The Case for Woody Allen's Innocence

This past weekend’s announcement that Hachette publishing was dropping Woody Allen’s memoir  “A Propos of Nothing” did not sit very well with me.

According to THR, Hachette Book Group decided to give the rights back to Allen for his book, after the publishing company received backlash, which of course started with the Farrow clan (including Ronan Farrow), and reached a fever pitch when a massive walkout staged by its employees occurred. In a statement, the company said it was a “difficult” decision.

We've been covering the Woody Allen saga left and right ever since Dylan Farrow's sexual abuse allegations against her 82-year-old father were reignited courtesy of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements in late 2017. Mia Farrow and her kids, Ronan and Dylan, have vehemently stayed true to their convictions. Suffice to say, Allen's reputation took a major hit; his contract with Amazon annulled and his films now blacklisted from the U.S. market.

Although some of the recent actors and actresses who have worked with Allen the last decade raised a spark akin to a domino effect in the industry, with Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig, Rebecca Hall, and Timothée Chalamet all expressing remorse in having worked with the director in the past, while others who have worked with Allen, such as Javier Bardem, Cate Blanchett, Diane Keaton, and Alec Baldwin refused to adhere to the mob mentality and condemn Allen.

I assume these actors have read enough about the case to raise their own conspicuous doubts. If you are the kind of person who is open-minded and would rather inform themself rather than be lazy and just trust inauthentic views of the Woody Allen case, then by all means, read Robert Weide’s excellent dissections of Allen vs Farrow which were posted on 12.13.17, 5.30.16, and, most recently, 1.14.18.

Weide, and many others with enough knowledge to know better that to accuse Allen, have made the case that Woody Allen was alone with Dylan Farrow in his apartment countless times over the years and could have abused her, without witnesses, any of those times. Child molestation is a compulsive illness, it demands repetition. The fact that Allen's alleged sex abuse history is limited to just Dylan Farrow, that one time, goes against everything sexual abuse psychologists have been saying the last 100 years about sex abuse.

Ronan and Dylan’s brother, Moses Farrow, has vehemently defended his dad, Woody Allen, over the years, saying “My mother [Mia Farrow] drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister, and I hated him for her for years. I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi.”

Moses was present before, during and after the alleged event.

However, Ronan Farrow, a reputable journalist, who helped uncover the Harvey Weinstein scandal for The New Yorker in 2017 (and signed a three-year deal this week with HBO to head up investigative documentaries), stands by his assertions that sexual abuse did happen, but his bias has also clearly been shown throughout this ordeal.

I am here to present to you the facts, and one thing that needs to be mentioned is that there is no evidence to support Dylan’s claim. But there’s a fair amount of evidence and ample indications that, as Moses stated, Mia Farrow, enraged by Woody’s romance with Soon-Yi Previn, made it all up to get back at Woody during an early ’90s custody battle. Mia’s case isn’t helped when you find out that three days before the alleged abuse, having learned that Woody Allen was having an affair with Soon-Yi, witnesses have attested that Mia Farrow said she would “find a way to stop him.” Mia went as far as to pressure then-nanny Monica Thompson to support the molestation accusations she was shooting against Allen and said another babysitter had serious doubts about the molestation accusation.

According to the Supreme Court document, Dylan Farrow never said that Woody Allen took her to an attic before Mia Farrow videotaped her:

Because she was already uncomfortable with Mr. Allen’s inappropriate behavior toward Dylan and because she believed that her concerns were not being taken seriously enough by Dr. Schultz and Dr. Coates, Ms. Farrow videotaped Dylan’s statements. Over the next twenty-four hours, Dylan told Ms. Farrow that she had been with Mr. Allen in the attic and that he had touched her privates with his finger.

The nanny, Monica Thompson, testified in sworn affidavits that “the tape was made over the course of at least two and perhaps three days. I was present when Ms. Farrow made a portion of that tape outdoors. I recall Ms. Farrow saying to Dylan at that time, ‘Dylan, what did daddy do . . . and what did he do next? Dylan appeared not to be interested, and Ms. Farrow would stop taping for a while and then continue.”

The tape had also been stopped and restarted several times, and even with a splice.

Since the very beginning, it has long been suspected that Mia Farrow had influenced, and even coached, her 7-year-old adoptive daughter, Dylan. Both Moses and Soon-Yi Previn have spoken out about the abuses they suffered in the hands of Mia and even spoke out as witnesses to the coaching of Dylan.

If Mia is lying about the accusations against Allen, then that can only mean that she coached Dylan to make the claims that she did. It’s a repulsive act in manipulation that should be condemned to the highest degree. Let us not forget that Woody Allen gladly accepted to take a polygraph test, which he passed, but Mia refused.  

Do people also forget that two independent teams of experts claimed Allen was innocent?

The first, a 1993 Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic report, concluded that “Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.” The report went on to add, “In developing our opinion, we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”

The second, another report from the New York State child welfare which stated, “No credible evidence was found that the child named in this report (Dylan) has been abused or maltreated. This report has, therefore, been considered unfounded.”

All of what I’ve laid out here is fact. It was officially released to the public to inform them about the findings. But in this post-#MeToo era of always believing the victim, people are acting as if the Yale/New Haven report never existed.

This is a polarizing and infuriating scandal and the noise around it is not about to quell anytime soon. And yet, in an age where information is abundant and educating yourself on just about anything is just a click away, the disinformation campaign led by the Farrows is dangerous and destructive to the #MeToo movement, whose historic significance should not be dampened and taken advantage of by opportunists.