How Narcissists Use DARVO to Escape Accountability

You raised an issue. Maybe you confronted a partner about their behavior, or reported a colleague, or finally told someone in your family how their behavior hurt you. And somehow — you don’t quite understand how — you ended up on the defensive. The original concern was never addressed. Instead, you found yourself explaining your motives, defending your character, and managing the distress of the person who hurt you. If that’s where you are, this article is for you.

DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is a three-stage manipulation tactic used by perpetrators when confronted with accountability. The perpetrator denies the behavior, attacks the person confronting them, and reverses the roles of victim and offender — positioning themselves as the wronged party. Coined by psychologist Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd in 1997, DARVO is a documented feature of narcissistic abuse, coercive control, and institutional misconduct.

What is DARVO?

DARVO is an acronym coined by psychologist Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd in 1997.¹ It stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

Dr. Freyd — Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, Stanford PhD, and recipient of the 2024 Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology — first identified DARVO while observing how perpetrators respond to accountability. Her original formulation remains the most precise description available:

“The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim – or the whistleblower – into an alleged offender.”

Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD

DARVO is not a random defensive reaction. It is a tactical sequence — each stage building on the last — designed to neutralize accountability, silence the person raising the concern, and reconstruct the narrative in the perpetrator’s favor.

What Does DARVO Look Like?

Stage One: Deny

Denial is the first and most instinctive stage. The perpetrator refuses to acknowledge what happened — flatly, forcefully, and often with an air of moral injury at the accusation itself.

Denial takes several forms.

• Outright denial: “That never happened.” 
• Minimization: “It wasn’t that bad.” 
• Reframing: “You misunderstood what I meant.” 
• Gaslighting: “You always do this — you twist everything.”

Each form achieves the same outcome. The event is erased. The survivor’s account is replaced with the perpetrator’s version. The foundation for the next two stages is laid.

Denial works because most people are not expecting it. When someone has done something harmful, the natural human assumption is that they know it. The flat denial of an event the survivor experienced clearly — delivered with apparent confidence and moral certainty — produces immediate disorientation. That disorientation is precisely what denial is designed to produce.

Read more our article What is Blame-Shifting And Why Is It Harmful? to learn more.

Stage Two: Attack

Once denial has been established, the perpetrator shifts from defense to offense. They attack the credibility, character, motivation, or mental health of the person confronting them through deflection.

The attack redirects the conversation entirely. Instead of examining the perpetrator’s behavior, the exchange now examines the survivor’s reliability as a witness to their own experience.

Attacks take predictable forms: 

• “You’ve always been unstable.” 
• “You’re doing this to hurt me.” 
• “No one would believe you.” 
• “You’re just trying to destroy my reputation.” 

The attack does not need to be accurate. It needs to be sufficiently destabilizing to derail the original confrontation.

Research confirms the attack’s effectiveness. A 2020 study by Harsey and Freyd found that observers exposed to DARVO rated the perpetrator as less abusive, less responsible, and more credible — while simultaneously rating the victim as more abusive, more responsible, and less credible.² A single DARVO sequence shifted third-party perception in the perpetrator’s favor. The attack does not only silence the survivor. It recruits the audience.

Stage Three: Reverse Victim and Offender

The final stage is the most disorienting. Having denied the behavior and attacked the confronter, the perpetrator completes the reversal — positioning themselves as the true victim of the exchange.

They are the one being persecuted. They are the one whose reputation is being destroyed. They are the one who cannot believe, after everything they have done, that they are being treated this way. The survivor — who raised a legitimate concern — is now the aggressor.

This reversal relies on what Dr. Freyd describes as figure and ground being completely switched. The abuse disappears from the frame. The confrontation replaces it. The survivor’s act of raising accountability becomes the harm that the narrative now addresses.

For survivors who have already been destabilized by months or years of gaslighting, the reversal lands on ground that has already been prepared.³ Their self-doubt is weaponized. Their concern is inverted. They frequently leave the exchange not only unheard but actively guilty.

