Public Appearances
Coercive Control in Plain Sight
Content Warning: This essay discusses AI-generated misinformation and false accusations, including their use within intimate partner violence. It references psychological coercion, reputational harm, and real-world legal and professional consequences.
The Drama of Danger
I once attended a business appointment with a black eye.
It wasn’t the first time I’d gone out in public with facial injuries. There was always makeup. But it was the first and only time someone asked me directly what had happened for me to have a shiner.
Because the truth was that my husband had hit me, I lied. I said my dog had been rowdy and my glasses had been pushed into my eye, causing the bruise.
The other person didn’t believe me.
I couldn’t do anything but defend my position because my husband and I were business partners, and he was just outside the room where the conversation was happening. I wasn’t free to tell the truth, not even indirectly. At that point, truth wasn’t a moral decision but rather a calculation about safety, timing, and what might happen later, behind closed doors.
This is one of the most persistent misunderstandings about abuse: silence is mistaken for consent, weakness, or denial. In reality, silence is often the result of containment - financial, psychological, technological, and physical - layers that make disclosure dangerous rather than relieving.
By then, I was already living inside a system of coercive control that extended far beyond physical violence. We shared a business, he controlled all access to money, and therefore also what I ate, which bills got paid and when, and more. We were active shooting sports people, with firearms in the home - possessions I viewed as home security and sporting equipment but came to realize that he had no qualms about using them to control and scare me. My child’s stability, and eventually his custody, were always implicitly at stake.
Increasingly, the abuse was reinforced, rehearsed, and justified through consumer technologies that looked neutral from the outside. He used tools people associate with productivity, communication, or “self-reflection”: AI chat systems, custom GPT models, AI generated phone call transcripts; and even text and email message archives. These weren’t used to understand me. They were used to override me because conversations were pre-written. Accusations were validated by machine output. If an AI response didn’t align with his narrative, he refined the prompt until it did.
This gave his version of reality a veneer of objectivity - the machine agrees - and allowed him to escalate control while appearing rational, concerned, even wounded. That manufactured credibility didn’t just shape how he treated me…it shaped how others responded when I tried to name the danger.
When I told my mother-in-law what was happening - when I named the violence, the fear, the control - she waved it off. Literally. She refused to acknowledge what her son was doing and has continued to refuse to this day. I told her I was afraid I wouldn’t come back from a road trip he was insisting we take - no planning, no safety considerations - just a vengeful need to send a message to my mother and my family “on my behalf.”
That fear was not abstract. It was grounded in lived experience. But because the abuse was increasingly mediated through technology - messages he sent as me, narratives he constructed with AI, “evidence” he curated through transcripts - it was easier for others to dismiss. The tools made it look less like abuse and more like misunderstanding. Less like danger and more like drama. At the time, I didn’t even understand yet how much technology would later become part of that calculation.
From the outside, none of this was visible.
Hiding in Plain Sight
The number of times we went to Home Depot with my face bruised should have caused someone to notice. I remember thinking the little video monitors at self-checkout would catch my image when I briefly lifted the brim of my ball cap and slid my glasses down my nose - quickly, while he was turned away talking to a stranger.
But no one noticed, even when the marks were not hidden.
On July 4th, 2024, he attacked me inside the house, near the front door. I was still in my pajamas. He tried to pin me to the floor, but I managed to wiggle out from under him. My pants came off in the process of getting out the door before he could stand up, and I ran half-naked around the house to my neighbor’s door.
She let me in and loaned me some shorts. She tried to ask what had happened, but I was terrified - not only of him, but of what would happen if the situation escalated further.
Then he called her.
I don’t know what he said. I only know she hasn’t willingly spoken to me since. And she didn’t say anything to the police when they later arrested him, almost a year after that incident, once the violence had escalated further.
Another neighbor once asked if I was okay because she sometimes heard me screaming. I told her I had severe panic attacks. I avoided eye contact, smiled, and excused myself from the narrow walkway between our homes - so close we can see into each other’s kitchen windows.
That wasn’t deception. It was survival.
When he wrecked our car while screaming at me about an affair he was convinced I’d had, the airbags deployed. We collided with a fire hydrant on a rural road and it was a miracle we weren’t injured. But just moments earlier, he had been completely unhinged. After the crash, he was suddenly concerned about whether I was okay.
Then he insisted we walk more than five miles home because we couldn’t stay there. He had a firearm and illegal drugs. Those facts mattered more than shock, injury, or the danger we’d just survived.
