You might have felt any number of emotions while watching R. Kelly melt down during his CBS interview with Gayle King this week: surprise, outrage, sympathy, confusion. Definitely a few moments of anxiety about King’s safety, watching her maintain her perfect posture and composure while Kelly towered over her, flailing his arms.
Jennifer Freyd was a little more blase than the rest of us. “It’s kind of predictable, sadly,” she says.
Granted, Freyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has a sense of academic detachment on her side. She has studied responses like Kelly’s for decades. In fact, she coined a term for the behavior pattern he exhibited in King’s interview: DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. In other words, as King said to Kelly during one of his outbursts, “You sound like you’re playing the victim here.”
That, Freyd says, is exactly the point. “I’m glad she labeled it, because that’s exactly what he’s doing.”
During the course of the CBS interview, he maintained his innocence by first denying that he had had sex with underage girls, then moved on to attacking his accusers as liars and suggesting they planned to ruin his career. Eventually, he got around to talking about how he was constantly being victimized because of his “big heart.”
“I just thought, ‘That’s DARVO.’” says Freyd. DARVO, as she explains on her website, is “a reaction perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior.” Avoiding accountability, she says, is key for the accused — and the best tactic for achieving that goal might be to become a victim.
Switching places with the victim, Freyd’s research has shown, not only loosens the bonds of responsibility for the perpetrator, it muddies the waters with a confusion that is so insidious it often extends to the victim’s own perception. “We know that it can lead victims to blame themselves. It can lead both parties to blame the victim, but even worse, I strongly suspect that it discourages other people from coming forward with their own accounts, because it looks extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that kind of response.”