Eyes were on Nevils’ social media accounts for a response to Lauer’s probe Tuesday, and she provided a succinct one via Twitter in the evening: “DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.”

The acronym is shorthand for common behavior by those accused of wrongdoing (particularly that of a sexual nature); it was first introduced in 1997 by the University of Oregon’s J.J. Freyd in the peer-reviewed journal Feminism and Psychology. “South Park” featured the term in a November 2019 episode.

Per UO:

“The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle-blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

“I was shaken, but not surprised, that few in the media were willing to thoroughly challenge the accusations against me, or the person making them,’’ Lauer wrote Tuesday in a piece on the website Mediaite that joined The New York Times’ Ben Smith in questioning Farrow’s reportage and, by extension, his best-selling book “Catch and Kill.”

Farrow himself responded to Lauer’s piece Tuesday evening — also on Twitter — writing, “All I’ll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong. Catch and Kill was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, including with Matt Lauer himself.”