They can hide in plain sight, in the most unlikely of places. Even in the White House.
With all of the recent political fuss over the departure of White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter, and the bombshell interview conducted by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper with Porter’s second ex-wife, Jennie Willoughby, on February 8, focus has once again turned to questions about successful people and the secret or second persona some of them seem to have. How can this be? How can a charming, intelligent, and successful person secretly be an abusive personality? How can they so easily glide through their world unnoticed? How can they so easily charm and manipulate intelligent, normal people who surround them?
If you haven’t yet seen the interview with Ms. Willoughby, it’s worth seeing. I’ve provided a link to it on YouTube (above).
I watched the interview with great interest. Ms. Willoughby said many things that sounded familiar. One segment in particular caught my attention. She described how her ex-husband was professionally a very competent and successful man, and, “even in the face of what’s unfolding,” she said, Porter still enjoys a high degree of support from the people around him. At the outset, Ms. Willoughby emphasized one thing: “the idea that he could be so different [at home] seems to escape people … and yet everyone, in their daily lives, has a different personality for different situations. I think this, for Rob, is just a really extreme and toxic version of that … [I experienced] a low-grade and constant terror of not knowing what I might do to set something off—what mood he would have. There weren’t any explicit threats, but I frequently felt threatened.” It’s clear Ms. Willoughby continues to be dismayed by the number of people who simply don’t want to believe her; who won’t permit the facts to challenge the image they already have of Rob Porter—his public persona. And the idea that he may have another side? They don’t accept it because they’ve never seen it. But Jennie Willoughby has, and so has Porter’s first ex-wife.
Willoughby: That’s a question I’ve been asked a lot—why did you stay if he was a ‘monster?’ And the reality is that he’s not a monster. He is an intelligent, kind, chivalrous, caring, professional man, and he’s deeply troubled and angry and violent. I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive.
Cooper: And the people he works with may not have seen that side of him at all?
Willoughby: Of course not. It’s reserved for the most intimate and vulnerable moments in his life.
In another fascinating portion of the interview, Ms. Willoughby describes meeting Porter’s first ex-wife, Colbie Holderness. It must have been an epiphany for her. She found validation in the fact that Porter’s “systematic” manipulation and “tearing down” of her own personality and confidence had all happened before to someone else, and therefore, had nothing at all to do with her—or with reality. “I think that a lot of people in abusive relationships,” she said, “because of the constant, insidious breaking down of that confidence, and that even knowledge or sense of self, [they] start to believe that it really is something that they’re doing, or something that they in some way deserved because of their choices. For me, I just sort of accepted it once it became the norm. I lost a lot of confidence and just accepted that that’s what it was. And it took years to get past that point. But it took me meeting Colbie and hearing the story and sharing my story, and us both going, yeah, yeah—that happened to me too, before I could recognize the magnitude of it.”
When asked about Porter and his current dating relationship with White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, Ms. Willoughby said, “If he hasn’t already been abusive with Hope, he will. Particularly now that he’s under a lot of stress and scrutiny. That’s when the behaviors come out.”
There’s a good deal in Jennie Willoughby’s story that rings true with me. As I observed, increased stress was one of the factors that caused my ex-wife’s substance abuse, infidelity, and interpersonally abusive behaviors to careen out of control. When Barbie accepted her ambitious new job in 2015, I removed everything involving the household and the children from her plate in an effort to help her focus. It had all been in vain.
On February 11, 2018, Ms. Willoughby published an article on Time magazine’s website. She wrote:
On Saturday morning, following the overnight resignation of another White House staffer after his ex-wife came forward with her story of abuse, the President Tweeted: “Peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”
{ Despair to Deliverance } 