DARVO

Deny. Attack. Reverse victim and offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd named this sequence in 1997: when a victim confronts a perpetrator, or an allegation becomes public, the perpetrator denies the behavior happened, attacks the character and credibility of the person who came forward, and then claims the victim role for himself—casting the person who disclosed as the real aggressor.

DARVO is the operational tool of coercive control. When an abuser denies, attacks, and reverses victim and offender, he is not stepping outside the abuse to defend himself. He is continuing it: deriving the same pleasure and exhilaration from depriving his victim of her sovereignty and her objective sense of reality that the original abuse gave him, and performing it now for whoever is listening. The sequence is specific enough that researchers can test it, and specific enough that once you know the three moves, you start seeing them everywhere powerful men answer an accusation.

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What the research shows

Sarah Harsey and Freyd have spent close to a decade testing whether DARVO actually moves an audience, not just whether a perpetrator believes his own account. Their experiments expose research participants to accounts that do or do not follow the DARVO structure, then measure what shifts in the listener. Perpetrator DARVO lowers how believable participants rate the victim, raises how much responsibility they assign her for what happened, and lowers how abusive they judge the perpetrator to be. A 2023 study extended the finding to sexual assault specifically: DARVO paired with an insincere apology reduced participants' willingness to punish the perpetrator and increased their willingness to blame the victim.

The tactic predicts nothing about guilt or innocence on its own. What the research measures is not whether DARVO signals a true or false allegation—it is what DARVO does to the people listening, regardless of which one is true.

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Why it works

DARVO deals in renovating reality rather than contending with fact. Its target is not the truth of the allegation. It is the center of the conversation. Deny, attack, and reverse are three ways of doing the same thing: moving the conversation off what the perpetrator did and onto whether the victim can be trusted, generating doubt where none actually exists. A listener who starts the exchange asking “what happened to her” frequently ends it asking “what is wrong with her”—without ever resolving the first question.

In my own training for police officers, courts, and guardians ad litem, I use a comparison that makes the absurdity concrete. A resource predator—someone who wants a thing, like a car—gives a flat denial when an officer pulls him over in a stolen vehicle: “No, officer, I didn't steal this vehicle.” A process predator—someone who wants domination itself, which is what an abuser is—runs DARVO instead, in the same stop: “I didn't steal this car. In fact, this car stole me. This car is a bitch, and it ran over my foot driving away with me. Officer, you should put the car in jail. It's the problem here.”

That sounds absurd, because it is absurd. It is also structurally identical to what Miller's statements do below: deny the theft, attack the object of the accusation, and ask the officer to arrest the car instead of him. The only difference is that no one has an emotional stake in defending a stolen car's honor. An abuser asks officers, judges, and guardians ad litem evaluating an intimate partner case to accept the same absurd sequence about a person, not a car—in a context saturated with exactly the stereotypes about anger, credibility, and who deserves belief that DARVO is built to exploit. The tactic manipulates every institutional actor positioned to intervene: the officer taking the initial report, the court weighing a protection order, the guardian ad litem recommending a custody arrangement. Each one is a fresh audience for the same three moves.

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The script, running in real time

Ohio Representative Max Miller offers a clear example running right now, and the unusual advantage of a five-year paper trail. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has filed multiple court petitions alleging domestic abuse throughout their marriage and the custody dispute that followed it—among them that he threw hot water on her, held a gun to her head, and assaulted her during a February 2025 custody exchange. Police reports obtained by ABC News document the allegations; Ohio's Department of Children and Family Services did not substantiate a related child-abuse claim, and prosecutors have filed no criminal charge against him. Five years earlier, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham made a strikingly similar allegation: her 2021 memoir described a White House–era boyfriend as physically abusive, and she later named him as Miller in a Washington Post op-ed. A 2021 Politico investigation, based on interviews with 60 people close to Miller, reported that the relationship ended after Miller allegedly pushed Grisham against a wall and slapped her during an argument at his apartment. What follows is not a judgment about what happened in either relationship—both matters moved through civil proceedings, not criminal ones, and the factual disputes in each remain contested. It is a reading of the public script Miller has run in response to both accusations, five years apart, because the script itself is the documented, testable part, independent of how any underlying dispute resolves.

