Cheater Deflection Tactics
Cheaters often employ deflection tactics to throw you off their trail. Hey, pay no attention to that affair! Squirrel!
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I’m probably tilting at the censor bots today, but the recent revelations about Kristi Noem’s marriage seem awfully calculated. I have a cynical Chump Lady brain, but I also know cheater deflection tactics when I see them.
Oh, am I busted? LOOK OVER THERE! A BARN IS ON FIRE! SHEEP ARE EXPLODING! RUN FOR COVER!
Did this happen to you?
You confront a cheater but suddenly a crisis presents itself.
This is a VERY BAD TIME to talk about their perfidy. His mother is dying! She won’t pass the Bar exam if you insist on these questions! Stuff your feelings. The lawn mower is malfunctioning and we need spark plugs IMMEDIATELY!
Now the heat is off the cheater and we’ve redirected our attention to another flaming mess (that they probably created themselves.)
Bonus points! They can elicit pity.
What? Are you HEARTLESS? His mother is dying. Have you no humanity? We’ll go over those hotel receipts you found another time (most likely never). These spark plugs need attending to AT ONCE. It’s not as if you know how to change spark plugs. No, that always falls to them. And do you appreciate them? No you do not.
Now let’s do Kristi Noem.
Who is Kristi Noem, Tracy? I don’t live in the U.S. and I stopped tuning into your dumpster fire news cycle years ago.
She’s our disgraced former Homeland Security director, known for her puppy killing and botched plastic surgery. But also her (alleged) affair with her subordinate Corey Lewandowski (who she got a job for, of course. Although he was recently sh*t-canned).
Congress started asking about how she spent $220 million on an ad campaign that seems to enrich her boyfriend. And if she was, in fact, having an affair. (She answered with another classic cheater deflection tactic — HOW DARE YOU ASK ME THAT!) Congress also began to wonder about her fancy tax-payer jet with the private bedroom and all the junkets she was taking.
So, do you know what the news cycle did next?
DARVO!
Kristi is the Real Victim here. That chump husband of hers is the true freak. All of a sudden someone’s leaked photos of him cross dressing and the conversation is off misappropriation of public funds and pivots instead to the much more titillating topic of Bimbofication fetishes.
I have so many questions.
Like, if you have a bimbofication fetish, isn’t Kristi Noem enough silicon for you?
Secret double life of Kristi Noem's crossdressing husband Bryon: The pouting 'busty bimbo' photos and trove of explicit messages https://t.co/4GvCcfPK9j
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) March 31, 2026
And does Bryon really have a double life if you had a double life first?
Guess who’s here to explain the entire f*cktangle to us? Amy and TJ!
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said she is “devastated” and “blindsided” by reports that her husband is a cross dresser who has a “bimbofication” fetish. Noem has been married to her husband Bryon for 34 years, the two are high school sweethearts and share 3 children together.
How nice of two cheaters to provide a platform for a cheater to describe how she’s the real victim here. Devastated and blindsided!
Let’s all go down a rabbit hole on bimbokink. Pay no attention to that tax-payer funded corruption. Kristi has a sadz.
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That had not occurred to me, and I think you are correct!
Yep this all seems like a calculated move. Given she had a high profile position, it would have been probably easy for any enemy state to expose photos long ago. But now that she lost her job and unlimited tax payer funded travel (I’m wildly guessing her newly created “special envoy” gig has a fraction of her former DHS pay), heated Congressional testimony, that the divorce attorneys are getting rounded up, so it was time for a convenient leak to the ever deep diving, storied journalism powerhouse – the Daily Mail. #TeamByron
Me neither.
Years ago I thought “well at least I didn’t have a Betty Broderick reaction” to my ex’s cheating. Yesterday I thought “well at least I didn’t have a bimbo kink reaction” to my ex’s cheating. 😂
Obviously, what Betty did was not ok. I have to make sure I say that clearly before I continue, BUT I can understand *how* it happened. It’s not that I think every Chump has the potential to be a Betty B. But more so, being chumped is so awful and the shit sandwiches are poisonous. The more we are forced to swallow, the more poison is leeching into our brains, the harder it is to remain logical. Obviously she went completely off the rails and I don’t condone or excuse it at all. I mean, if nothing else stopped her, the idea of leaving her kids with NO parents should have.
