Gavin de Becker Biography, Family, MOSAIC, Books, and Jeff Bezos

Gavin De Becker Biography

Gavin de Becker was born in the year 1954, October 26. He is 65 years old as of 2018. He is the founder and chairman of Gavin de Becker and Associates. He is also an author and specialist in security issues, primarily for governments, public figure and large corporations.

Gavin De Becker Family

Gavin was born in the United States. He was born to his parents whose information is not disclosed. Although he is an outspoken man, Becker is a very secretive person when it comes to his family. If any information arises about his family, it will be updated.

Gavin De Becker Career | MOSAIC

De Beker has co-designed the MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems and the United States Marshals Service. The MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems is used to screen threats to Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and members of the United States Congress. It was adopted by Los Angeles County Law enforcement agencies in 1997 to help police manage and reduce spousal abuse cases that might lead to homicide.De Beker was appointed two times by the President’s Advisory Board at the United States Department of Justice.

He got to serve two terms on the Governor’s Advisory Board at the California Department of Mental Health. He has also shared his philosophies about prevention of violence in several appearances on shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, Larry King Life, 60 Minutes, and the Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris. He has also appeared in Time Magazine and Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other magazines.De Becker is also the writer. His first book was The Gift of Fear and was a US bestseller on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Oprah Winfrey dedicated a show for the book’s 10th-year anniversary in 2008. She also dedicated two hour-long shows to de Becker’s work in domestic violence in the last year of her show. He also published his latest book Just 2 Seconds, which was also co-written by Tom Taylor and Jeff Marquart. The book is a guide for protectors of risked people and includes 5 lessons for people charged with protecting others. The book also includes stories of past incidents from the last several decades of training and analysis. His firm was hired by Bill Cosby to investigate the murder of his son, Ennis in 1997. De Becker was an advisor to the Los Angeles County District Attorney on the criminal prosecution and the successful civil case against OJ Simpson.

Gavin de Becker Photo
Gavin de Becker Photo

Gavin De Becker Books

De Becker is also good when it comes to writing. He has shown his talent in writing after publishing several books notably  The Gift of Fear. Below are books that Gavin has written;

  • The Gift Of Fear: Survival Signs That Protect Us From Violence(1997)
  • Just 2 Seconds: Using Time And Distance to Defeat Assassins(2008)
  • Protecting The Gift: Keeping Children And Teenagers Safe (And Parents Sane)(1999)
  • Fearless: Real Truth About Risk, Safety And Security In A Time Of Terrorism(2002)

Gavin De Becker The Gift of Fear

The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence is a nonfiction self-help book. The book was published in 1997 by Dell Publishing and republished with a new epilogue in 1998. The book demonstrates how every individual should learn to trust the inherent “gift” of their gut instinct. By learning to recognize various warning signs and precursors to violence, it becomes possible to avoid potential trauma and harm.

Gavin De Becker And Associates

Gavin de Becker and Associates is a security and consulting firm that provides private security. It protects its clients who are the most prominent people. It was founded by David de Becker in 1978. The firm also offers protection training courses. The company operates in 27 cities and seven countries with its headquarters being in Los Angles.

Gavin De Becker Net Worth

De Beker net worth is estimated to be $15,386,294.

Gavin De Becker Quotes

  • Denial is a save now, pay later scheme
  • Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait
  • I’ve successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear “no,” and teach young women that it’s all right to explicitly reject
  • I encourage people to remember that “no” is a complete sentence
  • Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death
  • “No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you
  • You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations
  • The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality
  • Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention

Gavin De Becker Jeff Bezos National Enquirer

Gavin De Becker was hired by Jeff Bezos to investigate how the National Enquirer had gotten hold of his private messages that reveal his relationship with his mistress Lauren Sanchez. Amazon founder revealed details of an alleged blackmail and extortion attempts. He published a post on Medium and accused American Media Inc of threatening him of releasing his intimate pictures if he did not call off the investigation of who leaked his photos and texts. Bezos wanted to know if David Pecker who was a long associate of President Donald Trump and head of American Media Inc. had a political motive against him.

Gavin De Becker Interview

Source: The Lenny Letter

Lena Dunham: You talk, in your book The Gift of Fear, about how you were affected by the violence your mother, a heroin addict, experienced and sometimes perpetrated herself. It allowed you to consider violence, to do research on violence, and ultimately to protect people from violence. Often people who grow up in environments like that become violent because they are enacting the things they’ve seen. What is it that you feel internal or that you saw that lifted you out of that circumstance? Why are you sitting in Fiji rather than jail?

