Photo: Hamilton County Sheriff's Office
Former NFL linebacker Darron Lee asked ChatGPT for advice on how to cover up the murder of his girlfriend after the incident took place last month, prosecutors revealed during a preliminary hearing in Tennessee on Monday (March 9) via WCTV.
Lee, 31, who faces charges of first-degree murder and tampering with evidence, allegedly consulted with the chat bot days before police found Gabriella Carvalho Perpétuo dead on the floor of a blood-soaked home.
“Don’t know what to do right now. Fiancee [sic] did her crazy thing again and now she’s messed up, I wake up and she has two swollen eyes (i didn’t do anything, self inflicted) she stabbed herself, slit her eye? Idk but she isn’t waking up or responding, what do I do?” Lee asked ChatGPT.
“Got it,” the chat bot responded, according to WDEF. “Here’s exactly what [redacted] is the safest way to handle it without framing it as 'police trouble.'"
Lee also asked if someone slipping and falling could result in "puncture wounds," to which the chat bot responded: “Yeah—- it can happen**, but there’s [redacted] to make. Can a slip-and-fall cause puncture wounds? Yes, but usually only under specific conditions?”
“I can help you sanity-check whether it lines up with a slip-and-fall or if it’s something that should be evaluated ASAP,” it added.
District Attorney Coty Wamp claimed that Lee used the artificial intelligence as a "legal advisor" after Perpétuo's murder took place.
“He has conversations, dozens of conversations, back and forth with ChatGPT over a two-day period about what he did to Gabriella Perpetua in detail,” Wamp said. “He asks how to cover it up. He asks what to say to 911.”
Prosecutors also presented new police body camera footage during the preliminary hearing, which showed Lee acting confused when they said Perpétuo was found dead inside their rented Ooltewah home.
“She wasn’t saying anything and that’s when I called 911 immediately and I was like what is going on… I was asleep for a long time,” Lee said in the footage shown in the courtroom on Monday.
Lee told police that Perpétuo suffered from narcolepsy and presumed she had fallen in the shower, though responding officers said the home showed evidence of a violent struggle and injuries inconsistent with an accidental fall. Perpétuo was found topless and suffered severe brain trauma, a broken neck, bruising across her body and large bite marks on her shoulder and thigh, according to an autopsy, while she had visible stab wounds to her legs and injuries to her face, with the medical examiner ruling her cause of death as blunt force trauma.
“There was blood going up the staircase, on the hand railing there was blood, on the walls there was blood, on the floor in the living room there was blood, in the floor on the hallway and the stairs,” said Hamilton County Sheriff's Office Detective Brian Lockhart, who was one of the first officers to respond to the rental home.
Lee was selected by the New York Jets at No. 20 overall in the 2016 NFL Draft and spent his first three seasons with the franchise before being traded to the eventual 2019 Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and later appearing in games for the Buffalo Bills in 2020. The former Ohio State standout recorded 273 tackles, 17 tackles for loss, four sacks and 11 QB hits in 38 starts and 58 appearances.