Freyd's work also led her to another concept with incredible value and usefulness today, DARVO. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It's a pattern Freyd identified in how perpetrators of violence respond when confronted. However, institutions also use this strategy, and they often have more power and resources, allowing them to be more effective than individuals.
Today, DARVO is a weapon wielded against the public by people and institutions meant to represent and protect us as citizens. The handling of the Epstein files, for instance, follows the classic abuser's playbook identified by Freyd: the obstruction, and then slow-walk, of selectively redacted release of information (Deny); the constant discrediting and threatening of survivors (Attack); the protection of powerful men's identities, reputations, and privacy (Reverse Victim and Offender). Asymmetrical power and the government's use of “transparency” have exposed victims' identities while masking those of the powerful. At various points, their names. Faces. Bodies. Addresses. Families.
This is what a system protecting itself does. DARVO, in the Epstein case, has consistently made victims the face of the crimes and ensured that the network that enabled Epstein remains an abstract force.
For many women, especially women of color who have never had the luxury of trusting these systems in the first place, the Epstein situation is confirming our worldview. The distress we are feeling isn't borne of surprise or even outrage, but deep grief and rage. It's the exhausting weight of living in a world that continues to tell women that we don't matter, not even as children. What the Epstein case is doing, however, is showing many more people that the men most likely to talk about protecting “their” girls and women are the ones most likely to feel entitled to do to girls and women whatever they please.

So, Trump desperately needed something to change the subject. And right on cue, he launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, apparently at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own desperate need to remain in power to keep himself out of prison for his own bribery and corruption scandals.
The bombing of Iran gave Trump a few days of wall-to-wall war coverage, pushing every other scandal (including Epstein) below the fold. It was a classic wag-the-dog maneuver, but so far it's worked well enough to dominate the news cycle.
But here is where the rhyme with 2001 turns frighteningly dark.
Kash Patel, Trump's FBI director, has fired or reassigned almost the entire FBI team responsible for tracking Iranian threats inside the United States. The specialists who spent years building intelligence networks to monitor Iranian-linked operatives on American soil have been purged from the agency, fired unceremoniously.
At the same time, Trump has let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse, leaving critical counterterrorism functions in limbo as Republicans in Congress refuse — at his insistence — to act. He's systematically dismantled the very apparatus that exists to prevent a terrorist attack on the continental US or our assets around the world.

Mais le cessez-le-feu annoncé n'a jamais été respecté par les israéliens. La menace ne s'est pas arrêtée. Le ciel n'est jamais redevenu silencieux. Nous avons continué à vivre sous le bourdonnement permanent des drones et des avions israéliens.
Et puis, hier, à trois heures du matin, la nuit a explosé.
Le fracas nous a arrachés au sommeil. Les murs ont tremblé. Les éclairs ont traversé les fenêtres, découpant la chambre en flashes blancs.
Et une fois de plus, nous avons fait ce que des centaines de milliers d'habitants du sud du Liban ont déjà fait : partir. Quitter la maison. Quitter le village. Quitter nos repères. Sans savoir où aller. Juste s'éloigner du danger.
Voir ma fille se réveiller en tremblant est une chose que je ne pourrai jamais oublier. Ni pardonner à ceux qui lui ont volé le droit de dormir en paix.