The Smear Campaign is Actually The Fear Campaign

After my home was broken into and I was assaulted by my neighbor, I limped into my apartment management office shaking like I leaf. I needed police; I needed my therapist; I needed to go to the doctor; I needed to get myself to safety; I needed to talk to my job; I needed my head to clear from the GHB. 

But my first stop was to the people who employed the maintenance man who harmed me who’d installed a microphone in my apartment, snooped it when I was away, broke appliances to force our interactions, and stalked me relentlessly for 8 months. 

I was crying. I was still drugged. I looked a mess. I probably smelled. I’d never needed some human tenderness more than I had in that moment.

As I appeared in the office, one of the women who worked there visibly flinched and bristled to see me. As I began to tell her what had happened, her whole bodily posture became hostile and dismissive. 

“Rape is a big word,” she said. 

“And I’m saying it,” I replied, “because that’s what happened.”

She rolled her eyes. It was clear there was no empathy for me, and the horror I’d endured seemed to extend into a horror I couldn’t escape, a maze I was trapped in with no way out. 

A man had tried to take my life and he was still out there; all my life, women I knew had poured over Dateline episodes, bemoaning the horrifying scenario I’d just survived, but I was soon to find out — empathy only exists for the girls that follow the patriarchal script. 

The girls who die as they’re supposed to. 

That’s the obedient girl. The dead girl is the good girl. 

The girls who fight and survive — either by might or miracle or both — are girls who’ve been disobedient and transgressive in some way. 

Luckily, the manager — though not a warm woman by any means — didn’t dismiss me as her subordinate did. She’d confided that costs for maintenance had been through the roof since they hired him, that she was sure he was running scams, and that she’d seen his temper and he’d almost hit her once. She also confided that his wife, who they also employed, said he beat her, and she saw bruises on her body. 

Then she confided something else: for months, he’d told people he worked with that I was obsessed with him, that he feared me, that he thought I was breaking my own appliances, and that I may be a stalker. 

He was telling me I was his favorite tenant. 

This is why the first woman responded to my trauma with hostility: in her mind, I was already guilty. And a guilty person could never be a victim. 

Never forget the golden rule: what a narcissist accuses is confession. 

This is true of the smear campaign as well. 

A smear campaign is never about the person being smeared.

It’s about the narcissist’s fear.