A common way to break someone's spirit is with some horrible truth, but sometimes a person seeking to hurt someone might choose to tell a horrible lie instead. Some common reasons why a person might choose to lie is because the truth would uplift the person instead, because a person needs to believe the lie in order to be manipulated or brainwashed or because hurtful lies can turn friends against each other.
There are a number of scenarios that would lead to someone telling such a lie; a Hope Crusher might resort to telling lies because the truth might create hope instead. A person who wants to drive someone to suicide might tell lies in order to push them over the edge. A cult member who wants to recruit people and/or control its members might tell potential recruits and members lies in order to isolate them from non-cult members.
Naturally, said lies will almost always get exposed. Perhaps the person the liar is trying to break might see through the lies by pointing out why said lies can't be true. Other times the deceived's friends/family might reveal the truth to them. Other times the liar might accidentally say or do something that causes the deceived to realize that they've been duped.
Frequent users of this trope tend to be the most loathsome Hate Sinks of the cast, for the simple reason that people don't like liars, let alone one who crafts lies specifically to hurt people (as opposed to make someone face an ugly truth). The Dirty Coward, the Slimeball, and the Manipulative Bastard are the ones most likely to resort to this.
Sub-Trope of Break Them by Talking. See also Batman Gambit and Scare 'Em Straight. Compare Malicious Slander, which is lying to other people about someone, and Gaslighting, which involves convincing people that their own memories are a lie. Contrast Awful Truth and Villain Reveals the Secret when a person is broken by the truth, and Villains Never Lie, which this trope can sometimes act as a subversion of. Also contrast Lying to Protect Your Feelings, I Didn't Tell You Because You'd Be Unhappy, Motivational Lie, and Let Them Die Happy when someone tells a lie to make protect or soothe someone's feelings.
No Recent Examples, Please!, as there are numerous and controversial examples of this happening in real life.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach: When Rukia is awaiting execution, Gin nonchalantly offers to save her and her friends, then just as nonchalantly says "I Lied". She had been prepared to Face Death with Dignity, but the moment of false hope makes her break down screaming.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: As a teenager, Cioccolata once volunteered at a retirement home, where he would psychologically abuse the elders by telling them that their families hated them, which led to them killing themselves.
- Naruto: When Gaara was a child, his uncle Yashamaru attempted to assassinate him. When this failed, they spent their dying breaths declaring that they'd always hated his guts, blaming him for his sister's Death by Childbirth. This drove Gaara into becoming the Ax-Crazy monster he would be known as in his early teens; however, several years later, he'd learn that this was all a lie that his father, the Fourth Kazekage, had forced them to tell as a Secret Test of Character. The Kazekage wanted to see whether Gaara could control the power of Shukaku while distressed. This deception is revealed by the Fourth Kazekage himself, who had been resurrected by the Edo Tensei; seeing how far his son had come, they admit the deception and apologize.
- Sailor Moon: In "The Terrifying Illusion: Ami All Alone", the Droid Giwaaku attempts to convince Ami Mizuno (Sailor Mercury) that she's Hated by All, getting her falsely accused of cheating on a test and hitting her with Hallucinations of her teammates turning upon her. She attempts a similiar tactic on Sailor Moon, only for Sailor Moon to angrily declare that she knows she's flawed and that her friends accept her anyway, Warts and All.
Fan Fiction
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: One of Ami's plans to get good people to cooperate with her Evil Overlord act and basically join her side, without letting them in on the fact that she's acting, is using hallucination-generation magic to make them believe the lie that her target's allies have turned to her side as well.
- Turnabout Communication: Yamai does this to Tadano when she visits him in the Detention Center late in the night, telling him that the reason why Komi didn't come to visit him as she promised was because she hates him for assaulting Yamai (in truth, she wasn't allowed to due to Yamai pulling the strings). This couldn't be further from the truth, but Tadano buys into it due to his extremely low self-esteem, and he doesn't realize Yamai lied to him until Athena hands him over a gift Komi sent him with a letter to cheer him up during the trial.
