DARVO is now in the dictionary. That’s a win for abuse survivors

In October 2017, just one day before The New York Times published its investigative report exposing his long career as a rapist, Harvey Weinstein blew into the newspaper’s offices with a phalanx of lawyers. The film producer was intent on attacking Ashley Judd, the actress, activist and humanitarian who is one of the authors of this piece, saying she had “mental issues.” For support, Weinstein brandished a photograph of the two of them taken in 1997 during the Oscar party his company Miramax hosted at Beverly Hills’ Peninsula Hotel. 

When she learned of his spectacle at the Times’ offices, Judd immediately recognized Weinstein’s slippery strategy as DARVO and felt a sense of relief. She knew there was language and a body of research that plainly identified and unpacked what can otherwise be a head-spinning distortion of reality. 

An insidious response tactic — it never happened, you’re a liar, you’re the one who hurt me — DARVO is intended to disorient the victim, painting them instead as the villain. It follows a predictable pattern: deny the harm, attack the credibility of the person who named the harm, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. The acronym, introduced to the world in the 1990s by Jennifer Freyd, another co-author, has grown in usage by individuals, media and institutions as an increasing number of people have come forward to report sexual assaults and harassment. Since then, DARVO has become so ubiquitous that it has now been canonized in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and added to its list of trending terms. 

DARVO was inspired by an infamous confirmation hearing. In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, her former supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who was then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. Thomas and his supporters responded quickly. While he denied the allegations and claimed to be the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” Republican senators attacked Hill’s credibility and motivations — and Thomas was narrowly confirmed to the Court. Freyd, a psychology professor and trauma researcher, took notice. As she saw it, the collection of responses followed a specific pattern. Several years later, she introduced DARVO to the world in a research article. 

At the time, Freyd called her acronym capturing how perpetrators deflect responsibility “very speculative.” Thirty years later and a #MeToo movement later, it’s no longer speculation. A growing body of research, some of it conducted by Freyd and Sarah Harsey, another co-author of this column, has provided important insights into this tactic. A database tracking DARVO research now counts 33 peer-reviewed studies investigating it. 

The studies tell us that DARVO can shift observers’ beliefs about who is really to blame. This is a fundamental goal of DARVO-users: Convince others of your innocence. When study participants were exposed to a fictional perpetrator’s use of DARVO, they assigned less responsibility to the perpetrator and more responsibility to the victim. When a fictional perpetrator used DARVO to explain away sexual assault allegations, participants were less likely to say the perpetrator should face punishment and more willing to agree that the victim should be punished. 

This research is consistent with what happened during Thomas’ confirmation hearing. After he testified, Thomas gained credibility in the public’s eye. Hill’s credibility, on the other hand, was damaged. 

Research has also shown that DARVO is relatively common. When study participants were asked to report on their experiences confronting other people, nearly 72% had heard a denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender. And the more DARVO participants heard, the higher levels of self-blame they felt. In a different study, exposure to DARVO was also linked to greater levels of psychological distress. Although these studies are correlational — which means it isn’t clear if hearing DARVO causes increases in self-blame or distress — they still suggest that being the recipient of DARVO is at least connected to worse well-being. 

But what do we know about people who use DARVO? In a survey of over 900 participants, people who used more DARVO to respond to confrontation also reported perpetrating more sexual harassment. One reason for this finding is that people who engage in bad behavior — like sexual harassment — may be accustomed to responding with DARVO as a way to get away with their actions. This survey also found that people with greater DARVO tendencies were more accepting of rape myths, which are common but inaccurate beliefs about rape that excuse the actions of perpetrators and place blame on victims. The connection here may be simple: People who personally engage in victim blaming agree that victims, including victims of rape, are blameworthy. 

As research continues to tell us more about DARVO, highly visible examples appear regularly in the news cycle. President Donald Trump, for instance, often reaches for denials, attacks, and victim-playing responses when faced with information that threatens his power or reputation. When talking about E. Jean Carroll — the writer whom Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing — the president has denied the sexual abuse, attacked her appearance, motives and sanity, and claimed to be the target of a witch hunt. Even Carroll herself couldn’t help but point out the pattern. In a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper, she observed, “He denies. He turns it around. He threatens, and he attacks.”