I never wanted FW to die. I did want to punch him, but I never did. I don’t think I would have felt great about it if I had either. Probably in the moment it would feel amazing, but after, I would feel icky about losing control. And the consequences wouldn’t be worth it. I definitely did wish he would move to the other side of the world forever. That appealed to me a lot.
But I can understand how Betty snapped. Being betrayed is hard, but then the hits keep coming, marrying the AP, realizing you knew the AP, And that she knew you, and your kids, having your kids around the AP. Your FW dumping you as he comes into his success, a success YOU helped him build. That is a lot and it’s relentless.
It’s interesting, chumps are often referred to as “bitter” if we do something as mild and reasonable as going no contact. The bar is set so high, we need to forgive and forget, be friends with the FW, have joint birthday parties for the kids, all of this for the kids sake, or we are seen as bitter. And it does make one want to respond with “well at least the Chump didn’t pull a Betty”.
I did wonder which came first: his cross dressing or her cheating.
I truly believe that the more Betty Brodericks we have, the fewer FWs we will see. Betty serves as a salutary lesson to a lot of men and bimbos who need that lesson.
CL, you are right. Also, isn’t the Daily Mail the equivalent of our U.S. “newspaper” the National Enquirer? I’ve heard it called the ‘Daily Fail’ by friends in the know.
Holy false equivalencies Batman! Does cross-dressing somehow justify cheating?
You would think not, but a friend of mine actually said to me, “This explains why she might have an affair, doesn’t it?”
This is one of the biggest frustrations of how non-Chumps misunderstand Chumps.
I think it would be shocking if you suddenly found out your husband had this fetish. The thing about fetishes is that they tend to be niche or “out of the norm”. And it’s not really easy to embrace a fetish that is not your thing. For example, I am pretty vanilla, maybe if I had a boyfriend with a foot fetish and he wanted me to get a pedicure every week, and let him massage my feet before we had sex, I might be able to get onboard with that. Pedicures and foot rubs are not something I enjoy in a sexual way, but I enjoy them in general, so I could probably indulge that fetish for someone if the rest of our sex life was enjoyable for us both. If it escalated and he wanted me to stick my foot “somewhere”, that would not be for me. But just saying, some fetishes might not have to be a dealbreaker for a relationship.
If I found out my boyfriend wanted to dress up like a bimbo every time we had sex or he couldn’t enjoy it? That is probably a dealbreaker for me. Not because he is a monster for having that fetish, but becasuse that would not feel comfortable for me. I am sure that wouldn’t be an easy situation to navigate. What if the marriage was great otherwise? (Maybe if he tried dressing more like David Bowie vs Dolly Parton I could rally)
But cheating doesn’t solve anything. It’s not “oh, you dress up like a bimbo? Well then I guess my only option is to cheat”
What is rather hilariuus in a black comedy kind of way is that all these FWs hide the cheating so they can stay married, rather than leaving if they don’t want to live up to their vows, and yet, we are all getting divorced ANYWAY. And by then it’s become a big, ugly mess. You know which divorced couples have the best chance of being truly friendly post-divorce, and co-parenting in a very amicable, low stress way? The ones that were HONEST when they wanted out and got out ethically. Divorce is never easy and the process will be hard no matter what the circumstances. But if you aren’t happy, and it isn’t fixable, and you tell the truth and don’t do shitty things to your partner during the process, you stand a much better chance at coming back from it.
Why do non chumps always think that if things in a marriage are bad, cheating is just fine? Or even mandatory. Leaving is an option. And if you cheat, you will be found out eventually, and then you are leaving anyway, whether you want to or not.
I agree with you that my friend’s comment reflects a complete misunderstanding of the realities of cheating and misconstrues the chump.
