Dylan Farrow spoke out in her first television interview on CBS this Thursday morning about the sexual abuse she’s long claimed she suffered at the hands of her father, Woody Allen. It’s a pretty hard watch.
Farrow first wrote publicly about the abuse allegations in The New York Times in 2014 saying, “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: When I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me.”
She replayed that scene this morning for Gayle King, going on to say that Allen was inappropriate at other times, following her around the house, with constant cuddling and touching. Behavior, she says, he did not display with her younger brother, Ronan. “He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on.” The director has always insisted that there is no truth to the allegations and continues to do so, saying in a statement to CBS, “I never molested my daughter—as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.” His claim has long been that Farrow was coached by her mother, Mia Farrow. No criminal charges were ever filed. Farrow steadfastly stands by her story, saying, “He’s lying. He’s been lying for so long.”
Allen’s statement to CBS morning:
"Even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time’s Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn’t make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter – as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”
In recent months, actors have begun to denounce working with Allen since the launch of the Time’s Up initiative. Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig, who worked with him on 2012’s To Rome With Love, expressed regret and said she would “not work for him again“. Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet, who star in Allen’s next film A Rainy Day In New York, have both said they are donating their fees for their appearances to charity.
These defections from Allen’s camp, years later, feel like obvious and calculating PR moves. Who could say with a straight face they didn’t know about the allegations when they shot in 2012?
Ok, if we’re going to get into the Woody thing I feel obligated to link to some points of view from the other side.
Robert Weide predictably defends Woody again. No, he’s not an ‘objective, neutral observer’ and Slate slagged him a couple times, but he does aggregate certain facts that should be known to anyone wanting to weigh in.
Moses Farrow, Dylan’s brother, believes she was coached by Mia and recounts a tale of Mommy Dearest-esque nastiness in the Farrow household:
Here’s the actual summary of the investigative report by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital from 1993:
I’m the last person worthy to judge the validity of psychiatric interviews of 7-year-olds claiming to have been molested, but it’s an interesting data point all the same.
I don’t know what to think on this one, except that I’m not at all sure a single accusation which was investigated 25 years ago ought to be put in the same boat as multiple-accusation affairs like Weinstein or Cosby. I also don’t think lumping in the Soon Yi relationship (which is its own thing and certainly shows Woody to be both fond of much-younger women and a man of astonishing insensitivity) with the Dylan molestation charges makes a whole lot of sense either, but people have a tendency to just put it all together into a ‘Woody is a creepo’ miasmoid.
There’s a big anti-Woody groundswell now with people like Greta Gerwig speaking out against him, Timothy Chalomet scrambling to distance himself by donating his Woody paycheck, etc. The #MeToo bus has been raring to run over Woody for a while, and now it’s happening.
I’m not sure it should. But Allen v. Farrow is such a sordid shitshow that you’d better put on your galoshes if you want to wade in.
Sure, I’m not commenting on if Allen deserves to be dragged into this. Just criticizing those that are damning him years after they had essentially all of the information/accusations. It’s been a widely known accusation for decades!
Oh good, it’s time for our annual deep dive into the psyches of the Allen and Farrow families.
Let me relate my own deep dive in the psyches of my own distant and confused experience with this, because now i actually wonder if there is something like a “Mommy Dearest” phenomenon.
My mother, as a child, went through counseling and found repressed memories of sexual assault by her father - i need to say this is related to us, not conveyed to us at the time, so to speak. Her mother and father divorced when she was a teenager, he literally running off with the tall blonde German nanny. We occasionally saw him when i was a pre-teen on random, awkward vacations. My mother convinced her family that he was horrible and they should break up all contact with him. After she these memories became a part of her life, she decided that her mother was just as bad as her father, and demanded her brothers and sisters break up all contact with her as well; which they refused to do. So she broke all contact with them, and for the last… 25 years, has had virtually no contact with a single member of her family.
There was something about the whole thing that was almost like she were relating a confused, garbled version of Mommy Dearest, the film… it was all confused, the stories were never the same, one thing was said one year and another thing said another year. Eventually this became the new normal, and we (my sister and I) essentially never saw our relatives on her side ever again.
And then one day…nothing. No more stories about abuse, no more survivors guilt. It was as if the film just ended and… gone. As the years pass and we met our parents on holidays and at other times, it was as this life-changing revelation of abuse never happened at all, like a Stalinist purging of history. Never mentioned, never referenced, never discussed. My sister privately confided in me she had started to doubt anything had ever happened, and that maybe it was some kind of confused, garbled transference over her anger at her parent’s divorce mixed with a psychologist leading her on, and she blithely going along with it. She has a history of taking bad advice from doctors, doctors leading her to many unnecessary or improper or badly thought out surgical procedures, ect.
