How do public figures slip out of trouble? Using a time-honored tactic: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The scientist who discovered DARVO has a lot to teach us about the war on truth.

We’re in an upside-down moment, in which there seems to be no cost for lying and no respect for honesty. How did we get here? Jennifer Freyd can explain. Since the 1990s she’s been tracking the misbehavior of public figures and the ways that institutions unwittingly betray us. And in the process she discovered and revealed the secret, specific choreography by which people accused of bad things fight back, and described it with the acronym DARVO. And once you hear her explain it, you’ll start to see it everywhere.

Freyd and I were fellows together at Stanford University, where she taught me how to look for the denials, attacks, and victim reversals that have now become the daily language of American politics. Here she breaks down her personal experience of betrayal, her decades of research, and how all of it led her to create The Center for Institutional Courage, where she teaches companies, universities, and organizations how to protect, rather than betray, their people.