Later, he decided I needed to ask the neighbor whose kitchen window lines up with mine to drive me back to the car so I could retrieve anything valuable before it was towed. She was deeply concerned. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t push, though she couldn’t hide the look on her face.
Even when someone was close enough to hear it, proximity didn’t guarantee intervention. Someone inside the house was subject to the same calculations about risk, retaliation, and what might happen next.
Even From the Inside
In early October 2024, one of our male friends stayed with us for over 30 days. He then intermittently stayed with us between November and January 2025. We had met him through our line of work and he was contracted to handle some business within close proximity to our home. I was quite surprised when my husband offered our place for him to stay as he was never that hospitable with anyone.
Over that time period, there were countless incidents between my husband and me which were definitely within earshot. I had the opportunity to speak with the friend over the summer of 2025 and we discussed our perspectives of the events in detail over hours and hours of phone calls.
He admitted he could tell things were bad, but he did not remember either of the two times when my entire left arm was purple, bruised from where the barrel of a handgun had been jammed into my flesh and muscle. I had been taking great care to hide my injuries while he was in our home.
He remembered hearing a fight from our bedroom during which I was screaming for a prolonged period. As he came to investigate, the bedroom door opened and my husband walked out by himself nonchalantly, asking our friend “what’s up?” The friend panicked and instead of asking if I was ok, or what was happening, he asked a business question in hopes of redirecting my husband’s attention to the fact he had been near our bedroom door.
He shared multiple moments like this with me later, apologizing profusely for not taking action. His reasoning was valid - concern that if he did or said anything that guns would be drawn, that further harm would come to me and my son, or that maybe nothing was actually wrong enough to make me stay away from my husband if he were to try and liberate me. He had already experienced standing up for a woman who refused his help, and that had totally backfired on him.
After my husband became paranoid that I was flirting, our friend was ghosted just like others, and the next phase began. We were already up at all hours - mostly in the garage - fighting, spiraling, living in a way that likely registered as “off,” but not necessarily actionable to anyone watching from the neighborhood. What registered as instability from the outside was, from the inside, constant calibration.
At one point, he began burning my belongings in a bucket outside. Important things like my childhood prayer book. He demanded I start emptying heirloom furniture - an early-1800s craftsman dresser and a buffet - because he wanted to burn those too. He wanted to burn anything that tied me to my family history.
Our life together collapsed before that happened but I still lost irreplaceable pieces of my past. I told myself to remain calm all through those moments of burning, and participated with tossing things on the fire, and even took part in volunteering things eligible for the fire so as I could point him to the things for which I could deal with the loss.
I mourned every bit of it as I watched pages of books, letters and childhood art, all turn to ash.
He was aggressive toward neighbors who disagreed with him. He regularly argued with the HOA manager and our community’s contracted lawn crew. He eventually faced a misdemeanor battery charge for assaulting one of lawn people and received a plea deal: community service, anger-management classes, and a required apology letter.
Those remain the only legal consequences he has faced other than the suspension of his constitutional firearms rights and no-contact orders involving my son and me.
After I got away, I went into a salon and asked to use the phone so I could call my cousin. I didn’t know at the time that the salon was owned by the wife of a Lieutenant Deputy at the local sheriff’s department. One of the stylists called the owner. They sent a deputy to pick me up and transport me for my eventual landing at a domestic violence shelter, where my son joined me two days later and we stayed for 30 days.
I entered the shelter on Mother’s Day. I went home less than a week before Father’s Day. Those dates as bookends is not lost on me.
Only after I had done the work to remove myself from the abusive environment did anyone call law enforcement on my behalf. Intervention came after escape, not before it.
When the Machine Is Treated as Neutral
What I lived was not a glitch or an edge case. These risks are already documented - not by survivors, but by the same media ecosystems that promote artificial intelligence as neutral, efficient, and broadly beneficial.
Mainstream reporting has repeatedly acknowledged that AI systems are vulnerable to bias, misinformation, and error precisely because they are trained on human-generated data. Algorithms are not inherently prejudiced, but they learn from datasets that carry our own systemic distortions. When those distortions are treated as insight - especially in emotionally charged or relational contexts - they can harden into false authority.
Compounding this is a problem the industry itself acknowledges: AI’s capacity to misinterpret, fabricate, or outright invent information while presenting it as fact. These so-called “hallucinations” are not rare, nor are they benign. They have already resulted in real-world harm, including reputational damage and false accusations delivered with the confidence of citation and authority.
