Joe Petito on Losing Gabby and Turning Grief Into Change | Have A Seat

Have A Seat with Chris Hansen

Chris Hansen

True Crime

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this emotional, insightful and important episode, Chris Hansen has a seat with Joe Petito, father of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old content creator who was killed by her fiancé while traveling the country. Petito shares what happened during the days Gabby was missing, to getting the unimaginable call that her body had been found. But through the darkness of tragically losing Gabby, Petito, along with his wife Tara, and Gabby’s mother Nichole Schmidt and husband Jim Schmidt, have created the Gabby Petito Foundation, an organization dedicated to raising awareness and educating first responders and law enforcement on domestic violence and missing persons cases. Just as Gabby touched the world, this episode will highlight the importance of mental health, how laws and protocols surrounding domestic violence calls are being changed, and how you can better talk to your family and children about domestic violence. Gabbypetitofoundation.org This episode is brought to you in part by: Home Title Lock: Go to https://hometitlelock.com/chrishansen and use promo code HANSEN to get a FREE title history report and a FREE TRIAL of their Triple Lock Protection! For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warranty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.8	Speak. You are on your way to the state capital of New York. We're in the studio in New York today,
0:34.8	going to Albany. And you've been doing this around the
0:37.9	country trying to take tragedy and turn it into action, trying to get laws in place that will
0:45.4	protect other young people, other human beings in general, from being victimized in the way
0:51.5	that Gabby was victimized. Tell me what you're trying to do.
0:59.1	So what we're trying to do is what's called a lethality assessment. It's been around for 20 years.
1:05.8	I spoke to the people who created the program, Dr. Messing and Dr. Campbell, they're amazing, amazing individuals. And this program that they developed has, I mean, the numbers are really staggering, right?
1:13.7	So it's been shown to reduce domestic violence homicide by 50% or more.
1:18.7	And how does this work?
1:19.8	So what it does is they really, when someone calls 911, let me back up for a second.
1:26.4	So it's not only to protect women and men and children, but also the law enforcement. Because other than, I guess, you know, car accidents, you know, the number one issue for getting hurt on the job for an officer is on a domestic violence call. So when you take that in mind, too, that we're trying to protect the officers as well,
1:47.3	because they're just trying to get home safe, which is what we want for every officer.
1:50.5	Absolutely.
1:52.4	What they do is when someone calls 911 and police show up, they'll ask a series of questions
1:57.9	to figure out if the person is in a lethal situation or not. And at that
2:02.2	point, what they'll do is they'll either get them on the line with an advocate at that point
2:05.6	or give them information to call when they feel that they're able to, to talk to somebody,
	...

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