And she describes the arrest as both shattering and, in some ways, a relief — the resolution of a sustained tension that she had been unable to resolve on her own.

This account is consistent with the psychology of willful blindness — the process by which a person knows something they do not want to know and arranges their perception to avoid full acknowledgment of it.

It is also consistent with a simpler account of genuine deception: that she was fooled, that she trusted what she saw because she needed to trust it, and that she was a victim of Bourdin’s sophisticated manipulation.

The two accounts are not mutually exclusive.