AI hallucinations caused artificial intelligence to falsely describe these people as criminals
Conservative activist Robby Starbuck sues Meta over AI responses about him
These systems are also known to reinforce belief loops. Social and generative AI tools are designed to increase engagement by mirroring, validating, and extending the input they are given. When the input is suspicion, grievance, or accusation, the output does not correct it - it is intensified. The result is an echo chamber that feels analytical, rational, and objective while steadily narrowing the frame of what is considered true.
When an AI system offers an interpretation or a claim, it does so without awareness of context, coercion, or power imbalance, yet its output is often treated as evidence rather than conjecture.
In my life, this mattered because these systems were never neutral - fed selectively and prompted strategically, and certainly trusted disproportionately. Once the outputs were treated as truth, my own voice became suspect by default.
This is where the story shifts from personal to structural. Because once a system exists that can rehearse accusation, polish narrative, and mimic authority on demand, the question is no longer why a victim didn’t speak. What is called into question is why no one else spoke up.
Silence and Complicity
When people reach for the language of bystanders and silence, they reach for history.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.”
—Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the early years, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Hitler came to power, Niemöller became a public critic of Nazi interference in the Protestant Church, and he spent the last eight years of Nazi rule (1937–1945) imprisoned in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.
The “First they came for…” statement is postwar. It originated in Niemöller’s impromptu public speeches after World War II, including a 1946 lecture tour where he publicly confessed his own inaction and warned that German silence and indifference made people complicit in the persecution and murder of millions.
So when someone brings up Niemöller, I don’t hear it as a clean moral lesson about speaking up. I hear it as something messier and more truthful: the way silence spreads through fear, through self-protection, through social convenience, through the bystander’s calculation of cost, and through the victim’s calculation of what happens if she accepts help and it doesn’t hold.
I also hear the warning embedded in the history: it wasn’t only the perpetrators who made the machine run. Niemöller’s point was a confession that silence can become a form of participation.
I’m not angry with my neighbors. I wonder why no one spoke up, but I also understand that too often these days, the innocent bystander who says something is thrust into a situation they want no part of.
I understand that calculus not just as a survivor, but as a bystander who once misread it. Years earlier, I had spoken up for a woman who I believed needed my help. At the time, I lived in an apartment complex. A neighbor - known primarily as the “baby mama” of a prominent football player - had been assaulted when her child’s father brought his new girlfriend over to fight her. He orchestrated it. Umpired it. All of it happened in the open-air elevator landing between our apartment doors.
I wasn’t home when it occurred, but I learned what happened afterward since my security camera had captured everything. I went to check on her and offered the video, but she shut the door on me mid-sentence. Her toddler stood behind her in the hallway, crying and scared, while his mother’s face was visibly injured.
At the time, I was offended. I couldn’t understand why someone would refuse help when the evidence was right there - when escape from the abuse seemed possible.
Now I understand that speaking up is not just about courage…. It’s about whether the cost of speaking feels survivable. In that moment, her refusal wasn’t a rejection of truth - it was a judgment about what she could live with next.
Writer Niyati has articulated this, noting that fear-based harmony is a marker of coercive dynamics, not intimacy. When one person must constantly monitor tone, timing, and words to keep things from escalating, the question is not who is “calm,” but who is unsafe.
This is why silence persists. Not because people don’t care, but because the architecture of control renders harm illegible.
Writer Elham Sarikhani , reflecting on Malèna, describes how collective silence becomes a form of violence - how communities abandon those who most need protection while convincing themselves they are merely uninvolved.
What struck me most in her writing is not the cruelty of any single character, but the choreography of everyone else: the neighbors who watch, the women who turn away, the men who rationalize, the institutions that remain intact while a woman is dismantled in public.
Sarikhani draws a direct line from Malèna’s humiliation in a small Sicilian town during WW2 to the lived realities of women in current-day Iran, where autonomy is restricted not only by law but by custom, surveillance, and communal enforcement. There, silence is not passive - it is trained, and it is required. It is what allows violence to be carried out under the banner of morality, order, or tradition.
When women are punished for existing outside prescribed boundaries, the crowd’s refusal to intervene is what completes the harm. The system does not need everyone to agree; it only needs enough people to look away.
This is the same mechanism Niemöller was confessing to - the same mechanism that operated in my life. And that is why his postwar confession still matters. His words were not written as poetry or prophecy but as an admission: that silence, even when motivated by fear or self-preservation, becomes participation over time.
