“Bang, Bang!” A headline delivers a fatal blow to a public career of yet another person. Never mind all his hard work. Never mind her accomplishments. Everything will be shattered in the rapidly spreading fire of accusations. It is so easy. News spread that a political candidate is a crook. Information surfaces that a leading scientist is a notorious womanizer. The character assault hits like an avalanche. The person is destroyed. Another one bites the dust. Who is next?
    How does character assassination work? When and why do character “assassins” decide to deploy their fatal weapons of facts and fiction? Why do people fall so easily when under attack? This book attempts to answer these questions and display the anatomy of character assassination. It combines the existing historic evidence with a novel psychological analysis of many cases, their origins, and consequences. It describes the victims of character attacks—political candidates and public figures, scientists, artists, activists, athletes, entrepreneurs, and writers. It reveals the relentless strategies and methods of character assassination of yesterday and today. The book also discusses the incredibly high success rate of character assassination attempts. It also examines several successful cases of effective defense against such attacks. The book discuses cases of George Washington, Marie Antoinette, Francis Bacon, Franz Mesmer, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John Watson, Sigmund Freud, Leo Trotsky, FDR, Richard Nixon, Eugene McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Toni Blair and many other historic figures.