When, where, and how DARVO is expressed in narcissistic abuse dynamics is described in detail in our full guide to the narcissistic abuse cycle:

• The Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse: 4 Phases and the Mortal Discard
• What is Love-Bombing? Signs, Psychology, and How to Protect Yourself
• The Discard Phase of Narcissistic Abuse: Recovery Guide
• The Discard Phase of Narcissistic Abuse: Recovery Guide
• Hoovering Phase: The Re-Engagement Stage of Narcissistic Abuse
• Mortal Discard: Five Terminal Patterns in Coercive Control

DARVO Examples in Real Life

Understanding DARVO in the abstract is one thing. Recognizing it when it is happening — in the moment, when its disorienting effect is at its height — requires concrete examples.

In an Intimate Relationship

A survivor tells their partner: “You spent our rent money without telling me. I’m really worried about our finances.”

The partner responds: “I cannot believe you’re accusing me of this. I work myself to the bone for this family. You’ve never appreciated anything I do. I’m the one who should be upset here — you constantly make me feel like a failure.”

The rent money is never discussed. The partner is now the aggrieved party. The survivor is on the defensive.

In a Workplace

An employee reports to HR that their manager has been taking credit for their work. HR interviews the manager, who says: “I’m honestly shocked and hurt by this. I have championed this employee at every turn. This is a deliberate attempt to damage my career, and frankly I’m concerned about this person’s judgment and stability.”

The employee’s complaint is now under the shadow of a counter-allegation. The manager is positioned as the victim of a campaign.

In a Family System

An adult child tells their narcissistic parent: “The way you spoke to my partner at dinner was hurtful and disrespectful.”

The parent replies: “After everything I’ve sacrificed for you, this is how you treat me? I’ve never felt so humiliated in my life. You always take everyone else’s side over mine.”

The original concern is abandoned. The adult child is managing the parent’s distress rather than addressing the harm.

In a Legal Context

A survivor files for a protective order citing coercive control. The perpetrator’s legal response characterizes the survivor as unstable, vindictive, and the true source of conflict in the relationship. The survivor enters family court proceedings not as the person seeking protection but as a defendant defending their own character. This is DARVO exerted through the legal system — what we describe in the lawfare guide as one of the most damaging post-separation tactics available to narcissistic perpetrators.

At a Public Scale

Dr. Freyd has documented DARVO operating at political and institutional levels — where powerful individuals or organizations accused of wrongdoing deny the allegations, attack the credibility and motives of those making them, and position themselves as victims of persecution, false accusation, or politically motivated attack.⁴ The mechanism is identical. Only the scale changes.

DARVO in Marriage and Intimate Relationships

In intimate relationships, DARVO operates across the full arc of the relationship — not as a single incident but as a sustained pattern.

Every attempt at accountability becomes an opportunity for the sequence to run. The survivor raises a concern. The concern is denied, the survivor is attacked, and the relationship dynamic is inverted. Over time, the survivor stops raising concerns. They have learned, through repeated conditioning, that confrontation produces more harm than silence.

This is the goal. DARVO in marriage does not merely resolve individual confrontations in the perpetrator’s favor. It systematically dismantles the survivor’s willingness to hold the perpetrator accountable at all — producing the silence and compliance that coercive control requires.

The Long-Term Consequences

The cumulative effect of repeated DARVO is profound. Survivors progressively lose confidence in their own perception of events. They begin to rehearse their concerns carefully before raising them — anticipating the attack, softening the accusation, pre-emptively conceding ground. Often, by the time they speak, the concern has been diluted to the point where it carries no accountability for the perpetrator whatsoever.

Self-blame becomes the default. If every confrontation results in the survivor being positioned as the problem, the survivor eventually internalizes that position. The perpetrator’s DARVO narrative becomes the survivor’s own internal narrative. This is one of the most consistent and most damaging features of narcissistic coercive abuse — and one of the central targets of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™.

