DARVO by Design

Written By Rachael Dietkus

Author's note: I have a high threshold for witnessing and carrying (while not absorbing) difficult news. My work has long required me to sit with trauma, state violence, and institutional harm without flinching or rushing to reaction. I do not write pieces like this lightly. I am writing now because the DARVO unfolding here – the denial, the narrative inversion, the sustained refusal to answer for lethal force – is overt, structurally supported, and impossible to ignore. When the details of Alex Pretti’s death – a kind, compassionate man, ICU nurse, and federal employee who worked at the local VA – clashed with the demonizing character assault from this administration, I knew I needed to write about DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender).

This is not the first time we have seen this dynamic. But we are now watching it unfold in real time, with recordable footage, rapid social sharing, and deep collective witnessing. I cannot stop thinking about how this extremely public display, and the way it is being defended, reverberates as a form of trauma for families, loved ones, and communities forced to watch these events repeat without any accountability. What we are experiencing is a form of collective institutional betrayal trauma: publicly witnessed, repeatedly replayed, and institutionally denied. It leaves families, communities, and witnesses carrying harm without the possibility of any meaningful repair.

What follows is not an emotional response to a single incident, but a clear-eyed assessment of a governing pattern that must be named.

What we are witnessing is not confusion, miscommunication, or political spin. It is DARVO by design: this administration’s deliberate use of denial, attack, and victim–offender reversal to evade accountability after state violence.

DARVO is a well-documented psychological pattern by psychologist Jennifer Freyd. It appears in abusive relationships, workplace retaliation, and institutional cover-ups. The sequence is consistent and intentional: harm is denied, the credibility of the harmed is attacked, and responsibility is reversed so that those who wield power claim victimhood. When this pattern is deployed by the federal government, it ceases to be a defensive reflex. It is their governing strategy, and we must be prepared for more.

What We Know to Be True

Escalating events in Minneapolis illustrate this with disturbing clarity. Most recently, on January 24, 2026, federal Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and registered ICU nurse at Veterans Affairs, during a federal enforcement operation in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis. State officials sought to investigate the shooting. Federal authorities refused to cooperate and denied local investigators access to the scene, even after a court-issued warrant, prompting a federal judge to order that the evidence not be destroyed.

Federal officials quickly defended the shooting, claiming Pretti posed a threat and acted violently. They have maintained this stance in a chilling example of structural gaslighting by the federal government. Videos viewed by millions of people and reviewed by multiple journalists and news outlets show Pretti holding a phone, not a weapon, as he filmed the encounter and moved to assist a woman who had been knocked down by federal agents, before being pepper-sprayed, tackled to the ground, disarmed of his legally-carried firearm, and then shot multiple times while pinned by federal agents. This undeniable sequence directly contradicts the official account that this administration insists on upholding. 

This sequence matters because it reveals how power responds to scrutiny now. Violence is followed by narrative control. Oversight is treated as interference. Evidence becomes a liability. The public is instructed to distrust what it is witnessing and clearly sees.

DARVO functions by destabilizing reality. It trains people to doubt their perceptions. It reframes grief as a threat and accountability as a danger. It produces confusion where clarity is required. This is how power protects itself when it cannot defend its actions.

This is also how institutional betrayal takes hold. Betrayal trauma theory explains that harm becomes especially destabilizing when it comes from institutions charged with protection. When authorities obstruct investigation, rewrite events, and criminalize the dead, they violate the most basic social contract. Trust erodes, legitimacy fractures, and fear replaces consent.

The psychological impact is visible. Moral injury emerges when people watch right and wrong inverted in plain sight. Hypervigilance spreads when truth feels fragile. Numbness follows when outrage becomes exhausting. These are not individual failures of resilience; they are predictable responses to systemic gaslighting.