My ex revealed his own doozy of a fetish to me after 32 years of marriage, so I know what it is like to be blindsided by it. I can tell you that although I at first looked at it the way you describe what you might feel about a foot fetish, that as you begin to understand just how a fetish operates for your partner, it is not like that at all. You say you think you could handle a foot massage, but I’m guessing that once you understood that depth and shape of your partner’s perception and attachment to that massage you would find it deeply disturbing, and not something to simply incorporate into your normal sexual life. As with cheating, I don’t think people who have never been involved with someone with a fetish understand the reality of it.
This is why, sadly, cheaters’ smear campaigns are often so successful, I believe. If they don’t have any actual “juicy” information to share (unlike here, apparently), they are just going to make something up, and too many people will fall for it.
Haha, it sure DOESN’T! But any excuse will do, right? My EXFW#2 told me once that I should have kept his behavior in check? WTF? I wasn’t aware that I was your mommy!
The day the suspicious bank statement arrived in the mail, he came home that evening ashen and upset. He, a doctor, had been told he was being sued for malpractice, he said. He told me all the details of the case.
It was all a lie.
Oh and more recently, he alluded to suicide to one of our adult children, to get her to contact him. It’s not his behavior that’s the problem, you see, but the kids’ reaction to it, which was to go no contact. She called the police instead, for a wellness check.
And I wonder why I’m tired all the time.
Yes, tired is how this goes for a long time. I regained most but not all of my energy, but I also got older (LOL). Hard to tell which is which at this point.
Your adult kid calling the police is spot on. My ex made an unsuccessful attempt, alluded to it when he left for the last time, and hinted at it for a very long time with our college kids. He did it with his own attorney, who called mine (“call your client and warn her”), and then called the police where my ex was living.
Maybe he figured life out, or maybe not. He’s still around years later (I assume) because I’m still getting payments. I am not in touch with my ex at all.
I was surprised when my daughter told me that her therapist had said repeatedly and unequivocally that her father wouldn’t kill himself. The therapist said outright that he’s too narcissistic and loves himself too much and is just using the threat to manipulate her.
That was one of the reasons my ex’s therapist cited as evidence that borderline was his main diagnosis. He had an attempt.
Post suicide attempt, she had thoroughly questioned him and was solid on the borderline and had enough on narcassism to call it a “strong tendency.” She was concerned that I might be in danger, which is why she broke protocol. Questioning him further on the characteristics of psychopathy would have been next.
And sure enough, during the divorce, he outlined a detailed plan for ending my life and getting away with it while on the phone with his attorney. Dumb! They’re officers of the court and CANNOT sit on that sort of thing.
He’s still around some years later now, so maybe more narcissistic than borderline at this point. The therapist said that with multiple diagnoses, they certainly can shape-shift over time, particularly with people they can fool. Oh, my…
Wow. I’m so sorry
He’s many states away. Radio silence for a few years now, and our adult kids cut him off during the divorce process. That’s really the only thing you can do with someone like that.
Every month goes by with yet another deposit, and I know that he’s still alive. But he’s 70 and in poor health, so who knows.
Chumplet, I need you to expand on the bank statement story. My FW vigorously kept me far far away from our banking business until somehow $100,000+ had vanished and he wanted me, me not him, to file bankruptcy.
I don’t know how much help I can be. He opened a secret account — not the first — but forgot to tell the bank he didn’t want paper statements mailed to him at our home address this time around.
Are you divorcing? Sounds like you may need a forensic accountant.
I just listened to the TJ & Amy link. I know who they are but never saw them on tv, never listened to them before. TJ’s ‘soothing’ voice and the way he calls her “Robes” . . . I need some disinfectant for my ears.
They are waaaaay overcompensating for Kristi’s pain and shame. There seems to be a lot of defend-the-cheater-at-all-costs going on. Too bad that Oprah got the Jumbotron cheater.
There was some deflection, mixed in with minimization and half truths. The half truths were the biggie. I think FW’s mind confused and conflated telling a half truth and my apparent lack of a reaction to it as a confession and consent for more. Ive taken all those half truths over the years and filled in the blanks with the most likely rest of the story.
But yes, when really feeling the heat and half truths and minimizatiom failed, deflection to how FW was in such a bad way and I was a Big Meanie were definitely a thing.