Films — Animated
- Kung Fu Panda 2: Po confronts Lord Shen in his munitions factory, wanting to find out the peacock's role in the flashbacks Po's been receiving of the last night he saw his birth parents before being sent down the river in a radish crate to the Valley of Peace. Shen, being a vicious Sadist who suffered from Parental Neglect in the past, can't resist the opportunity to try attacking the panda with some Psychological Projection:
Shen: Yes, that night. I watched as your parents abandoned you. Very tragic... (...) Oh, you want to know so badly? You think knowing will heal you? Eh? Fill some... crater in your soul? Well, here's your answer: Your parents... didn't love you. (Po becomes frozen with shock) But, here... let me heal you! (he unveils another cannon and fires it at Po while he's still paralyzed)
- The Lion King (1994): Scar, as part of his plan to become king, has his brother Mufasa killed in such a way that it seems like Simba did it by accident (Simba thinks he caused Mufasa's death because he assumes that his roar spooked the wildebeests that trampled Mufasa). After finding Mufasa's dead body, he convinces Simba that he has to exile himself in order to "atone".
- Toy Story 3: It's revealed that Lotso turned Big Baby into his henchman like this. Their owner, Daisy, left Lotso, a clown named Chuckles, and Big Baby at a rest stop by mistake. They made it home to her, but Lotso saw that Daisy's parents had replaced him (but not Big Baby nor Chuckles) with a duplicate, a Madden Into Misanthropy moment. As a result, Lotso told Big Baby that Daisy had abandoned them both (despite Chuckles pointing out the obvious), which caused Big Baby to become Lotso's enforcer. When Big Baby is told the truth, he turns on Lotso.
Films — Live-Action
- The Count of Monte Cristo (2002): After Edmond Dantès is framed for being an alleged Bonapartist, Villefort sends Edmond's fiancée Mercedes a letter falsely telling her that Edmond was executed for treason (in actuality, he was sent to the Château d'If), helping Fernand woo her.
- Jubal: Pinky gradually poisons Shep's mind by implying that his wife is having an affair with Jubal. This eventually drives Shep into a jealous rage where he tries to kill Jubal and is shot by Jubal in self-defence.
- Labyrinth of Evil (2014): Palpatine lies to Vader about Padme being dead, causing him to yell in agony.
- Stuart Little: After Stuart has found out the Stouts were not his birth parents and his real parents were killed years ago, Snowbell makes a last-ditch effort to send Stuart away by lying that George no longer cares about him and ripped Stuart's picture out of the family photo (in reality, the family used the picture for the posters). However, he comes to regret this decision when he sees how upset the Littles are to miss him, especially George, leading up to Snowbell's change of heart.
Literature
- In Changes, as revealed retroactively in Ghost Story (2011), Lasciel drives Harry to suicide by telling him a lie about how his daughter was going to die, and it was all his fault.
- Devils & Thieves: After Darek is revealed as the Big Bad, he tries to torture Crow through hallucinations, in which Crow is taunted about supposedly murdering everyone he loves. Jemmie is able to convince him it isn't real but the psychological damage was still done.
- Living Dead Girl: After kidnapping Alice, Ray repeatedly lies to her that her family doesn't want her back after the horrible letters she sent them. It's left ambiguous whether Ray actually sent them but it's heavily implied that Alice's family would (of course) want her back.
- Something Wicked This Way Comes: Mr. Dark taunts the boys as they are hiding in a library, describing in graphic detail how he mutilated their mothers by rapidly ageing them with the carousel, in order to make them cry so that he can hear where they were hiding.
Live-Action TV
- House of Anubis: In the second half of the third season, Team Evil is looking to turn some of the students into sinners, namely by provoking them into sinning. Some of this includes cruel, hurtful lies.
- Denby sets her sights on the blatantly insecure Patricia by slowly but surely manipulating her into believing that Eddie is cheating on her. It starts out small, with a casual warning to plant the seeds of doubt; eventually it spirals into planting fake messages on a computer for Patricia to read, which absolutely destroys her as the final nail in the coffin. She breaks into tears and declares that she hates Eddie, which is exactly what the villains needed to capture her for the sin of "spite".
- Victor storms in one day and physically forces Eddie into his office. Once there, he locks the boy in and starts to viciously verbally abuse him to try and spark a sin. The cruelest moment is lying that his father, Mr. Sweet, never actually loved him — something deeply hurtful as Eddie has been struggling with Parental Abandonment issues for years. Luckily, his friends break him out before things get worse.
- Played for Laughs when Robert and Denby try to make Willow sin. They feed her lies, like the idea that Alfie would cheat on her. She, however, is so pure and naive that she dismisses everything as really good acting and casually remarks that Alfie would never do such a thing. The adults grow gradually more angry and aggressive in their methods while Willow just remains confused and oblivious — and entirely unphased by their increasingly untrue claims.