Deny. “No court, no agency has ever substantiated any allegation of abuse against me. No criminal charge has ever been filed against me,” Miller said publicly. “I categorically deny abusing my former wife. Family court disputes are often emotional, painful and deeply personal,” he said in a livestream. He denied the Grisham allegations in the same terms in 2021—categorically, and immediately. Both statements hold up on their own narrow terms, and Miller's framing depends on the listener not knowing what those terms actually mean. A civil protection order operates on a different evidentiary standard than a criminal charge does. Prosecutors decline cases for reasons that have nothing to do with whether an allegation is true; the False accusations dispatch on this site documents how much of the distance between a report and a conviction closes for reasons that have nothing to do with what actually happened. The absence of a criminal charge is not evidence of innocence. It is, at most, evidence that the case did not clear a bar much higher than the one a family court protection order requires.

Attack. “My former wife is engaging in a pattern of reporting incredible, serious and destructive allegations with absolutely no evidence,” Miller said. The word pattern is doing specific work in that sentence—it is the exact vocabulary this site uses to describe an abuser's behavior, and he has turned it back on the person who reported one. Miller has also stated publicly that Moreno has bipolar disorder; he offers it not as a private medical fact but as an explanation for her allegations. Attaching a psychiatric diagnosis to a person's credibility, in public, functions as an attack regardless of whether the diagnosis is accurate—it invites an audience to discount everything she says as a symptom rather than treat it as a report.

The attack move has a five-year history too. Miller sued Grisham for defamation in 2021, claiming she fabricated her allegations to sell books and damage his congressional campaign; he dropped that suit in 2023 after reaching a confidential settlement with her. Then, in May 2026, as the Moreno allegations intensified, Miller posted an audio clip on social media and declared that “everything alleged by Stephanie Grisham was fabricated”—reviving a five-year-old allegation against a different woman at the exact moment a new allegation put him under pressure, with nothing from Grisham herself prompting it. Grisham is now suing him again, this time for breaching the 2023 settlement's confidentiality terms. Attacking an old accuser to blunt a new one is still the attack move. It just runs on a longer clock.

Reverse victim and offender. Miller filed his own protection order against Moreno; a judge later dismissed it. He has also stated that Moreno, not he, broke their two-year-old daughter's clavicle. The 2021 defamation suit against Grisham did the same procedural work five years earlier: rather than answer as the accused, Miller became the plaintiff, asking a court to treat him as the injured party and Grisham as the one who owed damages. All three moves do procedurally what Freyd's framework describes rhetorically—they ask the legal system and the public to relocate the victim position onto the person who reported the harm, and the offender position onto the person who disclosed it. A protection order or a defamation suit an accused man files against his own accuser is DARVO with a case number attached.

The pattern is no longer only rhetorical. In July 2026, Moreno's attorney sought a protection order after Miller allegedly grabbed him during a courthouse hearing and taunted him with “come at me.” Miller's own defense attorney, addressing the court, said his client “just can't control himself.” That is not Freyd's framework or this site's language. It is the word Miller's own lawyer chose, in court, about Miller.

Each pass through the system without consequence is also practice. System-enabled abuse becomes a more viable strategy the more times courts fail to hold an abuser accountable. A future dispatch on this site takes up that escalation directly.

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What incumbency buys

The tactic is not succeeding only in the court of public perception the Harsey and Freyd studies measure. It is buying Miller something more concrete: time, and it has done so before. The Grisham allegations were already public during his first congressional campaign in 2021 and 2022, and Ohio Republicans nominated him and voters elected him anyway. Running the same script twice, five years apart, has cost him nothing electorally yet. Ohio Republicans had a deadline to decide whether to replace him on this year's ballot, and let it pass without deciding.

A Politico poll fielded July 13–15, 2026 by the polling firm Public First put a number on that durability: 72 percent of self-identified MAGA voters said they would still support a Republican candidate accused of domestic violence, against 61 percent of all 2024 Trump voters—a gap showing the effect concentrates in the most tribally identified slice of the base, not the party writ large. The same split holds for sexual assault allegations: 66 percent of MAGA voters would stick with an accused Republican, against 53 percent of all Trump voters. Voters who backed Kamala Harris extended far less grace to their own side: 39 percent would stick by a Democrat accused of domestic violence, 40 percent for sexual assault. DARVO's third move asks an audience to relocate the victim position onto the accused. This is what it looks like when a large share of that specific audience says yes before the reversal even finishes running.