The shady doth protest too much, methinks!
My former fake husband’s professional moniker is Darvo the Great. Never has he ever, one single time that I can recall, copped to anything. Literally nothing is ever his fault.
I, on the other hand, can be found on YouTube having a conversation with a rock star, he onstage and me standing up in the audience, explaining how I was responsible for missing the email with the Meet and Greet instructions, for which my friends and I paid extra on top of our concert tickets. We missed out on the Meet and Greet because I didn’t see the email. The concert and the Meet and Greet had been rescheduled due to COVID. Before the concert, the artist had a table set up in the lobby where concertgoers could submit questions in writing. I took the opportunity to explain what had happened. He read my submission at the question break in the As result, the audience got a good laugh, and we all had a way more fun and memorable Meet and Greet.
Poor cheaters. They’re just shooting themselves in the foot, tying their own hands behind their backs, cutting their own noses off, and missing out with their lives of lies and deception.
As Mel Robbins says, let them!
😛
Bryon (whatever happened to just Brian?) is not very good at the cross-dressing thing, I am sorry to say. Definite tit-screpancy in that photo.
Anyway, probably the biggest deflection of all time is to start a war to distract from the crime of rape.
💯
Just tryng to catch up here… Is the implication that Bryan Noem threatened to sue for divorce in response to allegations that his wife cheated with (and embezzled with) Lewandowski so that the sudden public disclosures about Bryan’s double life are basically Kristi’s DARVO maneuver (with the help of Trump)? Or is framing Bryan as a kinkster a preemptive measures so evangelicals don’t pillory Kristi for dumping her hubs for Lewandowski?
I’m not sure I get why Trump would be helping to shield Kristi Noem from consequences unless she has some explosive things against Trump. Bracing for more weirdness but, before I jump on the Team Bryan bandwagon, I’m going to hold out for the possibility that anyone who remained married to Kristi may have a lot worse buried in their history but, because Trump or others are guilty of the same crimes, the administration is playing a tablecloth trick of only highlighting the one impeachable thing (balloon boobs) that Trump doesn’t do.
My guess is that Bryon (with an O!) was fixin’ to divorce KKKristi so he would not be on the financial hook for her $220 million embezzlement. (Trump will not be protecting her from those charges; note how Republicans went after her in that hearing. That was with his blessing, or they wouldn’t have don it. She pissed off the wrong person somewhere.)
So Bryon started his escape plan, and she — underhanded as she is — went nuclear by exposing his secret.
Bryon with an O, lol. As in OMFG or “Oh what a tangled web.”
Immediately following a horrific D day, learning about a coworker that had had sex with my then’ husband at work ..he told me she had jumped him like all woman jump men at work
..I.then heard that cheater was under HR review and the vote was coming on what to do with these 2 employees. HE MIGHT LOSE HIS JOB!!! Don’t I understand this???
The vote came in by phone but after hearing my now-X defending his horrific actions, I grabbed the phone away so i could ask questions
.The boss told me both individuals were under ONE DAY SUSPENSION.. both employees had to not be in touch on the work premises. But the WOMAN involved was told she would lose her job if she if SHE were caught again. My now Ex- husband kept his job, no worries.
This event sparked the end for me. Would my cheater jump on someone else?? Blame shift his way out again? I had a low life but believed I had a gem.
All tactics work and these cheaters get to a professional level. It is progressive. I wish I had left at least 15 years earlier..but you don’t leave someone with a mental illness do you???
Hmm. I’ve never jumped a man at work. In fact, the thought never even occurred to me. I was overworked at almost every job I had, so I didn’t have the time and energy for that.
Where do they get this crazy stuff from???
For these brazen cheaters ..sex becomes a driving compulsive act. My worry after hearing what happened, me being blamed for driving him to it and HR letting it go essentially..my concern was my now XHC could end up raping someone. And if not that, he’d have to take his behavior more to the streets. There was no choice for me to make
My therapist had me make plans to lock him out. It was a devastating experiment
Throughout our marriage my ex used this sad sausage deflection technique, culminating in this stunner when I was trying to get some clarity after disclosure day: “It’s been a sh-t summer on top of a sh-t spring, and I’m not really in a position to talk/think about this.”
