Kellie Sutton: Coercive Control, Suicide and a UK Landmark

Content note: This article discusses and describes sensitive topics. If you are currently experiencing abuse or are in early recovery from coercive control, please read with care, or seek support from Samaritans.

Introduction

Some women do not survive entrapment-based relationships. The femicide stage of the coercive control continuum is hard to write and harder to read. Yet it is the necessary opening for a story like this. Kellie Marie Sutton was thirty years old, a mother of three, and a much-loved daughter, sister, and friend.¹ She died on August 26, 2017. Three days earlier, her family had found her unconscious at her home in Hertfordshire. In 2018, her partner Steven Gane stood trial for coercive and controlling behavior and two counts of assault against her. The court convicted him on all three charges. He never faced a charge for her death.

This article is about what Kellie lived. It is also about a structural pattern her death revealed. Practitioners working with survivors of severe coercive control encounter this pattern repeatedly. The pattern has implications for the legal system, the police, and the public. It changes how we understand the link between coercive control and victim suicide. It also has implications for survivors who recognize themselves in what happened to Kellie. Survivors who are alive need to know one thing above all: the voice telling them their lives are not worth living is not their own.

In July 2023, after a six-year fight by her family, a jury at Cambridge and Peterborough Coroner’s Court returned a landmark conclusion. They found that Kellie had been unlawfully killed. It was the United Kingdom’s first “unlawful killing” inquest conclusion for a self-inflicted death following domestic abuse.^{2 3} Her case is now central to the legal recognition that coercive control can cause death by suicide.

What Happened to Kellie Sutton

Kellie met Steven Gane in March 2017. Two years earlier, in 2015, she had separated from a previous partner. She was the mother of three children. The verified record now establishes that Gane subjected her to physical and psycho-emotional abuse from the start of the relationship. The abuse included verbal cruelty, coercive control, and physical violence.^{4 5} On 3 June 2017, he split her head open. On 9 July 2017, a neighbor called the police after hearing the assault. One of Kellie’s children had also told the neighbor that Gane was strangling her on the floor.

Two officers attended that day. They spoke briefly with Kellie. She told them she was very frightened. She told them Gane controlled everything she did. However, she did not report the assault. The officers did not interview the neighbor. They did not conduct a safeguarding check on the children. Crucially, they did not identify that Hertfordshire Police had at least five pieces of intelligence on Gane from previous partners. The case went into the system as a “non crime domestic” and at the lowest risk level. The officers left.

Six weeks later, on August 23, 2017, Kellie’s family found her unconscious in her home. She had hanged herself. She died in hospital three days later. Gane ridiculed Kellie’s death to a friend who alerted the authorities. Without that crucial phone call, Gane would have gotten away with his abuse scot-free. The investigation that followed her death recovered text messages from Gane’s phone. On the morning of her death, those messages showed, Gane had actively encouraged her to take her own life.

Specialist domestic abuse officers from Hertfordshire Police then conducted what the family’s solicitors have described as a groundbreaking investigation. They documented the pattern of abuse Kellie had endured throughout the five months of the relationship. On March 23, 2018, Steven Gane stood trial at St Albans Crown Court. The court convicted him of three offences. The first was coercive and controlling behavior in an intimate family relationship. The second and third were assault — the head injury on June 3, 2017 and the strangulation on 9 July 2017. He received a sentence of four years and three months’ imprisonment, along with a ten-year criminal behavior order.⁶

The CPS did not charge him with manslaughter. The criminal proceedings did not address whether his criminal acts had caused Kellie’s death. As of 2026, that question remains unanswered in a criminal court.

Read about a similar case in the United States, Mica’s Law South Carolina: Coercive Control Bill Fails to Progress.

The Six-Year Fight

The first inquest into Kellie’s death took place on March 17, 2020 before a Senior Coroner. In advance, the family’s legal team made several representations. They asked the coroner to recognize Steven Gane as an interested person. They asked him to recognize that Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights applied. They asked him to empanel a jury. Finally, they asked him to consider returning an unlawful killing verdict. The coroner accepted only the Article 2 application. He refused the rest. He also refused to call the officers who had attended Kellie’s home on July 9, 2017.

