Quote:Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director at the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me, “We were seeing this disturbing pattern emerge: as more survivors came forward, the perpetrators who harmed them were using retaliatory defamation lawsuits to threaten them.” The plaintiffs in such suits didn’t have to win for the efforts to be successful. Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims. “These retaliatory lawsuits were designed to drain survivors of financial resources, re-traumatize them through lengthy proceedings, and really intimidate them into silence,” Stender said. Some men had the means to hire private investigators to find incriminating information on survivors, to deploy media campaigns designed by public-relations firms, and to mobilize their online followers. In the nineties, Jennifer Freyd, an expert on the psychology of sexual violence, developed a model called DARVO to explain the ways perpetrators deflect blame: “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.”