Post-Separation DARVO

DARVO does not end when the relationship does. It intensifies. The smear campaign is DARVO at social scale — the same denial, attack, and role reversal deployed across mutual social networks, family systems, and legal proceedings simultaneously.

For the full analysis of how DARVO operates after separation, see the Post-Separation Abuse guide and the Narcissist Smear Campaigns article.

To learn more about what high risk post-separation abuse looks like, read Mortal Discard: Five Fatal Patterns in Coercive Control.

DARVO in the Workplace

DARVO is not limited to intimate relationships. Anywhere a power imbalance exists, the conditions for DARVO are present.

Dr. Freyd’s research on institutional DARVO emerged specifically from the workplace context — sexual harassment, whistleblowing, and the organizational responses to both.⁵ Her findings are unambiguous: institutions, managers, and organizations use DARVO in the same way individual perpetrators do.

How Workplace DARVO Operates

An employee raises a complaint about harassment, discrimination, or misconduct. The institutional response follows the DARVO sequence with precision.

• Deny: The complaint is characterized as unfounded, exaggerated, or the result of misunderstanding. HR procedures are invoked not to investigate but to manage the complainant’s expectations. The misconduct is reframed as ordinary professional behavior, misread by a sensitive or difficult employee.

• Attack: The complainant’s professional performance, judgment, and motivations are scrutinized. Prior disciplinary records are surfaced. Colleagues are quietly canvassed for negative observations. The complainant’s credibility as a witness to their own experience is systematically undermined — through the official apparatus of the organization’s own processes.

• Reverse Victim and Offender: The accused manager or colleague is positioned as the victim of a false or malicious allegation. The organization expresses concern for the reputational and professional harm the allegation has caused them. The complainant — who raised a legitimate concern through official channels — is now the source of the problem.

Institutional Betrayal

Dr. Freyd describes this as institutional DARVO — and extends it to a broader concept of institutional betrayal: the harm caused when an institution fails to protect those who depend on it, or actively works against them. Research published in PLOS ONE by Smidt, Adams-Clark, and Freyd (2023) found that institutional courage — the opposite of institutional betrayal — directly protects employee health, buffers against institutional betrayal, and fosters organizational commitment in the aftermath of workplace harassment.⁶

The implication is clear. Workplaces that train staff to recognize DARVO, respond to complaints with genuine accountability, and protect rather than punish complainants produce measurably better outcomes — for employees and for the organization itself.

For Survivors of Workplace DARVO

Document everything contemporaneously. Written records, dated and specific, are your most important protection. Do not rely on verbal communications — follow every significant workplace interaction with a written summary sent by email to create a paper trail. Seek advice from a specialist employment attorney or union representative before raising formal complaints. Understand that the DARVO response, when it comes, does not mean your complaint was unfounded. It means the institution is protecting itself using the same tactic individual perpetrators use.

DARVO vs Gaslighting: The Critical Difference

These two concepts are frequently conflated. They are related — but they are not the same thing. Understanding the distinction matters for survivors trying to name precisely what is happening to them.

• Gaslighting is a sustained campaign of reality distortion. It operates continuously — across the relationship, through daily interactions, through the perpetrator’s consistent substitution of their version of events for the survivor’s. Its primary target is the survivor’s internal relationship with their own perception.

• DARVO is a specific response to confrontation. It is triggered — by accountability, by challenge, by the survivor or a third party attempting to hold the perpetrator responsible. Its operation involves three distinct stages and frequently deploys an audience. It is both a silencing tactic and a narrative construction tactic.

The relationship between them is this: gaslighting prepares the ground; DARVO exploits it. A survivor whose perception has already been eroded by sustained gaslighting is maximally vulnerable to DARVO — because the self-doubt that gaslighting installed makes the denial, the attack, and the reversal all more effective. The two tactics reinforce each other.

Both are documented components of narcissistic abuse and coercive control. Both are addressed within the pattern recognition domain of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™.

