I've lived with coercive control. I know it inside and out. I'm going to dig into this post, just a little bit.
She said the chicken was off and made her nauseous. She went to the toilet, quite possibly to throw up. Asking your partner to deal with the bill in this situation is normal.
In the situation when the police decided she was the aggressor, they were contacted by someone who had seen him hitting her.
The police pull them over, partly because of the bad driving. Gabby is very distressed and is unable to articulate exactly what has happened. She has marks on her arm and face indicating she's been hit. The male officer acknowledges this, but dismisses it. She asks if she can have her phone to call her mother. She can't give a clear account of what has happened. She immediately blames herself, despite the marks on her face and arm and the fact that someone saw him hitting her. She says she has OCD. She has anxiety. Of course she bloody does, she's in an abusive relationship.
All of Gabby's behaviour is indicative of someone who is being coercively controlled. She's confused but desperate to take the blame (because in a coercive relationship, this is what you are trained to do. You are made responsible for the other person's awful behaviour. You made them do it, and therefore you are the one who has to fix it by correcting your own behaviour. You try your best and it seems to be working, but then there's another explosion. You promise to try harder. You're not quite sure what you did wrong, but you'll fix it. Your partner is so distressed by the awful thing you made them do to you. You want to fix their pain. You learn early on that the easiest way to get the silent treatment, the sulking, the nastiness to end is if you say it's all your fault. The nice version of them comes back more quickly if you do. Every time, there's a promise that it's fixed now. It will all be nice from now on. And it is, for a month, for a couple of days, for an hour, until you make another mistake. Sometimes you make a mistake on purpose because you can feel the rage building and not knowing when it's going to boil over is unbearable.
And so it goes, over and over and over again, until you are hypervigilant, constantly anxious, barely sleeping, and blaming yourself for all of it. You are so embarrassed, full of shame, barely able to make a decision. If you react or respond to anything, a slap across the face, a violent shove, having your phone snatched out of your hand, having your dinner thrown in your face, being accused of something you didn't do, then you're immediately accused of being abusive and violent and threatened with the police, despite the fact that you're considerably shorter and smaller and the power imbalance is not in your favour and you've been hit plenty of times, although that was always provoked, of course. You made him do it. DARVO.
Brian, on the other hand, shows no signs of distress. He very calmly tells the officers that Gabby is to blame and they accept it without question because it's easy, isn't it? After all, look at the stupid hysterical woman. And yes, he slapped her around a bit, but he was defending himself despite being bigger and stronger and male (and therefore far more likely to be violent), and she's obviously crazy, she can't even explain what happened and she's got mental health problems, she said so herself, and you'd do the same as Brian if you had to put up with a woman like that.
Being abusive makes men like this feel in control. It helps them to feel calm. That's partly why they do it.
Any officer with proper training in spotting coercive control would have seen this immediately.
As for the officer who says his wife is the same as Gabby, has these anxious meltdowns? My first thought was I wonder what he's like at home.