The Old Man and His Smear Campaign
October 10, 2018
This part of the story is about the old man’s smear campaign against Sam. Why are we talking about this now? Because as we get closer to revealing the old man’s identity, it is important for those of you who know him and know Sam to understand just how insidiously the old man has operated and will operate to distract you from the truth.
Narcissists lie to themselves and others to maintain their fundamental belief that they are superior to everyone, that they deserve only “the best” in life regardless of having truly earned it, and that anything less than what they perceive to be “the best” (whether a material thing or person) is a waste. To a narcissist, if you aren’t good enough, you are worthless, and everyone should know about it. By constantly putting others down, the narcissist continues to feed the delusion of superiority. And everyone is fair game—even family. Threaten to expose a narcissist, however, and that’s when the smear campaign begins. By using a smear campaign, a narcissist will do anything and everything to destroy a target’s reputation and credibility, so that people will not believe that the narcissist is the problem.
This part of the story is about the old man’s smear campaign against Sam. Why are we talking about this now? Because as we get closer to revealing the old man’s identity, it is important for those of you who know him and know Sam to understand just how insidiously the old man has operated and will operate to distract you from the truth.
​
Part 1 – The Narcissist & His “Supply”
Appearances were everything to the old man. As long as he looked like he was living a better life than others, reality was largely irrelevant. Country club memberships, living in the “right” part of town, and flashy cars were far more valuable than meaningful relationships or doing the right thing. That’s not to say he did not give the appearance of having meaningful relationships—after all, what “successful” “heterosexual” “man” does not also have a wife? So, along with expensive clothing, the old man acquired women to be by his side. Because of his inability to truly care about anyone other than himself, however, he couldn’t hold on to any of the good ones. Time after time, they would leave him, never looking back—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and sometimes with significant geographic relocations. And time after time, the old man would go through the same motions right after: he’d weave a new self-flattering story as to why the relationship ended, brag about how excited he was to be playing the field again, and fill his calendar with a multitude of mostly dysfunctional women until one of them stuck around long enough for him to propose to, which usually took a few months. This cycle was so predictable, you could almost set your watch to it. In fact, if every woman the old man proposed to or said he was going to propose to would have actually married him, he would be on his seventh wife by now.
​
The old man’s current wife, Cathleen, was third in one of his classic playing field line-ups, shortly after the old man was “Dear John’ed” by one of the women who crossed his path after his second wife left him. Sam heard the old man talk about her in passing during one of their reunion meals years before the crash. The old man told Sam about all three prospects, but it was clear he was most excited about the one whose son was well-known in commercial real estate. It was as though her son’s status gave the old man status. The second conquest he spoke of was less memorable. Then there was Cathleen, who, at the time was running a distant third. When Sam eventually met her years later, he understood why. During their very first meeting, Sam learned two main things about Cathleen from Cathleen: (1) she was a divorcee from a small town who moved to the big city to try and make a life for herself for the first time in her life in her fifties, and apparently had been living a lifestyle her eldest daughter “did not approve of”; and (2) she was a seething bigoted racist.
Sam also learned pretty quickly that Cathleen had about as much respect for her own children as the old man did. That is to say, not much. In fact, Cathleen had so little regard for her adult kids that during the three years she dated the old man and one year she was married to him prior to Sam’s crash, she never brought them around to meet Sam and Brady. Not once. But boy did she talk about them. Though he never met them, Sam learned more than enough information about Cathleen’s kids because every time he saw her, she talked trash about them. Her oldest daughter apparently had all sorts of behavioral problems when she was younger, which Cathleen loved to go on about from a self-righteous perch of superiority as if she was not at all responsible for any of those problems. Meanwhile, according to Cathleen, Cathleen’s only son loved to hunt and fish, but wasn’t very smart and never did well in school. She talked about him being a roofer as though he was a disappointment—maybe that is why the old man never had the same enthusiasm talking about Cathleen’s son as he did talking about the woman’s son who had made it big in commercial real estate. Although Cathleen did not have much to say about her youngest daughter, she spent plenty of time talking about how that daughter married a man who was abused and consequently did not want to have children (as though such private details were anyone else’s business). Since Cathleen’s daughter and son-in-law were not going to give her grandchildren, they were not terribly useful to her. As a result, Cathleen was pretty much only interested in talking about her son-in-law being a victim of abuse, and really only as a way to garner sympathy for herself about not having grandchildren from him.