Striking examples of DARVO can be found outside of the things political figures say. Beyond his noxious attacks on Judd, Weinstein has repeatedly used DARVO tactics in his many attempts to discredit the many women who come forward about his crimes. 

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More recently, the investigation into the seven Cornell University fraternity members who are accused of sexually assaulting a female undergraduate has unleashed a torrent of DARVO against the student known as Jane Doe. A visible part of the discourse about the Cornell Seven reveals how some have flatly rejected the possibility that Doe was assaulted, attacked her credibility and her appearance, and labeled the case as a “hoax.” Sympathy for the fraternity members is not too hard to find, either; Trump himself shared that he felt “badly” for the accused men.

Many may wonder whether DARVO is a necessary response to an accusation. How else is someone supposed to respond? But DARVO is not inevitable. Someone can admit their responsibility for causing harm and sincerely apologize, which is the most constructive path for all involved. If someone is innocent of the accusation — or wants others to believe they are — they can respectfully deny the allegation without attacking or putting themselves into the victim role. Thomas, for instance, who had chaired the very agency charged with enforcing sexual harassment law, could have responded to Hill’s testimony by saying: “I do not remember the events in this way but I know these conversations about sexual harassment are important, and I want to understand your experience.”

DARVO poses a significant social problem. For even the smallest transgressions between two individuals, it’s antagonistic and fails to provide a productive resolution. On a larger scale, DARVO stands in the way of justice by encouraging a pervasive and hostile disbelief of victims. Even our institutions can use this chilling tactic, resulting in a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal. This may be one reason many people fear coming forward to seek accountability and are effectively silenced. 

Two stories of institutional betrayal were prominently featured in the 2015 documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which investigated sexual assault on college and university campuses. In 2007, during her freshman year at the University of North-Carolina, Annie Clark reported being sexually assaulted to campus officials. One employee compared rape to football. Annie was the quarterback; what could she have done differently? She had come seeking support and instead found herself being asked to account for her own supposed failure. Four years later, while a student at Harvard Law School, Kamilah Willingham encountered a struggle for accountability after reporting a sexual assault. 

The stories of Clark, Willingham and others brought institutional betrayal painfully close: the place where you hoped to learn, belong and flourish can become another place entirely, one where you must fight to be heard.

When the documentary was recently screened at Harvard — one of the institutions whose responses it challenges — those stories were given particular force. They also offered a lens for examining institutional responses at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and beyond. 

DARVO helps us name how institutional self-protection can become an attack on the person seeking help: deny responsibility, undermine the survivor’s credibility and cast the institution or the accused as the injured party. The student asking for protection becomes a threat to someone else’s future or reputation. Freyd has identified this institutional DARVO as a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal.

But the film also follows Clark and her colleague Andrea Pino building a network of survivors who refuse to leave one another alone with these experiences. Universities could learn from them. The Center for Institutional Courage’s 12 steps call on institutions to welcome truth-tellers, respond well to disclosures, acknowledge harm and sustain the resources needed for change. Imagine the difference if a student’s disclosure was met with care — and a commitment to stay for the work of accountability and repair.

This underscores the good news of what we have learned: DARVO loses some of its power when people know what it is. In one experiment, some participants read a one-paragraph explanation of DARVO — what it stands for and why perpetrators may use it — before reading a fictional scenario in which a perpetrator used the tactic. Compared with participants who had not read the explanation, DARVO-educated participants believed the victim more and supported the perpetrator less.

Institutional DARVO can be combated, too, with institutional courage. By taking actionable steps such as cherishing whistleblowers, practicing transparency, and committing to seek truth and engage in moral action, institutions can act in ways that restore trust and help people who have been harmed come forward.

Judd has described the effect in her own life. “When I know I’m being attacked, I immediately remind myself that that is a common strategy,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “It’s DARVO.” 

This is why Merriam-Webster’s entry for DARVO matters. Its presence in the dictionary makes the term available to a wide audience; anyone can look it up and learn what it means. This access is especially important for victims who have been made to doubt themselves, who can now more easily reach for a term that shines a light on their experiences. It also offers a critical reassurance: No, you’re not crazy — you’re being DARVOed. The tactic’s efficacy depends on a confused audience, and every person who learns about the acronym is a little bit harder to fool.