Woody: woody have done it?
Feb 24, 2021
A NEW HBO documentary looks into the nearly 30-year old allegations that film director Woody Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan. Is it wrong that my first instinct is always to defend Allen? Shouldn’t I give the alleged victim the benefit of the doubt? Is this all about trying to protect his art, or to protect my own right to watch his movies?
Allen and his wife have already described the documentary as a hatchet job created in collaboration with the Farrows. His staunch defenders continue to defend him - staunchly. They say there is nothing new in the HBO documentary, and certainly nothing that further incriminates him. Nevertheless, social media is of course fizzing with indignation and urging the world to ban the 85-year old director forthwith.
The distortions are manifold. The “incredible intensity” of Allen’s relationship with his daughter was already known, and was included in the investigations that exonerated him. The allegation that Allen discussed his “inappropriate” feelings for Dylan with his therapist appears to have been invented. The suggestion that Allen “was there every morning before the kids woke up and he was there every night until they went to sleep”, even if it were true, shouldn’t in itself be grounds for suspicion, but in any case he only visited the Farrows’ Connecticut home twice a week. Some of the other allegations of Allen “grooming” Dylan were not even brought up during the investigations, and only surfaced years later.
Much depends on the testimony of Ronan Farrow, large parts of which is clearly unreliable and inaccurate. Ronan claims that at the age of five he already believed Allen’s relationship with his sister was “strange”, even though he was just four years old the last time he had even seen his father.
Robert Weide, who made a great documentary about Allen a few years ago, says he “stands by” him still. He says the HBO team are either “half-assed researchers” or “deliberately manipulative and dishonest”, and might indeed be both.
Weide writes:
[I]t’s worth repeating that Dylan Farrow could still take Allen to civil court in Connecticut and sue him for every penny he’s got. The statute of limitations won’t expire until Dylan turns 48. (Ronan could even be her lawyer!) But we’ll never see this happen, because their case would evaporate quicker than the Trump lawsuits claiming election fraud. Their charges make good, juicy copy, but in a court of law, they have nothing. Just ask yourself why the Farrows keep trying their case in the media and the court of public opinion, rather than a court of law?
Still, Allen supporters always mention the fact that Soon-Yi wasn’t his adopted daughter and that their relationship was never illegal, but they sometimes forget to add the obvious caveat: a 50-year old having a relationship with the teenage daughter of his long-term partner is at the very least problematic.
They also never fail to refer to another hatchet job by Moses Farrow, who describes his mother Mia as a brutally-damaged control freak who would think nothing about brainwashing her daughter. Again, we forget to add that Mia’s own psychological issues do not in themselves prove that Allen is innocent or that Dylan is lying or confabulating or reciting her mother.
Nevertheless, all the allegations focus on one event in August 1992, the details and location of which have continued to change over the years, but which has now settled into the claim that Allen told the 7-year old Dylan to lie down in a crawl space and play with a toy train while he fingered her. This, let’s not forget, was after the relationship between Allen and Farrow had collapsed in an acrimonious scandal.
So, we are supposed to believe that Allen was allowed to take Dylan unsupervised into the attic of Farrow’s Connecticut home, where he seized this one and only opportunity to molest his daughter at the height of a bitter custody battle.
Woody’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing - which fell victim to the Woke Taliban last year - explains that he never wanted children but he went along with Mia’s adoption mania. He really enjoyed the company of Moses, whom he taught fishing, and then “fell in love” with Dylan. Throughout he ignored the red flags:
Every single Farrow cursed with flaws that ran the gamut from the Athenian stage to The Lost Weekend - except, it seemed, for Mia. I was amazed how she could grow up tiptoeing through that minefield of craziness and come out charming, productive, likeable, and unscathed. But she hadn’t been unscathed, and I should’ve been more alert.
After Mia Farrow gave birth to Ronan, or Satchel or Harmon or Seamus or whatever the hell he was called at the time (she changed her mind constantly), she went cold on Woody, he claims. Their relationship, never really one of love, “continued to ebb away in ever large chunks”. After shutting Woody out, Mia “expropriated” Ronan/Satchel, took him into her bedroom and insisted on breastfeeding him and sleeping in the nude with her son until he was 11 years old. There are suggestions that Mia is projecting when she talks about Woody’s inappropriate relationship with Dylan.
All in all, it was all very dysfunctional:
As Soon-Yi pointed out, Mia enjoyed adopting, loved the excitement, like one buys a new toy; she liked the saintly reputation, the admiring publicity, but she didn’t like raising the kids and didn’t really look after them… It is no wonder that two adopted children would be suicides. A third would contemplate it, and one lovely daughter who struggled with being HIV-positive into her thirties was left by Mia to die alone of AIDS in a hospital on Christmas morning.
As his steadfast friend Weide puts it, “it’s so much easier to convict him in the court of public opinion, especially with such lazy fact checkers at their disposal and no testimony from the other side”. It is likely that Woody Allen will go to his grave with these allegations clouding his career and dominating all our memories of him. This, presumably, is what Mia Farrow wanted.