Cathleen’s mean-spirited attitude also spread into the way she interacted with her family according to the old man. She was overly aggressive and, at times, downright combative. The way the old man talked about it to Sam early on, the dynamic between Cathleen and her kids was crazy, hostile, and aggressive, and he found it exhausting to be around them. Apparently Ms. Small-Town-Turned-Big-City missed the etiquette lesson on how to have more class than to behave like an aggressive sarcastic teenager around her own children.
But the old man’s need to maintain an appearance of being a successful heterosexual apparently overrode his annoyance with these less-than-desirable traits. That and the fact that Cathleen supplied him with the type of adoration and attention he needed to help him hold up his delusion of superiority made her the perfect partner. In psychobabble speak, Cathleen became the old man’s “narcissistic supply source,” and as long as she serves the purpose of fanning the fire of self-delusion the old man has, she will be useful to him. If she ever begins to have self-interest that collides with his, however, there could be trouble. But I digress.
​
Part 2 –A Day in the Midst of a Narcissist – What He Really Thinks About You.
If you have ever been around a narcissist, you have probably heard him or her talk an incredible amount of trash about pretty much anyone. And if you’re in the narcissist’s inner circle, it might even feel as though you are being told some big secret, that you’ve somehow been invited to be part of some important secret club. But at the end of the day, all that is happening is the narcissist is continuing to weave his own web of self-delusion by making sure anyone around him hears how comparably inferior everyone else is.
And here is one reason Cathleen may have been attractive to the old man. She talked almost as badly about her family as he did about his family. To hear the old man tell it, somehow he was the only member out of the entire family who was not “white trash” or “low rent.” Out of all of them, including his older sister, his older brother, and his two younger brothers, the old man was smarter, more successful, made better decisions, was classier, better educated, more cultured, and the list goes on and on. No one escaped the old man’s disparagement. Now, before going into examples of how the old man talked about his own family, let me be clear – these were his words and views as he shared them with Sam, not Sam’s, or anyone else’s views.
For example, when it came to his sister, the old man consistently talked about how disappointing her sons were. Mr. Compassionate would routinely refer to the younger of her two sons as a “lunatic” and “crazy”, while he would criticize the other son as having wasted his life as a drunk “college dropout” who lived with his mother.
When it came to his older brother, the old man regularly talked about him, his wife and two of their four kids as though all of their problems and life experiences were up for him to judge and use to make himself feel better than them. For example, every chance he had, he would make disparaging remarks about the middle daughter behind her back, yet act as charming as could be to her face. When it came to the son, the old man was even harsher, having no mercy on the labels he would place on the guy, making clear that his own nephew was forever a loser in his mind. And, in some ways, it makes perfect sense why the old man came down so hard on them--they were a living example of what a loving couple with a loving family could look like; something the old man never was a part of and never created or fostered. Sam always looked up to them and the old man knew it, which is why it is also no coincidence that after one of the last falling outs between Sam and the old man, the old man went straight to them to disparage Sam and try and break any bond they had with him.
The old man also regularly found ways to make fun of his stock-broker brother behind his back for not having gone to college. It would start with the old man first pointing out how ridiculous it was for his brother to be a fan of the old man’s college football team when he did not even go there, and then he’d segue into talking about how his brother didn’t go anywhere for college, as though, again, that made him undeserving of respect. The old man also frequently referred to his first younger brother’s oldest daughter and son as “low rent,” with particularly harsh criticism for the son, who he called “grease ball” behind his back, referring to both his character and his body type.
(As an aside, while it was true that this particular nephew had his fair share of near run-ins with the law, ironically, when he finally was arrested, it was the old man’s first wife, Sam’s mother Catherine, who was instrumental by telling all local police that he was not her nephew and, therefore, to not let him get away with anything. And, of course, the old man knew it. Yet, to this day, no one has ever told the nephew why he ended up eventually going to jail and the old man and Catherine continue to pretend to be friends to him to his face.)
