Why “But They Were Nice to Me”‘ isn’t the Defence People Think it is

And often comes from people who have a long-term fawn response in their system, and are unable to detect dissonant personalities.

I’ve been seeing a pattern that needs addressing: when allegations surface about someone, there’s often a rush of people sharing positive personal experiences as if that settles the matter. “They were kind to me.” “They helped me once.” “They never crossed a line with me.”

Here’s what we need to understand.

Predators Are Often Charming, Helpful, and Selectively Appropriate

This isn’t a contradiction- it’s part of the pattern. Abusers don’t abuse everyone they encounter. They’re often charismatic and generous in public settings, genuinely helpful to people they don’t target, skilled at reading social situations and adapting their behaviour, and building networks of people who will vouch for their character.

This is sometimes called “grooming the community,” not just individuals. By being wonderful to many people, they create a shield of character witnesses who find allegations impossible to believe.

The Reality of Compartmentalisation

People with certain personality patterns, particularly those with narcissistic traits, can genuinely be two entirely different people in different contexts. The warm mentor in public settings can be an entirely different person behind closed doors. This isn’t about “masks” in a simplistic sense- they may genuinely experience themselves as that helpful person while also engaging in harmful behaviour they rationalise or minimise.

Your Positive Experience Doesn’t Negate Someone Else’s Trauma

If someone wasn’t inappropriate with you, that’s genuinely good- for you. But it tells us nothing about what they may have done to others. Predators are selective. They assess risk, vulnerability, and opportunity. The fact that they maintained appropriate boundaries with you might mean you weren’t their target demographic, the setting offered too much visibility, they correctly assessed you wouldn’t be receptive, or there were other factors that made you a higher risk to target.

What We Should Do Instead

When allegations emerge, we should listen to those coming forward, especially when they have nothing to gain. We should recognize that our positive experience is one data point, not the complete picture. We should understand that “I can’t believe it” is about our experience, not an investigation of the facts. And we should avoid using our positive interactions to publicly discredit accusers.

Character witnesses have a place in legal proceedings, but they don’t override evidence or the experiences of victims. Someone can have helped you, saved your life even, and still have harmed others.

The point isn’t to become suspicious of everyone. It’s to understand that harmful people rarely harm everyone they meet. They’re often wonderful to most people and that’s how they maintain access and credibility.

Believe in nuance. Believe in complexity. But don’t let someone’s public persona convince you that abuse couldn’t have happened in private.

Why People with a Chronic Fawn Response Become the Strongest Character Witnesses

There’s a specific group that tends to rush to defend accused individuals, and it’s worth understanding what drives that impulse- not to dismiss them, but to illuminate a pattern that often goes unexamined.

People who developed a fawn response as a long-term survival strategy, typically from growing up in environments where safety depended on reading and pleasing volatile or unpredictable people, carry a particular vulnerability here. Not because they’re naive. Because their nervous system was trained to do something very specific: detect threat and immediately move toward appeasement rather than away from danger.

This creates several downstream effects that are directly relevant.

**They experience charm as safety, not as data.** When someone is warm, generous, or attentive to them, their system doesn’t file that as “this person is being nice.” It files it as “I am safe here.” That felt sense of safety becomes deeply personal, almost bodily. So when allegations emerge, it doesn’t just feel like someone is questioning another person’s character- it feels like someone is telling them that the place they felt safe wasn’t real. The defense of the accused becomes, at a level they may not be conscious of, a defense of their own sense of reality.

**Their “radar” is actually calibrated in reverse.** Most people assume that someone who grew up around dysfunction would be better at spotting it. Often the opposite is true. Fawn-oriented people learned to detect anger, displeasure, and emotional shifts with extraordinary precision- but they learned this in order to manage and soothe those states, not to protect themselves from them. They can be highly attuned to someone’s mood while being functionally blind to that person’s character. A narcissistic or predatory personality often *feels familiar and readable* to someone with a fawn pattern, which gets mislabeled as trust.

**They unconsciously filter out dissonance.** When you’ve spent years, often decades, managing the gap between who someone is in public and who they are behind closed doors, your system gets remarkably good at holding contradictions without registering them as contradictions. A person with a chronic fawn response can witness subtle boundary violations, coercive dynamics, or manipulative behavior and genuinely not flag it as concerning, because their threshold for “concerning” was set extraordinarily high in childhood. What looks like a red flag to someone with a healthy baseline just looks like Tuesday.

**They over-identify with the accused’s “good side.”** This is perhaps the most painful piece. People with fawn patterns often had a caregiver or authority figure who was genuinely loving some of the time and harmful at other times. They learned to survive by attaching to the good and dissociating from the bad. When they encounter someone who is publicly wonderful and allegedly privately harmful, they already have a well-worn template for choosing which version to believe. Defending the good version isn’t a choice- it’s a reflex that was installed for survival.

**They may also feel a sense of specialness in not having been targeted.** If this person was harmful to others but not to me, the unconscious logic can become: *I must be different. They see something in me. We have a real connection.* This isn’t vanity- it’s a trauma pattern. The fawn response is built on the belief that if you’re good enough, attuned enough, valuable enough, you can be safe. Having been spared feels like proof the system works. Accepting that the person is predatory threatens that entire architecture.

What This Means for the Conversation

None of this is about blaming people who defend others in good faith. It’s about recognizing that the loudest, most emotionally invested “but they were good to me” voices may be speaking from a place of unresolved trauma rather than from a complete picture of who someone is.

If you recognise yourself in any of this - if you’ve ever felt a visceral, almost desperate need to defend someone against allegations, a need that felt bigger than the situation warranted- it may be worth sitting with that. Not to force yourself into a different position, but to ask whether your certainty is coming from evidence or from a survival pattern that learned long ago that the safest thing to do is side with the powerful person in the room.