On Tuesday, I released my new book Playing the Victim: How the Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide. My book draws the connections between domestic abusers’ tactics (particularly DARVO, which Spitfire readers are surely well acquainted with) and imperialism, Zionism, and state violence. 

In this excerpt, I write about how abusers weaponize defamation suits against their victims, framing themselves as the victims—because their victims dared to speak out. This strategy has been deployed by lawmakers accused of abuse, by college assailants, and certainly, by towering public figures like Johnny Depp. Defamation suits against victims are the embodiment of DARVO.

This book means the world to me, and I’m so thankful to Kat for letting me share an excerpt with her readers. As I write in my acknowledgements, Kat’s transformative reporting on domestic violence and her tireless work to change how the media treats survivors have been absolutely instrumental to my writing. 

As I’ve often told loved ones, studying and writing about gender-based violence over this past decade has been the love and pain of my life. The stories and interviews featured in Playing the Victim have broken my heart and kept me awake at night for years—all while I am honored beyond words to be entrusted with them. My work on gender-based violence has not just transformed how I interact with the world, but also offered me a path to take back my life and believe in my strength after experiencing sexual violence. No matter how difficult this work can sometimes be, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how thankful I am to be doing it.

The main reason I wrote this book is that I believe having the language to conceptualize violence we’ve experienced, to identify state violence, to identify how resistance to state violence and abuse is wrongfully demonized, is a key first step to fighting back. My sincerest hope is that this book can be a resource to as many people as possible.

—Kylie Cheung

On college campuses, defamation suits have long targeted student survivors who report their assaults. In 2021, Know Your IX published a report based on more than 100 interviews with campus sexual assault survivors who had been victimized between 2002 and 2020, and found almost a quarter of them were threatened with a defamation suit from their attacker. Nearly one in five said they were warned by their school of the possibility of defamation suits, and 10 percent faced “retaliatory complaints” filed by their assailants. A Know Your IX organizer and co-author of the 2021 report told me about a student whose assailant was expelled from her university—only for him to file a defamation lawsuit that allowed him to “access her medical records, school records, even her sexual history,” forcing her to transfer schools, delay her graduation, and spend more than $100,000 out of pocket. In 2022, for Jezebel, I reported on a rising tide of increasingly successful “anti-male bias” lawsuits in response to disciplinary action around campus sexual assaults. One database claimed at the time that more than 700 Title IX–related lawsuits had been filed since 2013, though it wasn’t clear how many had been thrown out or privately settled.

In 2017, at the onset of the MeToo movement, Pamela Lopez, a California-based lobbyist, joined numerous women working in state politics to speak out against the prevalence of sexual harassment in their line of work. She testified before the legislature that she’d been assaulted by a state lawmaker the year before, and while speaking, she was pressed to reveal his name—a demand that would spark an avalanche of legal action against her. Lopez named her assailant, then-Assemblymember Matt Dababneh, which was protected speech. But Dababneh then sued her for naming him at a press conference after her testimony. A court initially ruled that her remarks during the press conference were not protected speech in 2018, but a federal appeals court ruled in her favor in 2021. Yet, by that point, the damage was largely done. Lopez told me:

Over the course of the legal harassment campaign Dababneh inflicted on Lopez, she told me she learned that several other women had accused him of sexual assault. Still, he saw himself as “the real victim” at her hands, specifically, because her testimony had inspired others to speak up too. “He could have just not assaulted anyone,” she said. “But I’m the one who was punished, I’m the one who was wrong, for trying to get justice.”

Jessica Stender, policy director at the gender justice nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me in 2023 that about one year after Heard and Depp’s defamation trial, her organization was “seeing a huge increase in these types of legal attacks, of predators trying to weaponize the law and the courts against survivors when they speak out.” And, “even if, ultimately, the survivor would win in this type of retaliatory defamation suit” like Lopez, Stender told me, this best-case scenario arises “only after years of really time-consuming, expensive, and deeply retraumatizing litigation that survivors should never have been put through in the first place.”

In 2023, California passed A.B. 933, a law that makes it substantially more difficult for abusers to sue and exploit the legal system to harass their victims. The law amended California’s civil code to treat “communications made without malice regarding sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination” as privileged speech. This doesn’t sweepingly stop these lawsuits from happening, particularly if a judge determines someone’s public allegations of abuse are made with malice. But if the victim wins the defamation suit against them, under A.B. 933, the person suing them will be liable to pay their legal fees. The law marks a crucial step in the right direction to protect victims from costly, highly destabilizing legal harassment. But the very need for a law like this, at all, speaks volumes about the targeted, gendered violence that is innate to our legal system, how tools that abusers can wield to punish their victims are innate to this system and all too often go unrectified.

The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates the lifetime economic cost of rape across all US victims stands at nearly $3.1 trillion, including $1.2 trillion in medical costs and $234 billion in legal costs. On their own, the medical bills associated with experiencing gender-based violence are alarming: A 2022 study analyzed national data from almost thirty-six million emergency-room visits in 2019 and found costs for sexual assault–related visits averaged $3,551 for all victims, while pregnant victims faced an even higher average charge: $4,553.19.

Defamation suits are still just one dimension of terror that abusers can inflict on their victims through the legal system. While writing Survivor Injustice, I interviewed several women who had children they conceived from rape and were then subjected to years of agonizing—and costly—abuse in custody courts. Sharing a child with your abuser can link you to them for the rest of your life. And that’s exactly why impregnating their victims, with or without their consent, is such a common line of attack from abusers. In some states, including several that have banned abortion, a divorce can’t be finalized while someone is pregnant, without exceptions for abuse. In February 2024, researchers published a paper in which they estimated that in fourteen states that had banned abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, there had been 64,565 rape-induced pregnancies—primarily in states whose abortion bans lacked rape exceptions. Unless their rapist has been criminally convicted, many of these women struggle to gain full custody; even if they invoke the abuse they suffered in family court, or their children testify about being abused, the father may be more likely to win custody. The father is the victim, because he is being denied fatherhood—all while wielding the courts to further torture his victim.

In 2023, The New Yorker’s Eren Orbey interviewed Lucy Guarnera, a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia who frequently interviews women who have endured custody battles with their rapists. Guarnera told him:

She continued, “I don’t know if a ‘power trip’ is the word I’m looking for, but I think that’s what it is and it’s all just for power. Isn’t that what sexual assault is? You just want to overpower your victim.”

An adapted excerpt from Playing the Victim: How the Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide by Kylie Cheung, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of publisher.