Eventually, the old man criticized the stock broker brother’s youngest daughter (who was from a second wife) for her obvious drug problem and “trashy” boyfriend, making it clear that he believed that was all she would amount to—a drug user with a loser boyfriend. More than anything else, however, the old man would talk about what his stock broker brother did to their mother. Apparently, after their father died, the stock broker brother talked their mother into selling the family home and putting the proceeds into an account where she could use them for whatever living expenses she would have. After she sold the home and put the funds into an account, he stole all her money from the account. The old man knew this happened, but never said a word to his brother about it. Instead, he spoke horribly about him behind his back to whoever would listen and acted as though he was a friend to his face.
Finally, there was the old man’s youngest brother, who according to the old man, was a disappointment essentially because he worked a blue collar job and never went to college, and because he was a “mama’s boy.” The most telling example of who the old man really is at heart was how he treated his youngest brother in his biggest times of need, after the death of their mother, when he struggled to the point of homelessness. Instead, of helping his youngest brother, as all the other brothers were, the old man puffed himself up as the self-righteous authority and tried to persuade the rest of his brothers not to help, arguing that to help would be a waste. And that speaks to the lessons on brotherly love the old man taught his own first born son, who he unsurprisingly named after himself, namely that “when times are hard for your brother, kick him when he’s down, take what you can get, and show no mercy.”
The point is that the old man has always used everyone around him as a way to feed his own ego. People serve no other function to him. And either it didn’t occur to him or he simply didn’t care what effect his words would have on anyone who heard them, which might explain why he dumped so many self-aggrandizing and family-denigrating details on his own kids. What kid wants to hear that his uncle is a loser, or that his cousin is “low rent”? How does that kind of example teach a kid anything healthy about family bonding? Of course it doesn’t, but the old man was too busy working on his own perception of himself to think about how he was affecting anyone else.
​
But amidst all the trash-talking he did, Mr. Wonderful never brought any attention to parts of his life that were less than flattering. He was perfectly content, for example, leading his family to believe he was living a picture-perfect life. What he didn’t talk about, however, was how he cheated on his first wife and left his kids to be raised by a single mom who was never there because she had to work all the time. He didn’t talk about how his sons were the only latch-key kids in that neighborhood, who at the ages of 8 and 10 were each walking themselves (and without each other because he also never taught his namesake to be helpful to or caring for his little brother) a mile each way to and from school with no adult supervision. He didn’t talk about how while he was sipping martinis in the trendy parts of the city, his kids were running around suburbia with so little supervision that other kids’ parents were afraid to let their kids come over. Or how one of Sam’s best friends was not allowed to even play at their house because his parents knew there was never any adult supervision. Interesting how that happened. It’s like a magic trick – truth and reality go into the hat, but once the magician sticks his hand in it all you see is a rabbit.
It is also noteworthy that the old man did not limit his trash talking to his family. Not at all. In fact, the old man also liked to carry on about his former bosses and colleagues, the ones who were indicted for criminal charges after the FBI raided Cambridge Funding I. For years, he would go on and on about how they were crooks and criminals and how much disdain he had for them—again, from a position of comparative superiority. In a peculiar twist, however, and in contradiction to all of the moralistic judgment he so eagerly engaged in against his own family, one of the things he would excitedly brag to Sam about was that one of his former colleagues allegedly hired a hit man to kill his own sister’s husband.
This paradox, upon later reflection, was quite chilling. On one hand, members of his family deserved no mercy for making innocent mistakes or for living a lifestyle different from his, yet on the other it was not only perfectly acceptable, but it was brag-worthy that his former colleague hired a hit man to kill his own brother-in-law. But in the old man’s narcissistic mind, of course it all would have made sense, because he needed to make himself look like whatever his vision of success was. His vision of success happened to include not being like his “low rent” family, while being accepted by white collar criminals who got away with their crimes, crimes he himself was engaging in. It is no mere coincidence that the old man later teamed up with the same man who he claimed confided to him that he had hired a hit man to kill someone, as well as the man he claimed was always responsible for the multitude of crimes committed by the principals of Cambridge Funding. But those incidents will be reported in full to the SEC and local authorities, as well as posted in full here right after, shortly. This post is about the old man’s smear campaign against Sam.