Gavin de Becker: I became a kind of ambassador between the two worlds of violent and not violent. I’ve been in jail a lot, not as a prisoner but as a visitor working with various groups of people. There’s a line in Gift of Fear, and I’m quoting somebody else, I don’t remember who it is, but where two brothers are speaking. One of them says, “Our dad was an alcoholic. Why didn’t you grow up to be an alcoholic?” He says, “Because Dad was.” Then that brother says to the other, “Why did you grow up to be an alcoholic?” And he says, “Because Dad was.” You can have the same raw material and people use it differently. I don’t know. I was certainly afraid as a boy, so I had a close relationship to fear and uncertainty. I saw the powerlessness of women. Even in my mother’s violence was the effort to have ownership over anything. It happened to be us kids. The position of women is such that there is a great deal of desperation. I remember a decade or so ago, I read a book called Excess Baggage, and it’s a really terrific book about the psychology of women. The very first paragraph says, “I set out to write a book about women and depression, and it turned out to be just a book about women.”

LD: Something that I really took away from The Gift of Fear was that so many women have lost touch with their intuitions because of a desire to appear nice, not to appear bitchy. A huge part of my childhood was my mom saying to me, “Never worry about being rude to someone. If somebody asks you if you want help carrying your bag, you can say, ‘Fuck off,’ and you can run away.” But a lot of people’s mothers didn’t tell them that.

I wondered if that’s something that you still see a lot of, women who get into unsafe situations because they felt as though they had to perform the role of kindness for someone who was ultimately going to attack them.

GDB: Yes, it is the primary strategy for persuasion predators. There are two kinds of predators. There is a powerful predator. That’s someone who charges like a bear and knocks somebody down, and that’s a very rare predator because it’s a much riskier thing. The persuasion predator actually persuades the victim to participate, persuades the victim to be in an environment that is without advantages, only has advantages for the attacker. The primary strategy of persuasion relies upon the idea that women have been taught that if you are aggressive in rebuffing someone, if you are rude, if you are a bitch, then that will cause violence. The consequence of that is violence.

In reality, in my entire career, I have seen no cases where somebody was attacked by a stranger as a result of rebuffing them or as a result of being a bitch. I’ve seen literally hundreds and studied so many where the decision of the woman to allow someone to remain in her environment because of fear about appearing to be not nice was the direct advantage that the bad actor used. This whole issue of being nice to strangers, I think women can take a real lesson from men on this. When I’m approached in a store and somebody says, “Can I give you a hand with anything?” and I say, “No, no thanks. I’m just looking,” that’s usually the end of the conversation. When a man says no, it’s the end of a discussion. When a woman says no, it’s the beginning of a negotiation.

LD: What you’ve said, both in the book and in my communications with you about my experiences with stalkers, was, “Do not give this person anything. Do not give them the sound of your voice.” These people, unwanted pursuers, they receive all communication in some way as positive communication. I think so many women have an ex-boyfriend who won’t leave them alone for six months, and they think they can bargain their way out. Your approach seems to be just to slice it off, right?

GDB: Yeah. Slice it off sounds like you’re talking about slicing off a guy’s dick, so …

LD: You’ll rephrase it slightly.

GDB: You handle it however you want. I’m the last guy to say, “Don’t slice off a guy’s dick,” by the way. Anyway, yeah, you end it completely. The way I have found most effective in teaching on this subject is this: that that person rejoins the stranger pool. There’s another 300 million Americans out there that you have no relationship with and they’re not asking for one. This one you’ve specifically said you don’t want a relationship with, so he has less business in your life than the other 300 million people. If you don’t want a relationship, then he’s a stranger. He becomes a stranger again, and that is your right. It is your right to decide who is in your life and who’s not in your life. The moment he doesn’t listen, and the moment he persists, and the moment he stays with it, that ought to empower you to recognize how right you were in your decision.

You know, men, young men, in particular, they need very explicit communication. For example, if you’d say to a young man, “My head’s just not in the right place for a relationship right now,” he only hears the words right now. He hears that you’ll be in the place for a relationship later on. If somebody says, “You’re cute, but …,” he hears that you’re conflicted.

When you engage, you’re engaging. There’s a thing you’ve read me say or heard me say, which is that if somebody calls you 30 times and leaves 30 voice-mail messages and then you call back, what he learns is that it takes 30 messages to get a callback. That’s not a big price for him to pay. He’ll pay the price of 30 messages, but if you never get a callback, it eventually ends, and people do eventually turn their attention elsewhere.

LD: Indeed. I know that your approach is very multifaceted, but if there were one thing you could say as a starting point for protecting yourself as a young woman against violence, what would it be?

GDB: It would be to look at nature and your nature and to not accept the scam that violence is a strategy only understood by men. There’s a universal code of violence, and that’s not a code you have to crack; it’s all inside you. When I used to give more speeches, I would ask audiences, “Is there anybody here who feels they could never hurt anybody?” A bunch of people would raise their hands and say, “I could never be violent under any circumstances.” If it’s a woman, I would say, “Well, what about if somebody was hurting your child?” “Oh, oh, oh, well then I could rip, burn, bite, scrape, scratch, poke, shoot, stab,” and so the resource is in all of us.

My answer to young women would be: Don’t buy the idea that you can’t understand violence. Learn about violence. Don’t be the only animal in nature that doesn’t. Do you think there’s a female kitten that isn’t learning about violence, or a female bird that isn’t learning about predation and isn’t focused on that subject? Why would you be the only creature in nature that is not endowed with a nuclear defense system?