When news that her father died, I was visiting them at their cabin during a holiday. She broke down in tears and was inconsolable. When her mother died I, with the whole family, went to her funeral. I was eager to see all the cousins that i’d missed over the years. I was welcomed, if somewhat with cool indifference; she was a pariah though and they basically asked her to stand in a corner and please don’t make a scene and (if you would be so kind) die in a fire and go away. After the funeral she was smiling ear to ear singing “ding dong the witch is dead!”.
Frankly i don’t think at that moment i’ve ever more confused about what the hell had really happened.
That movie, though, i swear it traumatized a generation. There was something so existentially horrifying about that film that seemed to strike everyone (of that age) who watched it to the core. I don’t think there is a single film within 10-20 years on either side of that film that caused such profound distress as Mommy Dearest. It’s like every 1950-60s middle class white girl’s version of the Worst Thing that could Happen to Me.
So per Samantha Bee, anytime you have a bad sexual experience because your partner was an ass it is fine to blog there name all over the internet? Does this apply to males and females?
And this is where society is leading?
The child-parent dynamic is pretty damn complicated.
Given what you’ve read about Woody Allen, would you trust him with your impressionable, arty, movie fanatic 17 year old daughter?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
That’s not what she said.
Maybe not but it is implied in her approval of what was done to Ansari. She said nothing about not outing him.
It’s also not what she implied. You’re using too broad of stroke with your label of bad sexual experience. There are different kinds. This one is specific.
Whatever. I am not going to rehash what we have spent seemingly forever rehashing.
And what makes Samantha Bee an expert source on this? It’s like famous peoples opinions are worth more for some reason. :)
Well you can listen to whomever you want, but i will assure you, if you are in the midst of intimacy with your partner, and you tell your partner your not comfortable, and the next thing they do is shove their fingers in your mouth, it’s probably fine to say you felt uncomfortable and violated, publicly. That is not sex or gender specific. My guess only your friends and family will care because… not a celebrity. That’s what made this explode.
Bad sexual experiences. can just be two teens fumbling in the dark… not necessarily pressure or force involved.
I mean… of course it is. Most nations in the world don’t treat women as human beings, I wouldn’t expect their representatives to magically be better than the rest of them.
“People like me had to wade through a sea of reprehensible dicks to build the world we now enjoy, and part of enjoying that world is setting a higher standard for sex than just Not Rape,” said Bee. “And women get to talk about it if men don’t live up to those standards — especially if that man wrote a book about How to Sex Good,” she added, pointing to a picture of Ansari’s 2015 book, Modern Romance: An Investigation.
That looks like an implied approval to oust Ansari me.
Doesn’t that take us out of the realm of the criminal, though? Isn’t it possible to call someone out as a jerk and a lousy lay and all the rest of it, without at the same time calling for them to be run out of their profession on a rail?
If this is all just about having a Larger Conversation About Sexual Mores, great, but I don’t see what that has to do with calls to shut down Aziz’s TV show, which some people at least have made.
Or, if the assertion is that Aziz did actually commit assault, that’s a separate matter. The goalposts seem to be flying around a great deal, here.
Men have always wanted sex, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t brazen enough to push for a blowjob on the first date throughout most of civilization. What changed, Sam?
Oust him from his job? No. Oust him as someone who says he respects women in the public but maybe doesn’t in private, possibly. And will that hurt his job prospects, well that depends on his job doesn’t it?
We moved away from the realm of criminality a long time ago.
“What she experienced with Ansari is not OK. But do we have language yet for intimate encounters that teeter on the edge of absolute sexual assault/abuse?” she wondered. “I don’t think we do. We’ve lived in a misogynistic world with misogynistic sex for so long. We thought this “bad sex” was normal. Until someone spoke up and said, this is NOT normal. This is not OK.”
Just going to mention there are several points of view in this article. They don’t agree. That’s just one.
I don’t think it should be part of MeToo. I know it’s not criminal as she describes it. I still don’t think it was okay even as the outlier it is… this weirdo not sexual assault but not okay, to some encounter…and it’s singular. Almost everyone else has several accusations, he has one.
Michael Douglas?!? Prepare to be flabbergasted.