Part 3 –The Anatomy of a Narcissist’s Smear Campaign
A classic narcissist smear campaign can be broken down into 5 steps: the narcissist (1) preemptively plants seeds of doubt about the target in the minds of others; (2) paints him or herself as the devoted, loving, innocent victim of the target; (3) twists stories and tells lies about the target’s character making sure to incorporate just the smallest bit of truth for the lies to be that much more believable; (4) lines up replacement(s) to use for future reputation management, supply, and triangulation; and (5) discards the target out of the blue, flaunts the new supply and uses the target’s reactions as proof the target is to blame for all problems in the relationship between the target and the narcissist.
Step 1 – Planting Seeds of Doubt
Though we have already talked about some examples of how the old man began to plant seeds of doubt in Brady’s mind about his own father, Sam, today we are looking at how the old man started controlling the media, so to speak, with other people.
Shortly after Sam was hit by the car, after having not been on speaking terms with Sam for nearly a year, the old man apparently began emailing some sort of email update, newsletter style, out to family and friends of Sam’s. No, he never asked Sam if he could email Sam’s friends, nor did it seem to occur to him that Sam wouldn’t want his friends hearing about his private life details from his formerly estranged father who was only around because Sam got hit by a car and his mother had no respect for Sam’s boundaries. But this is how the old man opened a pipe line through which he eventually could plant seeds of doubt in the minds of anyone who knew Sam.
By the time Sam threatened to spill the old man’s secrets after the old man refused to bring Brady home, the majority of friends he had known, some of whom he’d known since he was a kid, were no longer around. And while some of that is a common experience for those with brain injury, not all of these losses were due to Sam’s TBI. It later became clear that the pipeline the old man created while Sam was lying immobilized with a broken neck allowed the old man to control the press when it came to what he did to Sam later when he took Sam’s son.
Steps 2 and 3 – Playing the Innocent Victim & Twisted Stories
Next, the old man painted himself as though he was the victim and Sam was the perpetrator. First, the old man played the victim about the fact that he and Sam had no relationship when Sam was hit by the car. In the early days and weeks after the crash, Sam went through a period where, due to his brain injury, he felt overcome with such powerful and inconsolable feelings of sadness, grief, and shame that all he could do with those emotions was to apologize to anyone he came into contact with over everything he could come up with as he sobbed uncontrollably. This happened with Sam’s old friends who came to see him, as well as with the old man. Instead of recognizing that this was a sign of Sam needing medical help, the old man sat in judgment and soaked up the apologies, eager to allow Sam to feel worse and worse for the sake of the old man feeling vindicated that his inferior son who had bruised his ego time and time again was finally seeing the light that the old man was right (and better) all along. At one point, the old man even pulled out literature and read to Sam about “mercy”, and how the Catholic Church emphasizes the need for mercy, making the point that thankfully the old man was in a position to show Sam mercy for being such a disappointment of a son.
Then, when Sam would later stumble with his brain injury, the old man would again play the victim, as though Sam had perpetrated some terrible wrong against the old man by being brain injured. And, as he spent more and more time with Brady, the old man would play victim with Brady and encourage Brady to also view himself as a victim of his own father. It was this particular game of victim that had the direst consequences.
It’s one thing for a maladjusted adult to sit around in his own mind believing himself to be victimized by the world. It’s quite another for that maladjusted adult to encourage that kind of delusion in a child with the specific intent of ruining that child’s relationship with his only custodial parent. Because of his age, Brady was already going to be prone to playing victim—that’s what kids do until they mature and realize that not everything is about them or about what they want when they want it. What the old man did was capitalize on that mentality and validate to Brady that Brady was correct to think of himself as a victim of his father’s brain injury, instead of encouraging Brady to be close to and loving of his father in his time of need. By villainizing Sam, the old man did the worst damage he could have done to the relationship between Sam and Brady and ultimately turned Brady against Sam. All of this was in the old man’s dramatic game of playing the innocent victim.
And the old man continued his game of victimhood through taking Brady away from Sam. Completely ignoring the fact that he had intentionally driven a wedge between Sam and Brady and that he had taken Sam’s son from him, the old man told everyone he was the victim. And of what? Text messages. That’s right, he turned text messages from his brain injured son who was devastated by the old man’s betrayal, into a fictional story that he was the victim of Sam.
