A man can be abusive towards his wife/girlfriend/random girl even if he is not a psychopath, even if he is very nice and polite towards all his friends and strangers, if he is a good student, productive in his job, or a Nobel price winner. Towards a specific person in a specific relationship, his behavior may be completely different.

A variation:

• Friends, strangers, and society in general normalize the abuse, spending cognitive effort finding ways to rationalize it. Possibly because he is a good student, etc., they try to fit him into the "good student box" instead of the "wife-beater box".