The inquest then went ahead with only two witnesses: the Home Office pathologist and one of the investigating officers. The coroner concluded that Kellie had died from suicide contributed to by domestic abuse. He made no findings against the police. He did not return an “unlawful killing” conclusion.

The family did not accept this outcome. A letter of claim followed, setting out the illegality of the first inquest. The coroner conceded that his failure to recognize Steven Gane as an interested party amounted to a procedural irregularity. By consent, the High Court quashed the inquest. The quashing order issued on June 25, 2020, shortly after Gane’s release from prison.

The second inquest took three more years to convene. Assistant Coroner Samantha Broadfoot KC presided, sitting with a jury, at Cambridge and Peterborough Coroner’s Court from June 26 to July 6, 2023. The coroner recognized that Article 2 applied. She also recognized Gane, Hertfordshire Police, and the family as interested parties.

This time the officers who had attended on July 9, 2017 gave evidence. Both admitted that they had not considered the offence of coercive control when they attended Kellie’s home. Both admitted that coercive control had not been in their minds when conducting the risk assessment. The court summonsed Steven Gane to attend. He received a warning about his right not to self-incriminate. He did not answer questions about the extent to which he had caused Kellie’s death. An expert in domestic abuse, Mary Mason, gave evidence. So did the head of Safeguarding Command at Hertfordshire Police. She admitted that there had been failings on July 9, 2017. Specifically, the officers had failed to check on the children. They had failed to carry out house-to-house enquiries. They had failed to exercise professional judgment when conducting the risk assessment.

The jury then concluded that Kellie had been unlawfully killed.⁷ The jury also concluded that failings of Hertfordshire Police officers on and after July 9, 2017 had contributed to her death. This was the first “unlawful killing” inquest finding in any United Kingdom case of self-inflicted death following domestic abuse.

The Family’s Statement

Pam Taylor, Kellie’s mother, has campaigned for years to have her daughter’s case recognized as what it was. After the 2023 inquest conclusion, she made a statement. The Bhatt Murphy Solicitors press release published it. UK media reported it widely.⁸ She said:

“Kellie was a much loved mother, daughter, sister, auntie and friend. It would have been Kellie’s 36th birthday tomorrow and she had everything to live for. Her family miss her every day and nothing will bring her back. It is an unspeakable loss and something we will never get over. In these last two weeks we have heard disgusting evidence about how Kellie was bullied and abused and assaulted by Steven Gane during their relationship and those are things that a mother should never have to hear. I will always believe that Steven Gane is responsible for Kellie’s death and that if she hadn’t met him she would still be here. Although he was found guilty of coercive and controlling behavior and assault, it has taken until today for him to be held publicly accountable for her death. We have fought now for many years for this inquest and for this unlawful killing conclusion. I now call on the CPS to reconsider this case and to charge Steven Gane with unlawful act manslaughter so he can also be held accountable in the criminal courts.”

Pam Taylor, mother of Kellie Sutton

Sophie Naftalin of Bhatt Murphy Solicitors, the family’s lawyer, said the conclusion sent a powerful message. Abuse leading to suicide can amount to unlawful act manslaughter. Police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service should learn from the conclusion. They should develop the professional curiosity to consider this charge when investigating unexplained deaths in the context of domestic abuse. Paul Bowen KC of Brick Court Chambers also represented the family. The Centre for Women’s Justice had referred Kellie’s case to Bhatt Murphy. Throughout the process the family received support from Action After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA).

Why Kellie’s Case Is a Landmark

The legal significance of the 2023 conclusion is substantial and worth understanding precisely. The jury did not find Steven Gane guilty of anything. An inquest is not a criminal trial. Rather, the jury concluded that on the available evidence, Kellie’s death amounted to an unlawful killing. In other words, Gane’s unlawful conduct caused her self-inflicted death — specifically his coercive and controlling behavior. The unlawful act, in legal terms, was the conduct already proved at his 2018 criminal trial. The inquest found that this conduct caused her death.

This is the structural breakthrough. Until Kellie’s case, the UK legal system treated self-inflicted death following domestic abuse as suicide. Prosecutors might pursue the perpetrator’s conduct under coercive control legislation. However, the death itself counted as the victim’s act, separated from the perpetrator’s responsibility. The 2023 inquest established a principle with implications across the entire landscape of abuse-related death. Where coercive and controlling conduct can be shown to have caused the victim’s self-inflicted death, that death may amount to unlawful act manslaughter.