But that wasn’t enough for the old man. The old man had to go the extra distance and make up stories to paint Sam in the most negative light possible. He falsely accused Sam of being a child abuser. He made false complaints to Child Protective Services (that Child Protective Services quickly saw through as a ruse by a disgruntled grandparent trying to make trouble for his adult son). He made up stories of things that never happened and fed them to Brady’s mother to use in court and put all over the public record lies about Sam abusing his son. Yet, as is often the case with narcissists, his stories had just the smallest bit of truth in them to make his lies that much more believable. For example, he took an incident where Sam was trying to keep Brady from losing physical control, and turned it into Sam trying to beat Brady and Sam’s wife “egging him on.” The grain of truth was that Sam’s hands were on Brady – but not in the way the old man told it. Again, all of this was to destroy Sam and make himself out to be the victim.
And these are only the lies we know about because we have seen them in the publicly filed documents. These do not include whatever twisted stories the old man has fed all of Sam’s old friends and family, none of whom have even attempted to contact Sam since the old man took Brady. Why would that be? Why would everyone Sam ever knew suddenly disappear without a trace when Sam had not even had a chance to do anything to cause the ruin of any relationships with any of them. There is only one explanation – the old man did what he had always done; he spun whatever tales made him look the best and his perceived enemy, Sam, look the worst.
Steps 4 & 5 –Lining Up and Implementing The Replacements
The final two steps in a classic smear campaign are the narcissist lines up replacements to use for future reputation management, supply, and triangulation; and the narcissist discards the target, flaunts the new supply, and uses the target’s reactions as proof that the target is to blame for all problems in the relationship between the target and the narcissist
In this situation there are several people the old man used in different ways—Cathleen, Brady, Sam’s ex-wife (Brady’s mother), Sam’s mother, and even Sam’s brother.
While not much work was required on the old man’s part for this one, the very first replacement the old man lined up was Cathleen. She may have been the one who fanned the old man’s ego the best at first and she most certainly emboldened him to go for the jugular with Sam by taking his son. In fact, the old man so effectively used Cathleen as a replacement that he did not even have to speak for himself when Sam’s wife called him out shortly after he refused to bring Brady home. Instead, Cathleen jumped at the opportunity to spread her venomous hatred towards Sam and his wife. She even used her oldest daughter to help her. Neither Sam nor his wife had ever met Cathleen's daughter. Yet, in the midst of the old man and Cathleen kidnapping Sam's son, she jumped into the fray and sent her own angry email to Sam and his wife in response to an email Sam's wife had sent to Cathleen. In it, the daughter defended Cathleen by talking about how no one knew what they (she, Cathleen, and her siblings) had “gone through” in life (as though that somehow justified Cathleen helping the old man lie to police and take Sam's son). She also told Sam and his wife they needed to find Jesus. So, Cathleen's daughter was incensed by the idea of someone judging her mother. Yet, that is exactly what her mother and the old man were doing to Sam--judging him as harshly as a person could be judged. And for what? For having a brain injury. How does that reconcile with the teachings of Jesus? Love thy son, unless he has a brain injury and, in that case, poison his relationship with his only child and falsely accuse him of child abuse? The old man was behaving in exactly the opposite way from all the tenets he claimed to be revering as a self-proclaimed upstanding Catholic, yet he had people preaching for him as though he was God himself. But that is the way replacements work for narcissists, as little minions to carry the negative message about the target while bolstering up the narcissist in everyone’s view. And most often they do not even realize that they are being used for that purpose.
But Cathleen and her oldest daughter were not the only people the old man used to carry out his campaign. There was also Brady, who, more than anything was the ultimate victim in all of this. As the old man manipulated Brady into believing that Sam was some sort of villainous monster, the old man was simultaneously lining Brady up to be a new source of narcissistic supply for himself, someone he could use to further make himself feel superior and, eventually, to further communicate the message to others that Sam was evil. As such, the old man turned Brady into a replacement he used to smear Sam’s reputation.
Meanwhile, the old man also went to Sam’s ex-wife and paid for her attorneys to help take Brady away from Sam. This was the same woman who, just the year before, the old man was willing to testify against as an abusive psychopath. But never mind the gross inconsistency there—who knows how he explains that away these days. Again, he did all of this to garner her loyalty and attention and secure yet another person who would carry out negative messages about Sam.