Even his own family eventually broke. Senator Bernie Moreno, Miller's former father-in-law, stayed silent for roughly two years before posting that Miller is “a danger to my daughter,” that he “hold[s] his breath every minute [Miller] has custody of my granddaughter,” and that Miller “fails” the basic standards of character elected office requires—saying directly that Miller should not serve in the House. Miller's response ran the attack move again, this time on Moreno: he called the statement political and noted that Moreno waited two years to make it. He did not resign, did not withdraw from the race, and continues to run for reelection. If a sitting senator publicly naming his own son-in-law a danger to his daughter and granddaughter cannot dislodge a House member from a primary ballot, that says less about DARVO's persuasive power and more about how little the ordinary mechanisms of political accountability can do once the script is already running.

Reports describe Trump allies pushing the president to call for Miller's withdrawal; the president had not done so as of early August 2026. Congressional Democrats have called for a House Ethics Committee investigation—the one formal institutional lever currently in motion; national Republican leadership has still not pulled a comparable one, even after Moreno's statement.

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Naming DARVO does not resolve what happened between Miller and Moreno. Only the courts can do that, on whatever timeline family court proceedings take. What naming DARVO does is close the gap between what an audience feels while the denial and the attack and the reversal unfold, and what the research already knows about why that sequence works on an audience at all. Voters, colleagues, and a party deciding whether to spend its leverage on a primary challenge are all pattern readers whether they know the term or not. The only question is whether they read the pattern before the news cycle moves on, or after.

There is a genuine, evidence-based reason for optimism here. The same 2020 Harsey and Freyd study that measured DARVO's effect also tested whether brief education about the tactic blunts it—and found that it does. Participants who received even a short explanation of DARVO before evaluating an account rated the victim as more believable and the perpetrator as more deserving of consequences than participants who received no explanation at all. Recognizing the pattern measurably weakens it. That is the whole premise this dispatch series runs on: predictability provides us the opportunity to interrupt the pattern, whether that pattern is a lethality trajectory or three sentences a man says to a police officer.

DARVO also does not survive contact with an evidence-based investigation. It depends on a first impression—an officer at the door, a judge hearing opening statements, a guardian ad litem's initial interview—before anyone has checked a timeline, pulled a phone record, or corroborated a single detail. Cell tower data, medical documentation, prior statements, and a consistent chronology do not care which party sounded more confident. An investigation that centers evidence instead of performance is the thing DARVO cannot talk its way past.

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Selected sources

• Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7, 22–32.
• Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
• Harsey, S., Zurbriggen, E., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Perpetrator responses to victim confrontation: DARVO and victim self-blame. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(6), 644–663.
• 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(8), 897–916.
• Harsey, S., & Freyd, J. J. (2023). The influence of deny, attack, reverse victim and offender and insincere apologies on perceptions of sexual assault. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(17–18), 9985–10008.
• Politico. (2021, July). Investigative profile of Max Miller, based on interviews with 60 people close to him, reporting the end of his relationship with Stephanie Grisham.
• Grisham, S. (2021). I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. Harper.
• The Washington Post. (2021). Stephanie Grisham op-ed identifying Max Miller as the former White House boyfriend described in her memoir.
• Spectrum News 1. (2026, July 8). Rep. Max Miller accused by ex-girlfriend Stephanie Grisham of breaking confidential agreement.
• The Washington Post. (2026, July 30). “Get your hands off of him”: GOP Rep. Miller's ex-wife says he threatened lawyer.
• Politico. (2026, July 30). Poll conducted by Public First on MAGA and Trump-voter tolerance for domestic abuse and sexual assault allegations against 2026 congressional candidates (fielded July 13–15, 2026; n=2,061; margin of error ±2.2 points).
• CBS News. (2026, July 31). Lawyer for GOP Rep. Max Miller's ex-wife files for restraining order as abuse allegations against congressman swirl.
• The 19th. (2026, August 2). Denying domestic violence allegations, Rep. Max Miller isn't dropping his reelection bid.
• CNN. (2026, August 3). Trump allies push president to call on Max Miller to drop out amid abuse allegations, sources say.
• ABC News. (2026, August 2). Sen. Moreno says Rep. Max Miller “should not serve in the House” for allegedly abusing his daughter.
• Bloomberg. (2026, August 2). Republican senator calls on ex-son-in-law to resign House seat.
• PBS NewsHour. (2026, August). Democrats see a chance to flip a seat as focus on abuse claims mounts against Ohio Rep. Max Miller.

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