Nancy Guthrie: Is Savannah Done Looking for Her Mom?

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
How much is enough? How much grief needs to go on camera, in an audience, for the general public to feel that Savannah Guthrie and her family are grieving to an adequate level? Why is that even a question? Why is that even something we're talking about or thinking about?
You got me. But there's far too many people out there seemingly with an opinion that either they're grieving too little, too much, to this, to that, to...
Why is it any of your business, anyhow? Savannah Guthrie sat across from Jenna Bush Hager and said something that really should haunt every person who has typed a comment about the family's grieving process. On a video, on a post, whatever, months into the disappearance of her 84 year old mother, blood on the porch, pacemaker disconnected in the middle of the night, no arrest, no suspect, no answers. She looked into the camera and said, I know maybe people wonder like, what's going on? How was she able to do that job? Is she not thinking about it? Did she forget?
And then she said, no, never. That right there. A daughter whose mother was taken from her own bed had to go on national television and assure people, people she'd never met, people she will never meet, that she still thinks about her missing mother. Does that make you feel good? She still thinks, okay, does that check a box in your mind that she informed you that she's feeling enough grief? That she hasn't moved on? That the smile she puts on at the anchor desk doesn't mean she's forgotten the woman who raised her? Because enough strangers from enough keyboards screamed loud enough and long enough that it required a public response. That is where we are at in the Nancy Guthrie case, not in the investigation, in the audience. Something has broken in the way people are watching this case, and it needs to be talked about. What is happening to the Guthrie family has almost nothing to do with finding Nancy. It has everything to do with a culture that decided a real family's worst nightmare is a show.
And they are the critics, and they have given themselves permission to review every performance. And the cruelest part isn't even the loudest accusation. It's the one Savannah could barely get through when Hoda Kotb asked her about it directly one word. And we will get there. Here's what happened. The Internet looked at the Guthrie family and did what the Internet does.

**Tony Brueski** (3:08)
It cast them.

**Tony Brueski** (3:10)
Savannah's the famous ones for every move she makes in public visible and scorable. Her sister Annie is the one who was there that night. She had dinner with Nancy the evening before she disappeared. So everything about Annie's life gets run through a suspicion filter that she didn't build and can't dismantle. Her brother Cameron, he's the quiet one in silence as the Internet has decided is always suspicious when you've already made up your mind that someone's hiding something. Annie's husband, Tommaso, is the outsider, married in. He's the rock and roll musician, the kind of person the Internet loves to circle around like vultures because he doesn't fit whatever pattern they've projected onto this family from their own families. None of these are investigative conclusions. None of them are based on evidence. They are casting choices. Strangers look at the family in crisis, assign each of them the character archetype for a true crime documentary that they've already seen, and now every single thing those people do gets measured against a script that exists only in the heads of the people grading them. Savannah posts on Instagram, analyzed. Annie doesn't post, analyzed. Someone smiles in a photo, and they're not grieving correctly. Someone doesn't appear in a photo, and they're distancing themselves. Someone hires an attorney. Guilty behavior. Someone doesn't hire an attorney. They should be worried. It's a closed system. Every input confirms whatever the person behind the keyboard decided before they started typing.
And the Guthrie family is trapped inside it.
They didn't build the game. They can't win the game because the game was designed so that no answer passes.
Look at the scorecard. Just look at it. Savannah took leave from the Today show on February 1st, the day her mother was reported missing. The criticism started immediately. Why isn't she in Tucson? Why isn't she in front of cameras begging for her mother's return? Why is she hiding? She sat down with Hoda for her first public interview in late March. She cried. She talked about her family. She talked about the investigation, and the commentary pivoted instantly. She's too composed. Is she really caring? Is she crying? That felt rehearsed. Those aren't real tears. She's a TV professional. She knows how to perform emotion.