DARVO as a Collective Grooming Tactic

DARVO rarely operates between two people alone. One of its most damaging features is its capacity to recruit an audience — to extend the denial, the attack, and the role reversal across an entire social group. When this happens, DARVO becomes a collective grooming tactic: a systematic process of shaping how a community perceives both the perpetrator and the survivor.

The mechanism works in a specific sequence. First, the perpetrator’s denial is presented to the group as the authoritative account of events. Because most people are not expecting a flat denial from someone who has caused harm, and because the perpetrator typically delivers it with apparent moral injury, the denial is often accepted without scrutiny. The survivor’s account is treated as a competing claim rather than as testimony.

Once the denial has been established as the group’s working reality, the attack on the survivor’s credibility reshapes how the group interprets everything that follows. Concerns the survivor raises are reframed as evidence of instability, vindictiveness, or manipulation. Supporters of the survivor are positioned as having been misled. The group’s perception of the survivor shifts — not through evidence, but through the sustained repetition of a narrative that the perpetrator controls.

The reversal completes the process. The perpetrator, now positioned as the victim of the survivor’s conduct, receives the empathy and social protection that belongs to the person who was actually harmed. The survivor is left holding the perpetrator’s accountability — disbelieved, isolated, and frequently the target of the group’s hostility.

Dr. Freyd’s research on betrayal trauma documents how this collective dynamic produces what she calls a culture of betrayal blindness — an environment in which the group’s investment in the perpetrator’s version of events becomes self-reinforcing. Raising the original concern again does not produce reconsideration. It produces further attack. The group has been groomed to interpret accountability as aggression.

This collective dimension of DARVO is why it is so consistently present in institutional contexts — in workplaces, religious organizations, family systems, and legal proceedings. It is also why survivors frequently describe feeling not just disbelieved, but actively persecuted. They are not imagining it. The group, having accepted the perpetrator’s narrative, has made the survivor the problem.

Understanding DARVO as a collective grooming tactic — not merely a personal defensive response — is one of the reasons it is addressed within the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™. Recovery from DARVO is not only about restoring individual perception. It is about understanding that the social isolation survivors experience after DARVO was not an accident. It was the intended outcome.

Why do Bystanders Participate?

Bystanders who witness DARVO and side with the perpetrator are not always malicious. Understanding why they participate — and why their participation is so consistent — is part of what makes DARVO survivable. It was never about you being unbelievable. It was about what believing you would have cost them.

Betrayal Blindness

Dr. Freyd’s framework of betrayal blindness offers the most precise explanation available. Betrayal blindness is a survival mechanism that emerges when awareness of a betrayal would threaten a relationship the witness depends on or values. In other words, bystanders who are socially, professionally, or emotionally invested in the perpetrator cannot afford — psychologically — to fully believe the survivor.

This is not a conscious calculation. Most bystanders are not aware they are doing it. The mind protects the relationship by finding reasons to doubt the account that threatens it. The survivor’s presentation — distressed, perhaps inconsistent, perhaps unable to produce documentation of events that happened in private — provides sufficient grounds for that doubt. The perpetrator’s presentation — calm, morally aggrieved, consistent — does not.

Social Capital and Self-Interest

Bystanders frequently stand to gain something by aligning with the perpetrator. Social capital, professional access, protection from the perpetrator’s own aggression — these are real incentives. Siding with a survivor of DARVO typically means accepting a social cost: loss of proximity to the perpetrator, exposure to the attack that the perpetrator has already demonstrated they are capable of, and the discomfort of holding an unpopular position within the group.

These dynamics are particularly visible in workplace and organizational contexts, where the perpetrator is often in a position of institutional authority. Supporting a complainant against a manager carries professional risk. Most bystanders, even those who privately believe the survivor, make a rational calculation about what alignment costs them — and choose accordingly.