The old man also simultaneously worked on Sam’s mother, Catherine, who unfortunately was an easy participant in the old man’s campaign since conviction and standing up for her own kid were never her strong suit. So she soon became another member of the old man’s replacement team, and she served as a trumpet through which the old man could play his song of woe to all of that side of Sam’s family to turn all of them against Sam.
And, of course, then there is Sam’s brother, who was all too eager of a replacement. As the old man’s namesake and clear favorite from the beginning, a burgeoning narcissist himself, Sam’s brother always eagerly chased after the old man’s approval and most often to Sam’s direct detriment. Lining him up against Sam was so easy it was as though the brother had been waiting for this opportunity all his life. Deep-seeded jealousy and underlying hatred for Sam made Sam’s brother an ideal replacement. So while it was sickening to see after the old man stole Brady that Sam’s brother strategically became Facebook friends with all sorts of people from Sam’s old life that he was not friends with before, people he only talked trash about before, and/or never had any interest in befriending before, in some ways it was not surprising. Always a bottom-feeder and forever striving to emulate his old man, Sam’s brother and integrity never really knew each other, let alone did they have a meaningful relationship.
With his replacements lined up, after refusing to return Brady home, the old man never again spoke a word to Sam. Not one. To this day, the old man continues to spin his twisted lies to manipulate everyone he knows (and some people he doesn’t) into believing that he and Brady were victims of Sam, and to try and destroy Sam’s credibility with anyone Sam ever knew or could come into contact with.
That is what happened.
Are You Unwittingly Being Used to Help A Smear Campaign?
To those of you who knew Sam, do you remember him? Do you remember how he lived his life? Do you remember how he centered his life around taking care of and raising Brady to be the best little man he could be? Do you remember how Brady was almost not born because his mother threatened to have an abortion? Do you remember how Sam was the one who took Brady to daycare and picked him up, even when the mother was still around, because the mother wanted nothing to do with being a mother? Do you remember Sam was the one who wanted to keep Brady when Brady’s mother left? Do you remember it was Sam who encouraged Brady to learn to play the violin and the guitar, when Brady’s mother actually argued against it? Do you remember Sam teaching Brady to ride a bike, and Brady having so much talent that he was able to ride over 30 miles at the age of 9? Do you remember Sam bringing Brady with him everywhere he could, and even having him finish the last mile of the MS-150 with him because he was so proud of his only son? Do you remember that all Sam seemed to be able to talk about other than cycling was his son and how proud he was of him? Do you remember how disheveled, neglected, and sad Brady would be every time he came back to Sam after spending time at his mother’s? Do you remember Sam having to fight over and over again just to hear from his son when Brady would go to his mother’s for summer visitation? Do you remember that Brady’s mother never wanted custody of Brady--the first time Brady’s mother became interested in getting custody of Brady was when the old man was paying her legal bills for her as he tried to destroy Sam? Do you remember that before then she would disappear for months on end at a time and had no interest in being a mother? Do you remember admiring and respecting Sam for the father he was and for what he was able to do with and for his son?
Have you noticed that you went from knowing Sam as an incredible father who dedicated his entire life to his son, to somehow believing that he suddenly became a “child abuser” and that he victimized his entire family? If so, stop for a moment and ask yourself—when was the last time you actually saw or talked to Sam? Where did you hear this information that transformed him from devoted father into villain? Think about it. Think about where that information really came from. And then, please, ask yourself two questions:
1. Is there any way you can absolutely know that what they’ve told you is true?
2. Have you seen any real proof (not what people have told you) of the terrible things they’ve told you?
Be truly honest with yourself and find that the answer to these questions has to be “No”.
So, now that you know the truth, the real question becomes, what will you do about it? Are you going to continue to sit by and listen to the gossip, and by doing so further fan the fires of hatred for Sam? Are you going to knowingly allow a man you always knew was not aligned with Sam’s best interests to continue to use you as a way to continue to try to destroy Sam? Or are you going to stand up for the person you once knew who is still very much alive and very much the same caring, loving, kind, devoted man and father he has always been. Are you going to give yourself the chance to stand up for something that is right, even if it may be uncomfortable to do so? It can start with just reaching out to him to let him know that you have not forgotten him, and that you want to help in whatever way you can, even if help only looks like making a connection with him again and letting him know you aren’t going to believe the lies you’ve been told anymore. This is where change for the better can begin. With you.