In a recent interview with journalist Jorge Lanata, filmmaker, author, and gifted comic Woody Allen suggested he deserved to be the “poster boy” for the #MeToo movement, and protested the fact that he was being mentioned in the same breath with the likes of producer Harvey Weinstein.
“I should be the poster boy for the #MeToo movement, because I have worked in movies for 50 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of actresses, hundreds, and not a single one—big ones, famous ones, ones starting out—have ever, ever, not a single one, ever suggested any kind of impropriety at all,” Allen said.
Allen complained that “in any situation where anyone is accused of something unjustly, this is a sad thing. I think everybody would agree with that. Everyone wants justice to be done. If there is something like the #MeToo movement now, you root for them, you want them to bring to justice these terrible harassers, these people that do all these terrible things. And I think that’s a good thing. What bothers me is that I get linked in with them. People who have been accused by 20 women, 50 women, 100 women of abuse and abuse and abuse—and I, who was only accused by one woman in a child-custody case which was looked at and proven to be untrue, I get lumped in with these people.”
In the age of #MeToo, celebrities like Natalie Portman, who’s been in a separate battle against Prime Minister Netanyahu, have pledged they’ll make no more movies with him, with Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet donating their pay from Allen’s last film to charitable causes. On the other hand, Oscar winners Penélope Cruz and Cate Blanchett, both for Allen’s films, suggested Farrow’s accusations should be reexamined by legal experts—25 years after Connecticut state legal experts found no evidence to substantiate the then 7-year-old child’s claim in the midst of her mother’s custody battle with Allen.”
According to Vanity Fair, Scarlett Johansson, who’s made three films with Woody Allen, had dinner with him last Friday.
So, it’s down to Portman’s judgment versus Johansson’s. We go with the SodaStream lady.
In August 1992, Allen was accused by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, then seven years old, of having sexually assaulted her in the home of her adoptive mother, actress Mia Farrow, in Bridgewater, Connecticut.
Allen has repeatedly denied the allegation. In 2014, in a NY Times op-ed, he wrote: “I naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand because of course, I hadn’t molested Dylan and any rational person would see the ploy for what it was. Common sense would prevail. After all, I was a 56-year-old man who had never before (or after) been accused of child molestation. I had been going out with Mia for 12 years and never in that time did she ever suggest to me anything resembling misconduct. Now, suddenly, when I had driven up to her house in Connecticut one afternoon to visit the kids for a few hours, when I would be on my raging adversary’s home turf, with half a dozen people present, when I was in the blissful early stages of a happy new relationship with the woman I’d go on to marry — that I would pick this moment in time to embark on a career as a child molester should seem to the most skeptical mind highly unlikely. The sheer illogic of such a crazy scenario seemed to me dispositive.”
“Meanwhile the Connecticut police turned for help to a special investigative unit they relied on in such cases, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital,” Allen continued. “This group of impartial, experienced men and women whom the district attorney looked to for guidance as to whether to prosecute, spent months doing a meticulous investigation, interviewing everyone concerned, and checking every piece of evidence. Finally they wrote their conclusion which I quote here: ‘It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992… 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.’”
Dylan Farrow has repeated the allegation several times as an adult. Her first public comment was in an interview with Maureen Orth for Vanity Fair in 2013, followed by an open letter in the New York Times in 2014, a Los Angeles Times op-ed in December 2017, and an interview with Gayle King for CBS This Morning in January 2018. Allen responded in the 2014 op-ed above, and in a 2018 statement to CBS, denying the allegation.
Speaking to Lanata this week, Allen repeated his denial of Farrow’s allegations: “Of course not, this is just so crazy,” he said. “This is something that has been thoroughly looked at 25 years ago. […] For it to come back now, I mean, my God. It’s a terrible thing to accuse a person of.”