If you weren't one of her victims, I bet she was a blast to hang out with. He'll, maybe if you were one of her victims she was a blast to hang out with when things weren't terrible.

It's a dirty little secret of successful serial abusers: they aren't caricatures of dog kicking villainy. In the real world, successful serial abusers have positive attributes they use to lure their victims and also to keep them in their cage.

Someone I care about was in an abusive relationship and I also knew he person who came afterwards. The individual had surface charm and brought some positive things to the table, including a circle of friends and promises of good times. Along the way he let his circle of friends seep in while distancing the target from their other friends. Quickly he let his controlling behaviors seep into the relationship, and while it is easy to say from a distance that they should have left, he implicitly or explicitly made threats. "If you leave you will lose these friends. If you leave you won't be invited to these good times." Afterwards when the person I care about did leave, he started to make those threats manifest by trying to convince his circle of friends to stop spending time with them and to force them to stop inviting them to things.

Hitler and Stalin and Mao didn't rise to power because they were monsters, they rose to power because they could convince others to follow them. It's then that the monster comes out.

Finally, crime statistics are very clear around the world who tends to abuse people: it's family, intimate partners, friends, and acquaintances. The people closest to us are the most likely to be terrible to us. The idea of the complete stranger coming in and being monstrous is largely a myth we want to believe. Point is, we need to stop imagining that the people who can hurt us most are the other, and recognise that those who can hurt us most are familiar, people we love, people we like. The more we like them or love them, the more they can hurt us without us turning away.