The principle now needs testing in the criminal courts. As of 2026, the CPS has not charged Steven Gane with manslaughter despite the inquest finding. Pam Taylor’s call for the CPS to reconsider the case remains active. Across the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s five-year dataset of suspected suicides following domestic abuse, only 17 cases have achieved any kind of posthumous charge for domestic abuse offenses. Three of these simultaneously pursued manslaughter investigations. As of 2026, the conviction rate for abuse-related suicide as manslaughter remains effectively zero. Kellie’s case is the legal foundation. The application of the principle is still ahead.

Meanwhile, our legal system continues to grant an ‘intimacy discount.’ This criminological term describes a systemic injustice: men who commit intimate partner femicide routinely receive lighter prison sentences than those who kill strangers.⁹ This must change – and changing it is the driving force behind my work.

The Pattern Her Case Illuminates

What happened to Kellie was not unique. Her case has specific features — a five-month relationship dominated by coercive control, escalating physical violence including non-fatal strangulation, and a perpetrator who actively encouraged her death by suicide. Yet these features sit within a broader pattern. Practitioners working with survivors of severe coercive control recognize this pattern across many cases. The legal recognition of the pattern is new. The clinical recognition has been longer in coming.

The IPV-Suicidality Link

Research has now established the population-level link between intimate partner violence and suicidality. A 2022 study in The Lancet Psychiatry by Sally McManus and colleagues analyzed a probability sample of 7,058 adults in England.¹⁰ The study found a strong association between lifetime IPV experience and self-harm and suicidal thoughts. People who had ever experienced IPV had more than twice the odds of past-year self-harm. They also had nearly twice the odds of past-year suicidal thoughts, after adjustment for confounders (McManus et al., 2022).

The 2018 research conducted by Refuge in collaboration with the University of Warwick found that 83% of people using Refuge’s services reported feelings of despair or hopelessness.¹¹ At least 24% reported feeling suicidal at some point during their experience of abuse. Eighteen percent had made plans to end their life. Research from a Kent suicide prevention program suggests that official statistics capture as few as 6.5% of the true number of abuse-related suicides. Today, the link between coercive control and victim suicide has research support. Legal recognition of that link, established by Kellie’s case, is finally beginning to catch up.

The Homicide Timeline

Professor Jane Monckton-Smith’s research on intimate partner homicide is the other foundational piece.¹² Her eight-stage homicide timeline appeared in Violence Against Women. She developed it through analysis of 372 femicide cases. The timeline identifies the predictable trajectory through which coercive relationships can escalate to lethal violence. The eight stages are: a pre-relationship history of stalking or control, the commitment whirlwind, living with control, a trigger, escalation, a change in thinking, planning, and finally homicide or suicide as the terminal stage (Monckton-Smith, 2020).

Stage 8 is significant for Kellie’s case. Monckton-Smith treats homicide and victim suicide as the same terminal outcome of the timeline. In her framework, perpetrator-driven suicide is not a different phenomenon from perpetrator-executed homicide. Rather, it is the same trajectory with a different final act. Kellie’s case fits the framework precisely. Gane had a history of stalking and control — three previous partners had reported him to police. The relationship moved into rapid commitment. A regime of coercive control followed. The escalation through strangulation marks the trigger and escalation stages. The perpetrator’s documented encouragement of her death corresponds to stage 7 planning and stage 8 outcome.

Mortal Discard as a Structural Pattern

In my own practice and writing I use the term mortal discard to describe a category of terminal-disposal patterns in coercive control. The configuration that took Kellie’s life is one of these. I want to be transparent about the term itself. It is the structural unification of several documented patterns under a single conceptual umbrella.