By the way, my ex was (is) a fetish cross dresser who after immersion in BDSM fetish groups and online lady-boy porn decided he was really “a woman in a man’s body.” He then hooked up with a former student of ours who “helped” him “experiment” with his “gender identity.” (hope this doesn’t trigger the censors) He wasn’t involved in the bimbofication fetish “community,” but his version of woman was bimbofication adjacent, in that it consisted of defining women as passive f–k holes, asking to be “put in his place” and punished, and wanting me to employ on him the techniques of “forced feminization” circulating online.
I suspect Bryon Noem had a similar journey toward bimbofication, although I must say Kristi herself looks like she’s had more than a brush with bimbofication herself. At least Bryon wasn’t separating children from their parents and locking them up, or defending the ICE agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti and defaming their victims.
I feel like the slow sibling reading all this. When I first saw the headlines, my immediate reaction was: here is another man who chooses the moment when his wife is at the pinnacle of her career to target and destroy her success. Didn’t we just talk about this not long ago? Folks, I don’t see exactly how she forced him into the activities that have been exposed. I just can’t see that. And until I read this page, I had no idea she was cheating. Just who is being DARVOed here? My head is spinning.
She is not at the pinnacle of her career. She is at the nadir. She just got fired. I very much doubt that he released these photos to destroy her “success.” She’ll be up on corruption charges soon. That’s not success. She was grilled by the Senate for outfitting a government plane with a bedroom so she could have sex with her employee. She used $220 million of taxpayer money for vanity marketing of … herself. There is no success for him to destroy. It’s all ashes now.
If anything, he was probably going to make his exit, and she is taking him down because he wants to file. She didn’t force him to cross-dress, but I’ll be very surprised if she isn’t behind this exposure.
Her well-known affair, the fraudulent contracts, the incompetence — this has all been reported in the press. Women can be FWs too.
I expect that as the current administration unravels and the Epstein files are revealed, we will learn that many federal positions were held by “compromised” individuals. Either their own lack of competence, their own greed or their vulnerability to black mail kept them loyal.
I worked in downtown DC in the 1990’s, and not much has changed. I was a federal manager and had a consultant on retainer who ran things down for me on Capitol Hill. Sometimes I ate lunch with the higher-ups in government and other times with the consultant’s friends, some of whom were staffers. People talked. I listened.
More recently, Epstein pulled a lot of people into his ugly circle, but that sort of thing has been going on for a very long time. I knew federal bosses and Capitol Hill folks who went to parties with what sounded like underage girls. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
Nearly every higher-up that I interacted with was questionable in their personal lives. Just ick.
The made-up emergencies were typically cheater ex raging at me for some made up problem that I supposedly created that was FAR worse than her cheating — me reading her chat messages, me not attending a party with her bigotted friends, me telling her lined up to be next but never acted on affair partner about one of her other affairs, etc. forever. I ended up aplogizing multiple times to her for my supposed behavior upon each discovery of her further cheating….
Dude, at least adjust your nipples before you take a photo. 🙄
I am convinced that almost all (if not all) people who are bigoted and aggressively performative about supposed “family values” have fetishes, are cheaters, in the closet, or any combination thereof. It’s classic reaction formation. Freud wasn’t wrong about everything. He and his daughter Anna Freud were right on the money about defense mechanisms.
Yes, and yet more Duggar family members are in jail. Not surprising!
When that show first came out, I said to FW, “Eventually stuff will come out about that family.”
FW said, “You know, Chumplet, they could just be a nice family.”
Yeah, no.
I was homeschooling our kids when the show came out. I watched it once or twice when my ex was working late, a frequent occurrence in our marriage. I was totally turned off. I mean, who really lives and acts that way? NO ONE.
I never dabbled again and had to search the memory banks later, when things began coming out about them. They had dropped off my radar. I wasn’t that kind of homeschool mom and never would be. Well, good thing.