- In Once Upon a Time, the Evil Queen captures Belle after Rumplestiltskin sends her away (he was too afraid of losing his power to let her True Love's Kiss break the curse it's tied to). She then tells Rumple that Belle ran home to her family, but they locked her up, tortured her in an attempt to exorcise the Dark One's influence, and eventually drove her to suicide. Rumple was already pretty broken about sending her away, but this lie drove him even further into his scheme—and when Regina in the present day gambles on being able to manipulate Rumple by finally letting Belle out of Storybrooke Hospital's awful psych ward, she loses terribly.
- When Captain Picard is being tortured in the second half of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Chain of Command", his Cardassian torturer tells him that his people just conquered Minos Korva and the Enterprise was destroyed in the battle in order to crush Picard's hopes of being rescued. It almost works until another Cardassian walks in and tells Picard that he'll be released back to the Enterprise.
- Torchwood: In "Adam", Adam Mind Rapes Ianto by inserting Fake Memories of gruesome murders when the latter comes across evidence that Adam is a malicious Backstory Invader, making Ianto believe that he is an insane serial killer and reducing him to begging Jack to lock him up. Luckily, despite a Lie Detector to the contrary, Jack refuses to believe that Ianto is bad enough to do such acts.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000: Part of the reason Horus fell to Chaos was a vision he received of the Imperium if his father's plans went unopposed: a brutal, oppressive theocracy standing as the antithesis of its planned rational ideals. In fact, it's more a vision of the Imperium today due to the Emperor being almost killed and becoming the God-Emperor.
Theatre
- After the End (2005): Mark lies about a nuclear war resulting in The End of the World as We Know It because he hopes to break Louise, make her give up all hope of her friends and family still being alive, and cause her to fall in love with him. It doesn't work.
- Othello: Iago slowly corrupts Othello into homicidal madness by convincing him that his wife Desdemona is having an affair. She is in fact doing nothing of the sort, and is deeply upset and confused by Othello's sudden cruelty towards her; by the time Othello realises he's been played, it's far too late.
- In Tosca, Scarpia (deliberately following the example of Iago) convinces Tosca that her lover Cavaradossi is cheating on her with Marchesa Attavanti and is having a tryst with her right at present — so that Tosca would run to confront the lovers and reveal the location of Cavaradossi's house to the police agents. While there may have been something between Cavaradossi and the Marchesa (Tito Gobbi, in particular, leaned towards that interpretation), at the moment in question Cavaradossi is busy helping his friend Angelotti hide from the police, and Scarpia knows it.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth breaks Cloud's will with bald-faced lies claiming that Cloud's just a clone and a puppet and not a real person. This works at first because Cloud's memories of his true identity are scrambled due to various traumatic experiences that occurred in the backstory. Once Cloud overcomes this identity crisis and remembers who he is, Sephiroth can't manipulate him this way anymore.
- Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade: Lord Lundgren's goal is to usurp the throne of Caelin by poisoning the marquess (his brother) and ordering bandits to kill Lyndis, the marquess' newly-discovered granddaughter. Knowing that the marquess is resisting out of a desire to meet Lyndis, Lundgren eventually lies to him that Lyndis has been killed, hoping the resulting despair will hasten his death. It fails, as Lyndis arrives in Caelin very soon after, defeats Lundgren, and introduces herself to the marquess.
- Persona 5:
- Futaba's mother Wakaba Isshiki was killed when Shido gave her a mental shutdown, causing her to be hit by a car so that he could take control of her cognitive psience research. He then bribed the authorities to lie about the circumstances, and so Futaba was told that Wakaba had loathed her and had been Driven to Suicide by the stress of looking after her. Futaba grew up believing this, and by the time the party first meets her, she's a borderline-suicidal Hikikomori, plagued by hallucinations caused by her guilt. Only with the Phantom Thieves' help does the truth come to light.
- At one point during Takemi's Confidant route, Oyamada informs her that Miwa, the Ill Girl she's been trying to develop a cure for, has passed away from her illness, leaving Takemi devastated. After the Phantom Thieves change Oyamada's heart, he admits that he lied to break Takemi's spirit, and that Miwa is actually still alive.