Mortal discard, as I use the term, describes patterns in which a perpetrator’s relationship to the target shifts from invested attachment to active disposal. The disposal is terminal rather than strategic. The category includes several recognizable configurations. Coercive control induced-suicidality — the configuration that took Kellie’s life — involves the perpetrator’s sustained encouragement of the target’s self-destruction. The target’s eventual self-inflicted death is the terminal act. Direct physical homicide involves the perpetrator’s killing of the target by their own hand, often in the context of separation or the perpetrator finding another partner. The Chris Watts familicide in the United States and the Hannah Clarke familicide in Australia are documented examples. Social mortal discard involves the systematic destruction of the target’s social, professional, and reputational standing through scapegoating, smear campaigning, and DARVO. The target survives physically but emerges from the relationship effectively unpersoned in the perpetrator’s preferred narrative. Extraction-discard involves a long relationship in which the perpetrator has accumulated significant value — financial, reputational, social — and discards the target once the extraction is complete. The target serves as a liability witness to what was taken. Other configurations exist, including the engineered-overdose pattern that practitioners sometimes encounter in cases involving perpetrators with antisocial features and access to substances.

The category itself is practitioner-observed. However, the individual configurations within it each have peer-reviewed support. Monckton-Smith’s stage 8 covers the induced-suicidality and direct-homicide configurations. A 2023 concept analysis of post-separation abuse by Spearman and colleagues appeared in the Journal of Advanced Nursing. It identifies the structural attributes of social and extraction patterns: fear and intimidation, domination, intrusion and entrapment, omnipresence, and manipulation of systems (Spearman et al., 2023).¹³ McManus and colleagues’ IPV-suicidality research covers the induced-suicidality configuration at population scale. Jennifer Freyd’s DARVO framework, originally articulated in 1997, covers the perpetrator behavior central to the social-destruction configuration. Freyd, Harsey and Adams-Clark have most recently extended that research.¹⁴

What is not yet in the peer-reviewed literature is the structural unification of these configurations under a single category. The category matters because it explains why the same perpetrator psychology — coercive control, low empathy, treatment of the target as instrumental — can produce such different outcomes for different targets. Several factors shape which configuration emerges in any particular case. These include the perpetrator’s other character pathology, the duration of the relationship, what the perpetrator has extracted, whether there are children, and whether the perpetrator has access to means of direct violence or pharmacological harm. Kellie’s case is the induced-suicidality configuration. Other cases follow other terminal paths.

Why This Matters for Survivors Who Are Alive

If you are reading this article and recognize yourself in what happened to Kellie, please read this section carefully. The voice in your head telling you that ending your life would resolve the situation is not your own. A perpetrator can cultivate, across the course of a relationship, an internalized voice that tells you you are worthless, hopeless, and a burden. That voice can persist after the perpetrator has been removed from your immediate life. Moreover, it can operate without their direct presence. It can tell you, in your own internal speech, the things the perpetrator told you out loud.

This is not your voice. Rather, it is the perpetrator’s voice. It became internalized across the period of abuse and is now running on its own. Recognizing this is one of the first moves in recovery from the induced-suicidality configuration of mortal discard. The internalized voice can be reduced, weakened, and ultimately replaced. The neurological mechanism that installed it is also the mechanism that can install something different.

If you are in immediate distress, please reach out to one of the resources below.

If you are in the United States:

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
• National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 (call) or text START to 88788

If you are in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland:

• Samaritans — call 116 123, free, 24/7
• National Domestic Abuse Helpline (Refuge) — 0808 2000 247, free, 24/7

If you are outside the US, UK, or Ireland:

• Find A Helpline — verified helplines in over 175 countries

If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. Telling a safe person what is happening is often the move that begins the path out.

The Legal Framework

The legal landscape around abuse-related suicide has shifted in the United Kingdom since 2015 and is still evolving. The Serious Crime Act 2015, Section 76, created the offence of controlling or coercive behavior in an intimate or family relationship.¹⁵ This was the legal basis for Steven Gane’s 2018 conviction. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021, Section 71, created provisions around encouraging or assisting suicide in the context of domestic abuse. Together, these provisions create a framework in which the perpetrator’s coercive conduct and any specific encouragement of suicide can both be addressed as criminal acts.

Kellie’s case established the inquest principle. The unlawful conduct of coercive control can be found to have caused a victim’s self-inflicted death, supporting a finding of unlawful killing. However, translating that principle into criminal charges of unlawful act manslaughter is the work that remains. As of 2026, the CPS has not charged Steven Gane with manslaughter. The Kiena Dawes case in 2024 illustrates the difficulty. The court convicted Ryan Wellings of assault and coercive control but acquitted him of manslaughter. This was despite Dawes leaving a note saying “Ryan Wellings killed me.” The legal recognition is established. The criminal application is contested.

