Lawyers for the husband of Jennifer Dulos, a Connecticut woman who has not been seen since May 24, have suggested that she may be recreating the narratively compelling but unrealistic plot of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, causing Flynn to publicly call bullshit.
Dulos, a 50-year-old mother of five, was in the middle of a custody battle with her ex, Fotis Dulos, when she disappeared. Authorities say they found bloodstains indicating an attack in her garage, and surveillance footage allegedly shows a man appearing to be Fotis Dulos throwing away clothes stained with Jennifer’s blood in multiple trash cans. Fotis, along with his girlfriend Michelle Troconis, who was reportedly in the car while the clothing was being discarded, has been charged with evidence tampering and hindering prosecution.
An attorney for Fotis, Norm Pattis, says he’s “investigating the possibility that this is a ‘Gone Girl’-type case and considering the possibility that no third party was involved in foul play.”
Flynn used a recent statement to New Haven ABC affiliate WTNH to remind everyone there’s a reason fiction and non-fiction are two separate sections of the bookstore:
“I’ve seen in recent coverage that Jennifer’s husband and his defense attorney have put forward a so-called ‘Gone Girl theory’ to explain Jennifer’s disappearance. It absolutely sickens me that a work of fiction written by me would be used by Fotis Dulos’s lawyer as a defense, and as a hypothetical, sensationalized motive behind Jennifer’s very real and very tragic disappearance.”
According to CBS News, Dulos once wrote a novel sort of like Gone Girl 20 years ago, which is ample evidence that she read a ton of Mary Higgins Clark and took a creative writing class just like the rest of us.