Gabby Petito Movie Trailer

Lifetime has a long history of mining real-life crime stories for ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies. But social media users are slamming the cable network for dramatizing the recent murder of Gabby Petito in the movie The Gabby Petito Story, which premiered, Saturday, October 1. And now Nicole Schmidt, Petito’s mother, is addressing the small-screen take on her daughter’s death.

“We thought our followers should know that the Lifetime movie on Gabby Petito has no connection to the Petito family nor did they give their approval,” Schmidt said in a statement released by The AWARE Foundation, according to Newsweek. “Lifetime took it upon themselves to make the movie.”

The film “explores Gabby and her fiancé Brian Laundrie’s complicated relationship and what may have gone wrong during their cross-country trip that resulted in Gabby’s tragic murder,” Lifetime says. “As the one-year anniversary of her tragic death approaches, the movie will bring to life Gabby and Brian’s doomed love story, including the warning signs that Gabby’s life was in danger, the ensuing search for her, the eventual discovery of her murder and ultimately, Brian’s suicide.”