For a fuller treatment of the legal framework around coercive control, see the platform’s article on coercive control and the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.¹⁶ The latter documents the legal status of coercive control across jurisdictions. See also the Global Femicide Legislation Index that launched in February 2026.

The Failure of Systems

The 2023 inquest jury found that failings of Hertfordshire Police officers on and after 9 July 2017 contributed to Kellie’s death. The specific failings were several. Officers failed to interview the neighbor who had reported the assault. They failed to check on Kellie’s children. They failed to identify that Hertfordshire Police already held intelligence on Steven Gane from previous partners. They failed to exercise professional judgment when conducting the risk assessment. Kellie told officers that she was very frightened. She told them Gane controlled everything she did. Despite this, the case went into the system as “non crime domestic” and at the lowest risk level.

These failings were not unique to Kellie’s case. Rather, they reflect systemic gaps in how UK police forces have historically recognized coercive control, conducted domestic abuse risk assessments, and shared intelligence on repeat perpetrators across previous victims. Reform has been incremental. National police reporting systems have been updated since 2017. Yet the wider problems persist. Two sources document the ongoing inadequacy of police responses in these cases: Louise Tickle’s reporting for Tortoise Media and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s domestic abuse-related deaths review process. I must also pause to acknowledge a monumental loss to our community: Sharon Bryan, Head of Partnerships and Development for the NCDV and a fierce advocate for victim-survivors, who died in 2025. During her lifetime, Sharon was vital in exposing the life-threatening gaps in law enforcement protocols that failed victims like Kellie.

This is a systemic problem. A 2026 study from a Kent suicide prevention program found a 6.5% capture rate of abuse-related suicides.¹⁷ This means the vast majority of these deaths are not being recognized at all. Perpetrators of these deaths are not being investigated. Patterns are not being aggregated. Reform begun by Kellie’s case is the recognition that these deaths are happening. Reform that remains is the recognition of what causes them, and the development of legal and policing responses adequate to that cause. Under the current system, perpetrators commit these injustices with utter impunity.

What the Family Is Doing Now

Pam Taylor continues to campaign. The family’s call for the CPS to charge Steven Gane with unlawful act manslaughter remains active. Pam is a named supporter of the Suicide is Homicide campaign at Project Resist. This campaign advocates for domestic abuse-related suicides to be investigated as potential homicides. Bereaved families of multiple women whose self-inflicted deaths followed coercive control support the campaign.

The campaign’s broader goals include systemic reform of how police forces investigate suspected suicides where domestic abuse is part of the history. It also seeks training for frontline officers in recognizing coercive control during domestic incidents. Finally, it pushes for the development of CPS guidance on bringing manslaughter charges where coercive conduct can be shown to have caused a victim’s self-inflicted death. Readers who want to support the family’s work can do so through Project Resist directly.

The family also received support from Action After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA), which provides specialist peer support to families bereaved through domestic abuse. The Centre for Women’s Justice referred Kellie’s case to Bhatt Murphy Solicitors. The Centre is one of the leading UK legal advocacy organizations working on systemic failures in the criminal justice system’s response to violence against women.

Honoring Kellie

This article exists because Kellie’s family chose to keep her case in the public conversation. They did this in the hope that what happened to her would help others. The case study you are reading is one piece of work that follows from that choice. The legal landmark her case has established is another. The ongoing campaign for the CPS to bring manslaughter charges is a third. Other articles, other campaigns, and other reform efforts that follow her case will continue to do work that she cannot do anymore. Survivors who recognize the induced-suicidality pattern in this article and reach out for help are alive in part because of the choice her family made.

That is the meaning of a landmark case. The landmark is not the legal precedent in isolation. Rather, the landmark is what the precedent makes possible for the people who come after. Kellie was thirty years old. She had three children. She had everything to live for, as her mother said. She did not survive. The work her case has made possible is the closest thing there is to a way of honoring what was taken.

What Narcissistic Abuse Offers

If you are reading this article because you recognize the pattern in your own life or in the life of someone you love, you are not without options. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab provides specialist recovery support for survivors of severe coercive control and narcissistic abuse, including survivors of the induced-suicidality configuration of mortal discard. The Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ was developed specifically for the kind of injury this pattern produces. It is not generic talk therapy adapted to severe cases. It addresses the four layers of injury — pattern recognition, nervous system recalibration, identity reconstruction, and boundary architecture — in the sequence required for genuine recovery rather than partial improvement.