The Role of Prior Grooming

Perpetrators who use DARVO effectively have typically been cultivating their social position for some time before a confrontation occurs. By the time a survivor raises accountability, the perpetrator has already established themselves as credible, likable, and — critically — as someone who would never do what they are being accused of. The survivor is raising a concern that conflicts with the group’s existing experience of the perpetrator. The group’s prior grooming makes the denial easier to accept and the attack easier to rationalize.

Research by Harsey and Freyd (2020) confirmed this experimentally: observers exposed to a DARVO sequence rated the perpetrator as significantly less responsible and more credible, and rated the survivor as significantly more responsible and less credible — after a single exposure to the tactic. The effect did not require a long history of grooming. One DARVO sequence was sufficient to shift third-party perception in the perpetrator’s favor.

For survivors, this research carries a specific and important implication. The bystanders who did not believe you were not simply reading the situation incorrectly. They were responding to a tactic that is specifically designed to produce that result. Their failure to support you was the intended outcome of a deliberate sequence — not a verdict on your credibility or your worth.

How to Respond to DARVO: 6 Strategies

Institutional DARVO

Dr. Freyd extended her original DARVO framework to describe how institutions — universities, police forces, churches, corporations, and governments — deploy the same tactic when faced with accountability.

Institutional DARVO occurs when an institution denies wrongdoing, attacks the credibility of those raising concerns, and positions itself as the victim of unfair criticism, malicious allegation, or politically motivated attack. It is, in Dr. Freyd’s description, “a particularly aggressive form of institutional betrayal.”

Examples are not difficult to find. Police forces that charge rape victims with making false reports. Churches that protect perpetrators and discredit survivors of abuse. Universities that discipline whistleblowers rather than the misconduct they reported. HR departments that investigate complainants rather than the conduct they complained about.

The 2024 landmark study by Harsey, Adams-Clark, and Freyd — published in PLOS ONE — provides the most current and most significant research on DARVO’s reach.⁷ It found striking associations between DARVO use, sexual harassment perpetration, and rape myth acceptance across both student and community samples. Those who use DARVO are not simply employing a defensive tactic. They hold a worldview that justifies participation in sexual violence and blames its victims. DARVO is not a isolated communication failure. It is an indicator of a broader system of beliefs about power, accountability, and who deserves to be believed.

The opposite of institutional DARVO is what Dr. Freyd calls institutional courage — the active, deliberate commitment to accountability, transparency, and the protection of those who raise concerns. Research by Smidt, Adams-Clark, and Freyd (2023) demonstrates that institutional courage measurably buffers against the harm of institutional betrayal and protects the health of those who have been failed by institutional DARVO.

Who gets targeted for DARVO?

For DARVO to occur a power imbalance must exist. Similarly, it is particularly effective when the abuser has more social capital than the survivor.

Generally, if the perpetrator is a member of a dominant group and the survivor belongs to a disenfranchised group, the likelihood of believing the survivor is lower.

People who are likely candidates for DARVO are:

• Survivors who confront their abuser.
• Whistleblowers.
• Socially vulnerable individuals or groups, e.g. women are more likely to be targeted for DARVO than men.

If you are ready to kick start the healing process, explore our guided support and step-by-step exercises for step-by-step in our Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Hub:

• The Complete Guide to Narcissistic Abuse Recovery
• Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Stages: A Complete Timeline
• How Long Does It Take to Recover from Narcissistic Abuse?
• Narcissistic Abuse Healing: Evidence-Based Techniques 
• Self-Care for Narcissistic Abuse Survivors: Practical Daily Practices

What is the purpose of DARVO?

The DARVO tactic serves many purposes.

• It is a smokescreen used by manipulators to conceal the truth of their behavior.
• It enables the manipulator to control how others perceive the target and the conflict.
• It often stuns the targeted person into confusion and silence.

Thus, the abuser is able to craft a scapegoat story which is used to cultivate biases against the target and rally bystanders to their cause.

“This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D.

