Attack the accuser and claim the wound.
Jennifer Freyd's DARVO is chapter 83: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The distinctive move is the third, because denial and attack are ordinary. The reversal converts the accused into the injured party — persecuted, smeared, subjected to a witch hunt, denied due process, destroyed by a mob.
Harsey and Freyd's experimental work is what makes this a technique rather than a description. Participants exposed to an account containing DARVO rated the accused as more believable and the accuser as less believable than participants reading the same account without it. Third-party judgment moved.
The reason it works on observers is a mismatch of performances. The accused deploying DARVO is confident, articulate and visibly indignant, and indignation is a legible credibility cue because innocent people are frequently outraged. The person describing what was done to them is often flat, hesitant, and inconsistent on peripheral detail, which is a well-documented trauma presentation and reads as a poor witness.
The Weinstein operation, exposed in Ronan Farrow's reporting in November 2017, shows the industrial version. Black Cube operatives working under false identities — one posing as a women's rights advocate, another as a journalist — approached accusers and reporters, recorded them, and gathered material to be used to discredit them. The reversal is more persuasive when it appears evidence-based, and the evidence was manufactured for the purpose.
The operational elements are: deny specifically and completely; attack the accuser's motive, memory, character and history; and then narrate your own injury at their hands, at length, with feeling.
The boundary is not a matter of degree. Freyd's construct was developed from studying abusers, and the pattern's diagnostic value comes from the fact that it is what perpetrators do. A person falsely accused has a defense available that this technique does not require: the evidence. DARVO is what is reached for when the evidentiary route is unavailable.
The counter has direct experimental support, which is rare in this guide. Harsey and Freyd found that educating people about DARVO reduced its effect on their judgments. Naming the pattern to an audience is the intervention.
The structural version of the counter is chapter 313: hold the original question open in writing, and refuse to move from an evidentiary question to a contest of character.
Countered by Deny, Attack, Reverse