Not at all as colorful, but one of my ex’s favorite things to say was, “And what about you? You are truly a horrible wife. I don’t know why I put up with you.” Then he’d outline all my faults and failings.
His own attorney told my ex at some point that he hadn’t heard anything about me yet, which wasn’t very ordinary. He actually told his client to stop wasting time talking about that so they could get the divorce done. Then my STBX’s attorney ranted to mine in a phone call. They knew each other well, having had several decades of negotiating divorces back and forth and meeting in court.
Mine smiled when he told me and added, “This is good for our side, things are shifting.”
And they did. I felt like my settlement was fair and reasonable, all things considered.
Deflection…hmmm…mostly he told me about my many failings and the fact that he never wanted to marry me in the first place.
On D-day, he tried deflecting by announcing that he never had rage-driving episodes with me and kids in the car (yes, he did, numerous ones, terrifying and dangerous).
Other deflections included “You wouldn’t do very well if one of our children died”. He was trying to illustrate that I am not a well coping person (I am a very highly coping person) but in order to make his point land, he had to compare it with something worse and the only thing he pulled out of the air was one of our kids dying.
Another giant deflection (which he actually used to deflect responsibility before the cheating) was to tell me that he planned to commit a large, violent social atrocity (like bombing or mass shooting). On paper, he was an upstanding citizen (young, handsome, well educated, war veteran, active duty officer) and he wanted me to turn him in so the he could tell the authorities that I was mentally ill and imagined the whole thing. I think he wanted to divorce me and garner pity at the same time
My ex had some really disturbing delusions like that, things he said he could get away with because he was so smart and “knew.” Well, he was also a pill addict, and I never knew how much of it was being high versus him really thinking he could do that.
But I shared all that with my attorney to illustrate how very mentally disturbed my husband was. By then, my STBX was living in another state and was supposedly sober, but who knows.
And of course, my husband repeatedly insisted that I was the disturbed one, telling his family and his attorney. Well, the attorney figured it out and called him on it. That attorney also raged with mine about how manipulative my STBX was and how he just couldn’t stand it. As if an older, $700/hour attorney was weak and clueless? Nope.
Absolutely the playbook my ex the FW narcopath was using. He was imagining soaking up the sympathy kibbles from my dying in a fatal accident, nobody the wiser about HIM, and then conveniently moving in the criminal madame hoho to play stepmama.
Coincidentally, I was in fact involved in a near fatal accident during this time of ILYBINILWY speeches and increased pressure from the main OW madame. FW was so mad at me for surviving it, it’s chilling to me now replaying the scenes. I lived to fight another day!
this is so much more ridiculous than any parody Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have dreamt up for South Park.
There’s nothing crazier than what goes on in the real world.
In the near three decades of pathological lying and secret double life I’m certain FW narcopath deployed every tactic under the sun.
Tantrum, fake suicide attempts, hurling himself into the wall, woe is him pity parties were the more obvious ones during the second wreckonciliation. Prior to that allusions job stress, job loss, pretend psychiatric disorders, veiled threats of divorce if I looked at him wrong, put downs about my stupidity, and just picking fights over nothing. But then before THAT it was much more subtle and all of it was very effective for years.
I’ve literally been whacked with the narc screeching rage-crying as an answer to questions about missing money and yet another secret bank account. FW don’t like accountability dontcha know?
Kristi and Bryon are likely both FW, we all know here his “online stuff” doesn’t stay only online. I have no idea how they met, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they were affair partners who married each other. Those two seem like a dumpster-fire-match made in FW heaven.
There’s an article in the New York Times saying the people in their rural (and I assume conservative) area of South Dakota feel sorry for him but not for her.
Wow, I didn’t pick up on this as deflection! Yes, it’s a suspiciously convenient time for those photos to come out.
Although I did pick up on the fact that Ms. Noem didn’t deny the affair. I’m always suspicious when people don’t just come right out and deny things. That type of response is pretty much an admission.
As for the affair, from what I’ve read, it’s been an open secret for several years. I hope one or both of the chumps decide to initiate a divorce.
She killed her kids’ puppy. That was all I needed to know about her.