In a DARVO climate, no amount of evidence will suffice as proof of the abuser’s transgressions. Bystanders willingly suspend their relationship with reality out of self-interest. The victim-survivors is objectified and reduced to a dehumanizing stereotype. Therefore, a social circle groomed by a manipulator with prominent anti-social traits will not believe them. Instead, the target will endure a terrifying campaign of victim-blaming and hate from the group. The perpetrator’s endgame is the complete destruction of the victim, either by social death, psychological destabilization, and/or self-destruction.

The Longterm Effects on Survivors

DARVO can have devastating consequences on the mental health of victim-survivors. Firstly, it leads to chronic anxiety, panic, major depression, and post-traumatic stress. These conditions, in turn, significantly impact the survivor’s physical well-being. Moreover, this process invalidates the survivor’s lived experience, inflicting additional pain and suffering as they are denied any form of justice. Instead of acknowledging the wrong done to them, individuals further persecute and blame survivors, despite their victimhood. Moreover, the rejection from peers and the perpetrator’s immunity to accountability continuously pour salt into the survivor’s wounds, repeatedly re-traumatizing them.

Related Links

• What is Blame-Shifting And Why Is It Harmful?
• Narcissist Smear Campaigns: What They Are and How to Survive
• Types of Narcissistic Abuse: Emotional, Physical, Financial and More
• Narcissistic Abuse Tactics: Gaslighting, Love Bombing and More
• The Complete Guide to Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

How Narcissistic Abuse Rehab Can Help

If you or a loved one is ready to break free from a toxic relationship and reclaim your life, Narcissistic Abuse Rehab is here to kick start your recovery journey. I developed the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ from seven years of direct professional work with survivors of coercive control and narcissistic abuse. The method is built on the recognition that coercive trauma is a specific category of injury — distinct in its neurological signature, its dismantling of identity, and what genuine recovery from it requires — and that survivors need a framework designed for that specific injury, not a generic approach adapted from it. I also offer expert coaching on how to prove coercive control in court. Book a free 15 minute consultation to learn more.

Learn more

Learn more about DARVO with Dr. Freyd in their lecture ‘Institutional and Interpersonal Betrayal.’

Frequently Asked Questions

Academic Citation

This article was cited as a source in the following peer-reviewed research paper(s) and literature:

• Scotto di Carlo, G. (2025). Understanding Discourse and D.A.R.V.O.: Theories and Methods. In: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Violence against Women. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-88866-3_3
• Garrick, J., Buck, M. (2022). Counteraccusing. In: The Psychosocial Impacts of Whistleblower Retaliation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19055-1_10

If you have cited this article in your academic work and would like to be included on this page, please contact us with a link to your publication.

Media Mentions

Manya Wakefield’s expertise on DARVO was featured in Newsweek’s coverage of the Depp v. Heard trial — one of the most high-profile public examinations of the tactic in recent years.

• Experts Can’t Agree on Who’s the True DARVO Victim in Depp v. Heard by Emma Nolan, Newsweek, May 13, 2022.

References

1. Freyd, Jennifer J. II. Violations of Power, Adaptive Blindness and Betrayal Trauma Theory. Feminism & Psychology 7, No. 1 (February 1997): 22–32. ↩︎
2. Harsey, S. & Freyd, J.J. (2020). Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO): What is the influence on perceived perpetrator and victim credibility? Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 29, 897–916. ↩︎
3. Sarah J. Harsey, Eileen L. Zurbriggen & Jennifer J. Freyd (2017) “Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26:6, 644-663 ↩︎
4. Harsey, S. & Freyd, J.J. (2022). Defamation and DARVO. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23, 481–489. ↩︎
5. Smidt, A.M., Adams-Clark, A.A., & Freyd, J.J. (2023). Institutional courage buffers against institutional betrayal, protects employee health, and fosters organizational commitment following workplace sexual harassment. PLOS ONE, 18(1): e0278830. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Harsey, S., Adams-Clark, A.A., & Freyd, J.J. (2024). Associations between defensive victim-blaming responses (DARVO), rape myth acceptance, and sexual harassment. PLOS ONE, e0313642. ↩︎

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