A free 15-minute consultation is the first step. The call is judgment-free and designed to help you understand what kind of support fits your situation. If specialist recovery coaching is the right fit, you can learn more about the coaching program.

Related Links

• Coercive Control & Femicide Research
• Global Femicide Crisis: A Woman Is Killed Every 10 Minutes
• PTSD And Depression Comorbidity Raise Risk Of Female Mortality
• Femicide in Malaysia: Why We Must Name It
• The Complete Guide to Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Bhatt Murphy Solicitors. (2023, July 6). Jury concludes that Kellie Sutton was unlawfully killed in self inflicted death following domestic abuse [Press release]. ↩︎
2. Brick Court Chambers. (2023, July 7). Jury reaches ‘unlawful killing’ conclusion in case involving self-inflicted death following domestic abuse. ↩︎
3. Bhatt Murphy Solicitors. 2023. ↩︎
4. Schechter, S. (1982). Women and Male Violence: The Vision and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement. South End Press. ↩︎
5. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
6. N/A. (2018). Steven Gane jailed after ‘driving his partner to suicide.’ BBC. ↩︎
7. Cooper, P. (2023). Kellie Sutton: New inquest finds abuse victim unlawfully killed. BBC. ↩︎
8. Bhatt Murphy Solicitors. 2023. ↩︎
9. Levine, K.L., 2006. The intimacy discount: Prosecutorial discretion, privacy, and equality in the statutory rape caseload. Emory LJ, 55, p.691. ↩︎
10. McManus, S., Walby, S., Capelas Barbosa, E., Appleby, L., Brugha, T., Bebbington, P. E., Cook, E. A., & Knipe, D. (2022). Intimate partner violence, suicidality, and self-harm: A probability sample survey of the general population in England. The Lancet Psychiatry, 9(7), 574–583. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00151-1 ↩︎
11. Refuge. (2024). Domestic abuse and suicide: Research with the University of Warwick. Refuge. ↩︎
12. Monckton-Smith, J. (2020). Intimate partner femicide: Using Foucauldian analysis to track an eight stage progression to homicide. Violence Against Women, 26(11), 1267–1285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219863876 ↩︎
13. Spearman, K. J., Vaughan-Eden, V., Hardesty, J. L., & Campbell, J. (2023). Post-separation abuse: A concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 79(4), 1225–1246. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.15310 ↩︎
14. Harsey, S.J., Adams-Clark, A.A. and Freyd, J.J., 2024. Associations between defensive victim-blaming responses (DARVO), rape myth acceptance, and sexual harassment. PLoS One, 19(12), p.e0313642. ↩︎
15. Serious Crime Act 2015, Section 76. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/9/section/76 ↩︎
16. Wakefield, M. (2020). The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. ↩︎
17. Seling, E. (2026). Research revealing the true toll of domestic abuse. University of Kent. ↩︎

Manya Wakefield

Website |  + postsBio ⮌

Manya Wakefield is a narcissistic abuse recovery coach, coercive trauma specialist, and the developer of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ and TENEL™ (Traumatic Exposure to Narcissism in Early Life) — proprietary recovery frameworks built from seven years of direct professional work with survivors of coercive control, narcissistic abuse, and Adult Children of Narcissists. Both frameworks have been reviewed by Dr. Michael Kinsey, PhD, clinical psychologist, New School for Social Research. She is the founder of Narcissistic Abuse Rehab, a global social impact platform launched in 2019 to support survivors through evidence-based recovery frameworks. Manya is the author of Are You In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship (2019), a resource used in domestic violence recovery groups worldwide. Her original research contributions include the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index (2020) — the first systematic index of its kind on the web — and the Global Femicide Legislation Index (2026), comprehensive legal references used by advocates, legal professionals, and policymakers internationally, cited in peer-reviewed publications including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Palgrave Macmillan, and the University of Agder. Her expertise has been featured in Newsweek, Elle, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Parade, and YourTango. She hosts the Narcissistic Abuse Rehab Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. All content on this site reflects Manya's direct professional experience working with survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control, her published research, and her ongoing advocacy work.

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