character assassination

i've had character assassination on my list of topics for weeks now, because it didn't feel particularly relevant to my life. but the topic became incredibly relevant to my personal life recently, so here we are. character assassination is the malicious and unjustified harming of a person's good reputation. i think it can come in two main forms. number one, a completely fabricated story that doesn't have an ounce of truth in it, that's created simply to harm someone's reputation. and then the second type is a dramatized negative version of the truth. so this is taking a little piece of truth and twisting it into something that is far more negative and defamatory than it actually is. this has always been an issue for public figures and celebrities. character assassination sells. but i would say prior to the internet, there was no way for the average person to just go viral on a whim like it's possible now. the moral of the story is anyone now can be the victim of public shaming and public character assassination at an astronomically larger scale than necessary. and before we go any further, i'd like to tell my story of my own character sort of being assassinated recently.