Niemöller was not describing ignorance. He was describing calculation and the decision to stay uninvolved until involvement is unavoidable - until there is no one left to speak. What I recognize now is how intimate that calculus can be.
My mother-in-law was not a distant bystander. She was told directly and repeatedly given opportunities to interrupt what was happening to me. She waved it off and minimized it, telling me that I was “too emotional.” She chose her own comfort, her image of her son, her unwillingness to confront what acknowledging the truth would require.
Like so many others in these stories - ancient, historical, and modern - she did not have to believe me fully to act. She only had to believe that something was wrong. Her refusal was not neutrality. It was alignment.
And this is where the personal and the political collapse into each other. Whether it is a woman in Iran, a pastor in Nazi Germany, or a daughter-in-law in suburban America, it is the same: harm is allowed to continue not only because someone is violent, but because others decide the cost of intervention is too high. And the person being harmed is left to navigate the consequences.
That is what makes collective silence so dangerous. It does not announce itself as cruelty. It presents itself as reason. It allows coercive control to hide in plain sight and use ordinary tools - phones, apps, algorithms, family loyalty, institutional inertia. It depends on the fact that everyone involved has a reason not to push too hard.
That dynamic is not just cultural or historical…. It is human.
The Infrastructure of Escape
By the time people talk about leaving, they often imagine courage as the missing ingredient. What they miss is that courage without infrastructure is exposure. The ability to speak, to refuse, or to leave depends on whether the systems surrounding a person make truth survivable rather than just willpower.
Leaving is not just a personal decision; it is a logistical and technological problem shaped by who controls access, visibility, and movement.
AT&T offers a program that allows victims of abuse to separate their phone line from the account holder. While I was in the shelter, for the first two weeks I could not use my own phone. My husband was the point of contact for my phone line so my device - and my location - were not secure.
Here is the link to AT&T’s program: Change a wireless account due to a life event
I worked with AT&T and Apple to secure mine and my child’s phone lines to a new account under my name, retaining all our data and original phone numbers / Apple IDs. This was a crucial step in being able to use my device and hide my location so he could not find us.
This is also a great example of the kinds of programs that help survivors maintain their security. I understand the AT&T process was fairly new at the time, and I’m so grateful the person at the retail store was willing to hear me so he could offer me the kind of support I really needed.
What programs like this actually provide is not bravery, but margin. They reduce the cost of leaving just enough for survival to become possible. Without it, speaking is not disclosure. It is exposure.
When one person controls the infrastructure, even truth becomes a liability.
We live in a culture that speaks loudly about my body, my rights. But the outrage often tracks the speaker more than it tracks the victim. When a victim is paralyzed with fear for her children, her way of life, her credibility, or her life itself, society has a lot less to say.
What I lived inside of wasn’t just violence. It was power: the power to dictate a reality, to outsource “proof,” to generate “analysis,” to rehearse a narrative until it sounded like fact. That’s why I keep coming back to the sentence I wrote elsewhere: there is no checkbox on a police report for AI interrogation, no statute for coerced scripting, no rule for generative outputs when one person controls the prompt and withholds context.
Survivors become translators between law and life, between technology and trauma long after they’ve escaped the person who delivered the abuse.
The Logic of Leaving
Almost a year before I escaped for good, in early March 2025, I did exactly what survivors have done for centuries when every other door feels locked. I ran away.
While my husband was out, I sprint-walked from my home to the nearest fire station 10-15 minutes away, repeating the same phrase over and over under my breath like a lifeline: God, please. Please, God, please.
I was not praying for justice or love.
I was praying for the terror to stop.
At the fire station, I called my mother-in-law and begged her to come get me. I asked for one night of reprieve, in a place where I could sleep without fear of what her son might do to me before morning. She refused.
A sheriff’s deputy then told me I had a choice: either let them help me, or leave. But I could not tell them where I lived as I knew too much about what my husband had threatened to do if law enforcement came to our home. And his threats of retaliation made the risk feel unbearable.
So I left.
I walked another 10-15 minutes, crossed a busy road, and found a place to lie down under the trees in a wooded area behind a dog park. It was cold but I had two layers of clothing and a hat as I had learned to be prepared for the worst. At one point, I could hear rain tapping softly against palm fronds above my head. All I wanted was quiet… Sleep… For the nightmare to end. But it got much worse before it did.
