By the Time I Left, Half Our Friends Had Heard His Version. | The Smear Campaign

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I found out what he was saying about me from a woman I had never met. It was a Thursday afternoon in the line at a pharmacy.

The woman behind me, a stranger in a camel coat, tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hi, sorry, are you Annika? Devs Annika? I said, I used to be. She said, I thought so. I am a friend of Priyanka's. We were at a dinner the other night, and I just wanted to say that I think what you did was really brave. I said, What did I do? She went pink. She said, Oh, I am so sorry. I thought you knew. I thought you know that you had gone to the program. I said, What program? That was how I learned that I was according to the story going around in a treatment program. For rage, I want to tell you what had actually happened. I had left Dev on a Tuesday evening in March. After four years, we had lived together. We had a cat. I had packed two suitcases and a box of books and walked down three flights of stairs to a car that my sister was driving. There had been no screaming. I had told him calmly in the kitchen that I could not be in the relationship anymore. He had said, Okay. And he had looked at me with an expression I could not read. I had assumed with a naive and generous heart that he was relieved. In the month that followed, I received very few messages. A text about the cat. A short note about a utility bill. I felt a rush of peace and a sliver of sadness and a deep and complete exhaustion. What I did not know was that in the same month, Dev had been busy. He did not go after me directly. He was cleverer than that. He had a talent which I had seen over the years and had never understood for being warm in a way that made people want to help him. He called our mutual friends one at a time. He did not accuse me of anything. He said, I just want you to know that I am not doing well. He said, Anika and I split up and I am worried about her. He said, she has been having a really hard time and I feel like she is not in a good place. He said, I do not want to say more. I do not want to speak badly of her. And then, every single time, a small piece of a story that I had been angry lately, that I had thrown something once, a plate, though I had not, that I had said some things I could not take back, though I could not imagine what, that I had been seeing someone else, which I had not, that I had refused to get help. Each person heard a different piece, and each person added their own memory to it. A friend remembered that I had once seemed short with the waiter.

Another remembered that I had left a party early and had not looked happy.

They were not malicious.

They were doing what people do when they are told a story by someone who seems sad and who they love. They were looking for confirmation.

Within six weeks, a story had been built. It had a villain. It was me. It reached me in pieces. A friend who stopped replying. An invitation to a dinner that never came. A cousin who wrote to ask, in a very careful tone, whether I was getting support. A colleague who said, in the elevator, I hope you are doing okay. In a voice usually reserved for funerals. And then the woman in the camel coat at the pharmacy.

I stood there in the line with a bag of cough drops in my hand, and a terrible, cold, clarifying silence came over me.

It was only later that I learned the phrase, a smear campaign. It is an informal term used by many writers and therapists for deliberate efforts to damage someone's reputation, often after a breakup, by spreading a distorted account. And the people who unknowingly carry the story are sometimes called, in the same informal language, flying monkeys, after the characters in a famous film who do the bidding of the witch. I want to be careful here. Most of the people who carried Dev's story were not villains. They were friends of his and of mine, and they believed they were helping.

I want to tell you about the three weeks that followed the pharmacy, because they were a kind of freefall. I stopped going out, not because I was ashamed, but because I could not tell who knew what. Every glance felt like a test.