The narcopath is able to hide her ugliness from so many of us for so long because most normal people trust what they are told to be the truth. This is the very reason why gossip spreads so quickly.
When a co-worker or friend tells you how abusive or controlling her partner is, do you question her truthfulness? No. Why not? Because when someone is confiding in you, you assume she is being truthful. A narcopath uses this natural tendency to destroy whomever her target is at the moment, be it her soon to be ex, her mother, her partner, etc. Her smear campaign is a pre-emptive strike, and usually starts before the target of her smear campaign is even aware the narcopath doesn't like him/her.
Even when the target becomes aware of the slanderous gossip being spread by the narcopath, he will encounter another phenomenon if he tries to defend himself. When he stats telling these same people that the narcopath is lying and telling them how horrible of a person she is, he will find that most people don't believe him. They look at the narcopath and see the fake persona she's created and cannot fathom that this sweet, innocent thing would ever do anything so ugly.
Unless someone is intimately familiar with a narcopath (narcissistic sociopath), chances are they'll have a hard time comprehending how someone can seem so nice, yet be so malicious. When I first became re-acquainted with Nikki Miller two years ago, I had no reason to doubt anything she told me, and chances are I would have questioned your veracity if you told me that she was a narcopath – it just didn’t fit with the persona she showed us.