Minneapolis is not encountering this pattern in isolation. The city carries significant layered trauma: the killing of George Floyd, repeated acts of political violence, mass shootings, and now federal force operating beyond local accountability. The trauma compounds, memory sharpens perception, and people recognize patterns – even through the psychological exhaustion – because they have lived them before.

Against this backdrop, the most revealing detail is not the rhetoric from Washington. It is the care people are offering one another: hand warmers passed between strangers in subzero temperatures, doors opened for warmth and shelter, coffee and food shared in the streets. These acts are not symbolic; this is who Minnesotans are in their day-to-day, but they are also necessary survival responses to institutional abandonment.

When systems escalate harm while simultaneously denying it, communities build parallel infrastructures of care. We have seen this with natural disasters over the years when our institutions have failed us. Care and mutual aid are how people stabilize one another when authority destabilizes reality.

We Must Name These Patterns

My worry is that their persistent infliction of DARVO is waiting to thrive on our exhaustion. It works by wearing down the public’s capacity to stay oriented to the truth. It tries to turn the truth into something debatable. It makes resistance start to feel futile. It expects, while also encouraging, our withdrawal and silence. This is why understanding and naming the pattern matters. Naming DARVO interrupts the gaslighting. Understanding it restores orientation. It makes clear that confusion is being produced, not imagined. It establishes that the problem is not emotional intensity, but deliberate, cruel inversion.

This moment demands moral clarity. Federal violence followed by denial and narrative attack is not normal. Criminalizing the dead is not healthy governance. Blocking oversight does not give any of us security. Forced order without the truth is coercive manipulation. 

What People Can Do

1. The first and most critical task: refuse the lies. Refuse the lies that this is confusion. Refuse the lies that this is a gross misunderstanding. Refuse the lies that accountability is extreme. And refuse what they are trying to say without saying it: that our grief and rage are threats. 

2. Name what is happening when you see it. Call denial denial. Call narrative inversion manipulation. Call the criminalization of the dead what it is: an abuse of power designed to shield those who caused harm. 

3. Demand evidence preservation, independent investigation, and public oversight without apology. These are not radical demands. They are the minimum requirements of a functioning democracy. Support journalists, legal advocates, and public servants who insist on truth when it would be safer to stay quiet. Challenge misinformation even when it costs comfort, reputation, or ease.

4. Protect, support, and participate in community care. People are already doing this because they have to. Mutual aid, open doors, shared warmth, shared food, shared grief—these are not feel-good gestures. They are how people survive when institutions choose force over accountability and denial over truth. Do not confuse care with compliance. Care is not acquiescence. Care is what gives people the strength to keep demanding justice when power tries to exhaust them into silence.

5. Above all, refuse normalization. This is the line. A society cannot function when reality is treated as negotiable, when violence is followed by gaslighting, and when those who wield power insist they are the real victims. DARVO, by design, depends on people giving up.

Staying oriented to the truth is a necessary civic responsibility, an act of resistance, and an act of care.

Ending note: While writing this last night (1/25/26), I began to consider how the growing public understanding of trauma (and betrayal trauma in particular) might be used in ways we never anticipated. I wondered: 'Is there a trauma expert in the White House intentionally using this knowledge as a tactic of manipulation?' That possibility seems wild, right? The argument I’m making here about how DARVO operates as a governing tactic does not depend on a secret trauma specialist being involved. It does require political operatives, lawyers, and strategists who understand – most likely through history and experience rather than trauma theory – that confusion weakens resistance, narrative inversion buys them time, exhaustion reduces accountability demands, and emotional overload fractures collective action. So, this is possibly a form of ‘folk psychology’ rather than formal trauma training steering the tactics. The more important thing here is that DARVO does not need to be named by them in order to be used.

Ways to Help Minnesota

Additional Reading

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My name is Rachael Dietkus, and I work with educators, public interest designers, civic tech teams, and government partners to move from trauma-aware to trauma-responsive practice. You can learn more about my work at Social Workers Who Design.

Rachael Dietkus
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