To me, this is a bit confusing when she said this...
Gibb says despite everything that has happened, she still loves Chad and Lori. She says she hopes they will repent, tell the truth and confess to authorities any wrongdoings they have done.
“I’m only here to share the truth because of those that passed away, and that justice needs to be served. … But if you’re Lori … She’s got to admit that these people are dead and it was because of their teachings and their ideas that they had these things happen. … You would have to admit you actually had something to do with the death of your family,” Gibb says. “It would be hard to say, ‘My belief systems are false.'”
She continues, “I do feel sorrow for everybody involved. … Everybody’s hurting from this. … She’s in … jail now. She doesn’t get to be with Chad, who she loves. That’s what she wanted so badly, and now she can’t even be with him. It was a fatal attraction that led to their separation and people passing away. It’s a tragic, tragic story.”
Part 2: Melanie Gibb describes zombies, JJ's disappearance and the 'fatal attraction' between Chad and Lori Daybell | East Idaho News
MG is saying that she thinks Lori really sincerely believes all the zombie stuff and in a way she's saying Lori has been brainwashed by Chad to believe it (MG doesn't like the word brainwashed but that's my word for it). I think MG seems to give Lori too much sympathy but it makes sense that she would to some extent, because MG was also sucked into these dangerous beliefs for a time. MG seems to have gotten good counseling since then and was able to see how dangerous, false and evil these teachings from Chad are. My take away from that part of the interview was that MG is hoping that Lori can someday see that too and that Lori will realize that people got murdered due to her false zombie beliefs. That's my interpretation of what she's trying to say, anyway. MG's not saying Lori was justified in murder, but that
Lori currently thinks she was justified and Lori won't come clean until Lori realizes how wrong her beliefs are.
Personally, I'm still on the fence on whether I think Lori actually believes this stuff or if the zombie and "dark spirit" labels were just a convenient way to justify murder to people close to them that they thought were gullible enough to belief that and go along with it. Because if Lori truly believed it then she would not have hidden those beliefs from police and mental health evaluators. Lori always had an alternate lie prepared to make herself out to be a victim and/or the one who was in the right when it came to talking to authorities. Lori always managed to come across as sane to the police and didn't bring up the zombie stuff, multiple past lives, the 144,000, being a god who was unable to die, etc. This makes me think it was all a form of gaslighting their "followers"-- so that if the others went to police and brought up zombies they (the people talking to police) would be labeled the crazy ones.
Lori also seems to test people and she changes her story/beliefs when they don't accept what she says. When Lori told MG that JJ was a zombie perhaps it was to test whether MG would agree to getting rid of "zombie JJ"?
But when MG showed resistance to that idea and said she didn't think JJ was any different, Lori switched to agreeing she would give JJ to Kay (who is also a zombie according to Lori
). Did MG not question why Lori would be OK with giving a zombie child to another zombie to raise? Wouldn't this make the zombies more powerful in their twisted belief system? It boggles the mind that so many people close to Lori seemingly accepted what she said at face value, even to the point of accepting talk of zombies.
But once Lori changed what she said she would do with JJ, she even went so far as telling MG that she met Kay at the airport and passed JJ off. That just reveals how conniving Lori was-- it had nothing to do with a belief in zombies but with a need to have MG accept whatever she was saying. She likely planned to continue to have a friendship with MG and do more podcasts together, so she had to come up with something that MG would accept as true as to where JJ went. Just like Chad told his family Lori was an empty-nester after JJ and Tylee were gone-- he knew that there would never be any minor children to come around and meet his parents or his kids so he told them a believable lie. And Lori told someone else that Tylee died years ago, probably because Lori couldn't completely delete Tylee from social media. They didn't tell family that Lori's children turned into zombies and they got rid of the zombies. They knew their family wasn't going to accept that explanation. I think Lori and Chad knew that MG was extremely gullible (i.e. open to talk of zombies/multiple past lives, etc) and they took advantage of that as much as possible, to the point where they thought MG would lie for them about having JJ with her. Fortunately MG finally woke up when they asked her to lie to the police. It's too bad she didn't wake up sooner, before the children were gone.
MOO.