Recently while reading an essay by Slay-DHD, I recognized that night immediately - not as metaphor, but as lineage. She was writing about the Welsh legend of Saint Dwynwen, a woman who flees into the woods after sexual violence. Slay-DHD names what most retellings refuse to say plainly: that Dwynwen prays not for love, not for justice, but for escape. For relief. For the pain to end.
As I lay under those palm fronds, listening to the rain, I began to process the slow, devastating realization that no one was coming to save me - not my mother-in-law, not the fire station, not the system.
And I discovered that survival becomes spiritual before it ever becomes strategic.
Silence Has a Witness
There is a difference between being unheard and being unhearable. Inside an active threat, silence is often a requirement for survival, not a failure of courage or clarity. What changed later was not my story, or the people I encountered. It was the absence of immediate danger.
I recently worked up the courage to go back to the fire station, long after the night I had gone there as part of my plan to escape. I’d been having an insistent nudge to tell them what happened to the manic woman they couldn’t help that night... To show them I’m not actually that way and to explain how I’d come to be there in the first place.
When I returned to the fire station, I knew that I was no longer negotiating the risk of retaliation, escalation, or disappearance. The conditions that had made speech dangerous before were now gone. Only then could my behavior be interpreted as trauma rather than instability, and only then could my words be received without immediate consequence.
By coincidence - or grace - the same three firefighters who had been on duty the night I had first arrived were there again. We talked for 15 minutes and they really listened, attentively and compassionately. We discussed how first responders might better recognize trauma responses like freeze and fawn, how someone like me might be helped to stay and speak instead of spiraling into flight.
This is not an indictment of them, nor did this mean the system will suddenly work better. It means that I was finally positioned in a way that allowed the system to hear me. Silence had not been the absence of truth but rather the cost of staying alive until safety existed.
The Moral of the Story
What I understand now - what only became clear after I saved myself - is that being “in control” is not a mindset you arrive at through courage alone.
Courage matters, but it is only one variable. Control over one’s body, voice, and environment begins when the threat is stopped, no longer actively managing the cost of every choice. Before that point, survival is not about bravery; it is about calibration. About constantly measuring risk. About deciding, moment by moment, which silence is safer than which truth.
This is why outside help so often fails to materialize in time, because accepting it can feel more dangerous than enduring what is already known. The optics surrounding an abuser - his family’s loyalty, his public composure, his “reasonable” explanations, the tools that make him sound articulate and justified - they form a thick mask. That mask does not just deceive bystanders; it traps victims inside a reality where being believed feels less likely than being punished for speaking.
Neighbors weigh the cost of intervention. Families choose comfort over confrontation. Institutions wait for cleaner evidence. And victims, fully aware of these calculations, often appear to “defend” their abuser - not out of loyalty, but because the alternative feels like stepping into free fall without a net.
Coercive control thrives in that gap: the space between what others might do and what a victim feels safe enough to accept.
I am in control of my life now not because someone finally intervened, but because I removed myself from the environment that made self-trust impossible. Only then could my body stop bracing. Only then could my voice return. Only then could outside help become something other than a threat multiplier.
This is how abuse hides in plain sight - not just through violence, but through silence, optics, and the very human instinct to avoid making things worse.
I know now that what people saw as normal was simply the shape survival had taken.
Resonances / References
Martin Niemöller: “First they came…” — postwar confessional statement
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, permanent exhibition
Niyati On fear-based harmony, silence as permission, and power imbalance
https://substack.com/@niyatikadakia
Maitri: Empowerment, Reinvention, and Post-Traumatic Growth (Jan 8)
Let me ask you this… (Jan 9, Jan 19, Jan 28)
Elham Sarikhani Reflections on Malèna, bystander violence, and communal abandonment
https://substack.com/@elhamsarikhani
The Universal Struggle of Forgiveness (Sep 18, 2025)
Slay-DHD The power of escape and how history glorifies abuse
https://substack.com/@slaydhd/p-185722496
Jess Maeve (author)
The Architecture of Silence: Living Inside AI-Enabled Coercive Control (Jan 2, 2026)
My Body Remembers: Coercion and the Slow Theft of Consent (Jan 25, 2026)
Thank you Jess. What you went through sounds terrible. I am so glad you made it out. And thank you for the advice you gave me for my daughter.
That was so comprehensive Jess. I was wondering if there are refuges for women where you live? There are in Australia and yet for all the reasons you mentioned, and others, often they are not accessed. I have four daughters and I am sure one is in a coercive relationship. In Australia they call it living underground and say only 20% of domestic abuse is reported.