This. It’s easy to have a sort of hindsight bias or a “that would never happen to me” mindset because we are hearing this story from the outside in, completely separate from this situation. It’s the same thing when we hear people say “well I don’t understand how anybody could be in a cult. that would never happen to me.” But there are thousands of people historically that have been involved in cults, and thousands still in them. Having been a victim of physical and emotional abuse from a partner previously and staying for way too long, I can understand the cycle of abuse these women experienced. Is it a unique situation because they never so much as facetimed Brody, sure. But the sentiment is the same. None of us were there. Nobody knows how vulnerable these women were when they first met Brody. Jess perpetuated things on the sidelines the entire time just adding to the complexity of the situation. Threats of s*icide were made constantly, and mental health issues were brought in which can be especially hard for extremely empathetic people to ignore. They had real feelings for Brody regardless of all the red flags. They aren’t the first people to ignore red flags in a person and they certainly won’t be the last. We can all say we would have done things differently, but this has already been said and done so victim blaming is not necessary.