An Imbalance of Power: The Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow Controversy
by MOLLY LAMBERT
Woody Allen has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay this year for Blue Jasmine, his 16th nod in the category. He’s been nominated for the award more than any other writer in the history of the Oscars, and has won three times, for Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Midnight in Paris. Allen is 78 years old. His adopted daughter Dylan Farrow is 28. On February 1 she posted a long, poignantly written open letter to Allen on the New York Times website saying that Allen molested her in the family’s attic when she was 7 years old. The molestation accusations are not new; they first surfaced in 1992. But Dylan Farrow had not spoken about it on the record publicly until last year’s Vanity Fair profile of Mia Farrow by Maureen Orth, and this is the first time she has ever written about it. The letter is concise and harrowing. She addresses Allen’s collaborators, asking them point-blank how they would feel if Allen had molested their children. She asks of the woman who delivered Allen’s Cecil B. DeMille Award: “You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?”
What is the reputation of a great artist worth? It’s a question that has come up a lot recently, bringing with it a bunch of other existential questions, the kind that might be debated in a Woody Allen movie. Is the value of art ever not subjective? Should a person’s personal life affect how you feel about their work? Can we really separate the art from the artist? R. Kelly’s most recent album and the accompanying wave of critical praise surrounding it spurred Jessica Hopper to publish a Q&A in the Village Voice with Jim DeRogatis that detailed DeRogatis’s reporting on the sexual abuse allegations against Kelly from 15 years ago. But although Kelly was reevaluated, with music writers vowing to think twice before they gave him another rave, people seem less eager to denounce Allen. This seemed pretty racist to me. After all, the indie rock world’s romance with Kelly had always been fraught with a lot of weird tension about race, with Kelly uncomfortably painted by the white music press as a genius buffoon. I believe that R. Kelly is every bit as much of an artistic genius as Woody Allen, that his longevity on the charts belies a masterful understanding of music, structure, and yeah, lyrics. I also think he is a sexual predator and a monster. It is disgusting that he got off in 2008 using the “Little Man defense” to discredit a 27-minute sex tape that clearly showed him peeing on a 14-year-old victim. The jurors blamed “a lack of evidence.” Stories about Kelly’s history of behavior are not hard to come by. He’s known to hang out at Chicago high schools to pick up girls.
Public reaction to the Dylan Farrow story has been split along battle lines. Allen’s defenders believe that Dylan Farrow is lying and was coached by Mia Farrow at age 7 to tell a story about how Allen molested her to damage him and throw favor toward Mia in their contentious custody battle. Following that line of logic, Dylan has kept up this lie for 21 years, but may not even know she is lying because Mia somehow “brainwashed” her and implanted this false memory. If you believe Dylan, she was molested by her adoptive father figure when she was a young child after a series of escalating incidents in which he pushed the boundaries of her comfort with his physicality. Dylan writes: “He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic.”
Allen denies any of this happened. Dylan stands by her childhood memory, with all its specifics and details. There is something about the Woody Allen case that seems to make some people recoil, as if the very idea is so distasteful it shouldn’t even be discussed. To Dylan Farrow, “Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.” She asks us to “imagine a world that celebrates her tormenter,” her bleak joke being that of course that world exists, and she lives there.
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