Three key women in Fox’s life are shown to enable his behavior by believing his lies when it suits their own needs. Fox also benefits from the self-protective behavior of institutions that dismiss him on false pretenses while covering up his crimes, allowing the cycle of abuse to continue.

Like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, Fox easily intuits grown women’s desires and makes a show of giving them what they need, assuring them, just as much as his child targets, that they are special. During the hiring process at Langhorne, he first tries to win Cady over by excelling at the teaching demo. When he finds that this is not enough, he finds out Cady’s personal likes and dislikes from her niece and then orchestrates the conversation to bring them up. He seduces Cady with the promise of a like-minded, equal friendship. Because Cady has often felt lonely, this is enormously appealing to her. Her former doubts regarding Fox disappear when he aligns himself with her specific tastes.

By playing to people’s vulnerabilities and unmet emotional needs, Fox short-circuits the systems of communal responsibility that should protect his targets. Cady admires the publication of his prize-winning poem, but she doesn’t ever read it. If she had, she might have realized that the work was not original. Nor does Cady follow up on personal suspicions. Once she’s decided that Fox is a friend, similar to herself, she doesn’t call up personal references to find out why Fox might have been previously dismissed. Instead, she lets old recommendation letters exist at surface value. Fox is consistently able to get new jobs since he knows that exclusive private schools will broker a deal to avoid scandal. These failures of institutional leadership illustrate The Importance of Communal Responsibility. Again and again, Fox’s predatory behavior is made possible by the breakdown of community, as adults protect themselves at the expense of children.

Katy, too, abets Fox by letting him use her as a reference, a personal bank, and a companion. She gives him personal information about her aunt so that he might impress her just as she helped him write his college papers in the past. Katy—whose name, Katy Cady, suggests her status as a blank receptacle of her aunt’s influence—is even less inquisitive than her aunt. She accepts everything that Fox tells her as truth. She perpetuates his delusions of persecution by validating his opinion that he has been wronged by every institution he’s been associated with, from Columbia University to the Kent School. She encourages his arrogance by insisting that he is above the people who work at these places. Katy so desperately wants Fox to be the romantic lead in her life that she willingly ignores his pattern of behavior, never questioning why he loses so many jobs nor why he can’t commit to her.

Imogene Hood falls into this pattern as well. She falls in love with Fox very quickly, in just a month or two. Imogene senses that Fox has a fear of sexual intimacy, which she then suspects is due to his own childhood abuse. She surmises this from his strong reaction to the novel Lolita, which she misinterprets as an expression of strong morals. Instead, Fox is simply unwilling to see how similar he is to Humbert, the monstrous figure who narrates that novel. Ironically, his profound lack of self-awareness is the trait he has most clearly in common with Humbert. Imogene is smart enough to recognize that Fox is hiding something from her yet never bold enough to find out what that is. For example, “a part of Imogene’s brain understands that [he] will never seize her hand, kiss her […] even as, knowing this, she is resolved to not know” (206). This decision to “not know” is central to the novel, made again and again by different characters and for different reasons. Both individuals and institutions choose not to know, either because they need what Fox pretends to offer them or because knowing would imply the responsibility to act. Imogene, like Katy, makes excuses for Fox because he claims that they have a deep rapport that could lead to marriage. When he hints that he has experienced child abuse in his past (without evidence), her perception of him is confirmed: “He is a wounded being” whom can’t be asked too much of (215). She tells this to Zwender, noting that Fox told her this in confidence and asked her, much as he did his child targets, to never tell anyone. Thus, all these women, feeling lonely and susceptible to flattery, deliberately ignore warning signs, such as not meeting any of Fox’s family or friends, in order to keep their own dreams of companionship alive.