Woody Allen has written an op-ed for The New York Times responding to his adopted daughter Dylan’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her when she was seven years old.
Clearly this is an awful and sordid business, and ultimately a lot of people are going to believe what they want to believe. I haven’t read all the court documents and have no wish to do so.
Allen makes a strong (if one-sided) case that Dylan’s mother Mia Farrow is unstable and vengeful. But the most recent accusations came not from Mia but from Dylan herself, now a 28-year-old married woman living hundreds of miles from her mother. And as I noted before, a number of readers of Dylan’s account who themselves experienced sexual abuse as children wrote that the events she described were very familiar to them.
Finally Stephen Marche notes a number of moments in Allen’s films and plays which, in retrospect, can make one shudder a bit.