- Shadow the Hedgehog: After beating Iron Jungle, Eggman tells Shadow that he is a Shadow Android created by Eggman and not the real deal (an idea that was teased in Sonic Heroes). Depending on which missions you do, Shadow's reaction varies from killing Eggman for abandoning him, to vowing to become more powerful than the original Shadow (and killing Eggman for good measure), to succumbing to despair and deciding he should never have been created, to actually handling it pretty well. In the Golden Ending, Eggman admits he was lying and that Shadow was the real deal the whole time.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: In Chapter 4, Monokuma tries to trick Hina into committing Murder-Suicide against all of the other students by switching Sakura's real suicide note with a fake one that claims that Sakura's suicide was a result of everyone hating her for being Monokuma's mole. In actuality, Sakura committed suicide in order to stop the other students from killing one another, something that Monokuma reveals in order to drive the students into despair, though unfortunately for Monokuma it actually had the opposite effect.
Webcomics
- Daughter of the Lilies: The danger of Drath is that they intuitively know people's worst vulnerabilities and can attack them with a combination of painful truths, misdirections, and outright lies, tormenting them to the point that they can't tell the difference. The biggest lie the Drath try to sell is that things are never going to get better and people deserve the worst.
- Honesty Akuma Attack: Lila falsely accuses Marinette of cheating on a test, declaring that she's already informed Ms. Mendeleiev of her suspicions. Marinette nearly gets akumatized as a result, especially since Alya and the others present unquestioningly accept the accusations, but manages to swallow down her anger. Lila's plan proceeds to prove her undoing when the girl she claimed Marinette copied off of gets akumatized instead and interrogates Marinette, magically compelling her to speak the truth... only for Marinette to continue saying the same Cassandra Truths she'd been telling everyone from the start.
Web Videos
- Solid jj: "The Injustice League" has an interesting example. The titular Injustice League are the exact opposites of the normal Justice League, something Evil Batman and Robin exploit by claiming (among other things) not to support segregation, thereby implying that the normal Batman does. Batman insists (and Word of God confirms he's right) that they're lying to try and turn the Justice League against one another... until Evil Batman accidentally gets one right.
Western Animation
- Cyberchase: In the episode "A World Without Zero", Hacker's plot to take over Gollywood requires Mr. Zero to be out of the cybersite. Hacker's method of doing this involves sending a bunch of hate letters under different names in order to trick Mr. Zero into believing that everyone hates him so that he'll leave, which works until the kids expose Hacker's scheme.
- Futurama: Invoked in "My Three Suns". Fry has accidentally ingested the emperor of a desert planet, a living water being, and needs to expel him somehow before the locals resort to tearing him apart in a juicing machine. Bender hits upon the idea of making Fry cry the emperor out by lying that Leela, who's outside fending off the mob, has been captured and executed via the juicer. This succeeds in reducing Fry to tears, but five seconds later Leela enters the building very much alive having successfully driven off the locals, scuppering the plan.
- Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures: Attempted by Dr. Jeremiah Surd in the episode "Digital Doublecross" when he traps Jonny and Dr. Quest in virtual reality with each of them facing their worst nightmares. Dr. Quest sees a graveyard filled with his family and friends, with Jonny's voice accusingly telling him that Dr. Quest let all of them down, while Jonny is subjected to an image of his father telling him that he's The Load who always needs Race Bannon's help to get his sorry hide out of trouble and doesn't follow in his footsteps as a scientist and is a horrible disappointment. Race and Hadji get themselves free in the real world, and while Race ties up the Mooks, Hadji communicates to Dr. Quest to let him know what he's seeing is a digital fantasy, and Dr. Quest then saves Jonny, punching out his doppelganger while saying "No one talks to my son that way", then assures Jonny that everything the double said was garbage, and he was exceedingly proud of his son.
- In Miraculous Ladybug, Lila Rossi has an almost supernatural talent for making people believe whatever lies she tells, and when she strings enough lies together in one go, she can break nearly anyone's will.
- Rugrats: Angelica likes lying to the babies to scare them (for instance, saying that the world will end when the sky falls or that chickenpox turns you into a chicken).
- In season 5 of Samurai Jack, Jack believes that he had killed a group of mind-controlled children in self-defense. As the latest in a long string of failures and acts of violence, Jack makes preparations to commit seppuku in penance, attended by a ghostly samurai spirit encouraging him to do the "honorable" thing. The spirit is very nearly successful, but when it claims that the children died at his hand, Ashi points out the lie — they're still alive, ultimately leading to Jack breaking out of his depressive episode.
- In the Superman: The Animated Series episode "Little Big Head Man", Mxyzptlk wants revenge on Superman, and, finding Bizarro to be of sufficient power and perfectly lacking in intelligence, goes to Bizarro and convinces him that Superman and all his friends are laughing at him. Enraged at this, Bizarro immediately goes to Earth with some help from Mxyzptlk. Once there, Bizarro starts to attack Superman.