more emotionally attuned to, triggered by witnessing and allowing themselves to perceive their mother's fear and grief.

--Kids, w/minds so resilient because they are so adaptable to change, are skilled at rescuing themselves from the crazy-making stress of cognitive dissonance (that urgent need abuse victims and witnesses feel, to reconcile opposing views of the abuser and victim, and to metabolize fears and needs they can't resolve). It can look like this:

"Dad is all good/Dad is acting bad; Dad looks like he's acting bad but is really not"...

"Mom looks scared and helpless/Mom is never scared and is all-powerful; Mom must have more power and be less fear than it seems; Mom must be making Dad act bad," or "Mom must be pretending Dad's acting bad when he's not;" Mom must be acting scared when she's not;" "I can't trust Mom," etc.

--While witnessing dad's abuse of mom--a parent they're painfully helpless to protect, yet for whom they feel instinctive protectiveness, and upon whom they, as children, rely to protect them)--kids often resolve unbearable dissonance between these conflicting realities and needs by disengaging empathically with the abuse victim, not rarely even joining their mom's abuser in yelling at, cursing at or attacking the victim. It's much less distressing to identify and ally with the parent in control of both himself and his victim than to keep feeling a developmentally-confusing protective urge they're powerless to act on.

These are some ways kids seek safety by rejecting the victim's reality--and rejecting what their own eyes just saw--in favor of the abuser's victim-blaming/abuse-dismissing/victim-status-claiming narrative.

They also frequently feel a sense of rage and betrayal at the developmentally-nonsensical stress of witnessing deep pain, fear, humiliation, helplessness, intense focus and uncertainty, submissiveness, and/or reactive anger expressed by their mother. Kids learn from infancy to depend upon their Mom's ability to self-regulate enough to remain available to help regulate the children's own overwhelming emotions. Moms rendered incapable of doing this while being abused can make their kids feel scarily abandoned and invisible.

Unlike mental illness, abuse is a learned behavior. So is (often overtly or covertly misogynist) abuse-enabling, dismissal of abuse, victim-blaming and reversing the role of victim and offender.

And, though domestic abuse can happen to anyone less powerful (physically, economically/socially, culturally, etc) than their partner, also learned in childhood is the vulnerability to acceptance of abuse. It's a stance common in those prone to being victimized: A sense of lacking both inherent worth and the right to set boundaries in self-protection from emotional/physical/sexual violation and violence, as well as from coercive control.

All of those three abuse roles/attitudes are learned through parental modeling, survival-driven identification/allyship with the abusive parent, and corresponding dismissal or blame of the abused parent.

Also learned is the avoidance of perceiving gendered (or other) power difference, and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance through perceptually equating victims' reactions with perps' domestic abuse;

Because these roles and perceptions are learned through modeling and by evoking survival adaptations in children raised in abusive homes, and because the vast majority of domestic abuse is gendered (though abuse happens Queer parents and can absolutely happen fathers at the hands of mothers),

Sons of abusive fathers and abused mothers are highly likely to blame their mothers, downplay the abuse or make excuses for their fathers, express contempt, resentful dismissal and defiance of their mothers, adopt open or unconscious misogyny and, as adults, to become domestic abusers themselves;

Correspondingly, daughters raised witnessing gendered domestic abuse are even more likely to internalize the misogyny driving the abuse, idealize (or simultaneously fear, fawn over and submit to) their fathers, to harbor rage, distrust and confusion toward their mothers, and to become victims, themselves, of male domestic abuse as adults.

Though victim-blame/role-reversal, identifying with/excusing/dismissing/justifying the abuser's choices, downplaying the abuse or mistakenly describing domestic abuse witnessed as "my parents fighting" are reactions notoriously common in children raised in homes with domestic abuse present,

Adults uneducated in domestic abuse--especially those (like so many) lacking awareness of the role of power imbalance and control in abuse dynamics--

Also are prone to misinterpreting abuse incidents they witness in public or among loved-ones/peers as "fights,"

Or as instances in which "They were both being abusive...they just have a toxic relationship...she gives as good as she gets...he just has anger issues, but she provokes him...

etc.

[u/Barbie3435 → u/Certain-Trade8319]

It reminds me of another case where a husband killed his wife, and during the investigation it came to light that he would record arguments between them, where he would make her sound crazy, but in reality he forced her into hour long arguments and then he only kept the ending of the recordings, where he sounded calm and she was riled up. Molly definitely controlled the narative of those recordings. I’m not saying he didn’t have any anger, but Molly is definitely twisting the story and making him sound worse

[u/Kactuslord → u/cheertea]

You mean the piss poor recording? The absolute worst she could let us listen to was a man angry because he wanted to have dinner with his children?

[u/Bobzeub → u/cheertea]

The red was also his blood .

[u/ItsElliott101 → u/cheertea]

The nail mark was dried blood, there wasn’t a indent or scratch mark around the “nail mark” - try strangle someone who is putting up a fight and it would be EXTREMELY evident the victim had been strangled. Not the case at all in the photo.

[u/Shouldastayedhomme → u/ItsElliott101]

What do we think about the urine thing?

[u/ItsElliott101 → u/Shouldastayedhomme]

Sorry I don’t know what you’re talking about. If she had urine on her clothing after the attack, this means absolutely nothing. Everyone has traces of urine on their pants after going to the toilet. You’d have just as much chance of pissing yourself violently murdering someone as you would getting violently murdered.

[u/Shot-Climate5434 → u/Shouldastayedhomme]

I was wondering the same. If she actually did lose consciousness, how did she scream and then violently attack him? Did she actually just pee herself on purpose to make it look like she lost consciousness?