1.2 The blamers

In bad times the distress of the famine, diseases and bad luck seem to fuel the irritation people feel about other people. Then it became more likely that people started to blame the 'deviant' people for their own misfortunes occurring to the 'normal' and the 'good' people.

But for effective blaming you need to have convincing reasons that can be believed by other people. So for those people who feel irritated by somebody for whatever reason, but notice his bad breath as well, it would become a different ball game if they could prove that the alleged bad smell was a sign of the person's pact with the devil.

The imagined allegation
The distortion in the allegation does not lay in reporting untrue events, though that might happen as well, but in what people believed were possible causal links between them.

In witch-hunts one of the beliefs was that 'words could kill'. People would make claims that the person cursed them and then something bad happened - that was just accepted as proof of witchcraft. Recently in the UK the word 'paediatrician' (children's doctor) was enough to blame and attack that person for paedophilia.