DARVO is detectable structurally, which is what makes it different from most of the material in this part.
The sequence is Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender, and it is stereotyped enough to be scored. Jennifer Freyd formulated it in 1997, and Harsey and Freyd's experimental work established that observers exposed to it rate the accuser as less believable and the accused as more sympathetic.
The scoring is three questions asked of a response to an allegation.
Does the response address the factual claim, or does it address the person making it? A denial is legitimate and is not DARVO. What marks the pattern is that the substance of the allegation is not engaged with — no alternative account of the event, no evidence, no timeline — while a great deal is said about the accuser's motives, history, mental state or character.
Does the response attack the accuser's credibility rather than the claim's? Watch for: they have a history of this, they are unstable, they waited too long, they want money, they were fine at the time.
And does the accused become the injured party? This is the diagnostic move. Persecuted, smeared, subjected to a witch hunt, denied due process, life destroyed, presumed guilty.
Any of these can occur legitimately in isolation. A falsely accused person may well be all of those things. What is diagnostic is the sequence and the absence — the reversal arriving in place of an account of what happened rather than alongside one.
The reason it works on observers is a mismatch of performances that has nothing to do with truth. The accused deploying DARVO is confident and visibly indignant, and indignation reads as innocence. The person describing what was done to them is frequently flat, hesitant and inconsistent on peripheral detail, which is a documented trauma presentation and reads as a poor witness.
The most valuable finding here, and it is rare in this guide, is that the counter has direct experimental support. Harsey and Freyd found that educating participants about DARVO reduced its effect on their judgments. Naming the pattern, to yourself and to an audience, measurably weakens it.
The counter-response for a target is structural: return to the factual claim, in writing, and refuse the move from evidence to character. What is alleged, specifically. What evidence exists. Those questions do not become easier or harder to answer depending on how anyone is behaving.
This counters Law 25.