In Defense of Woody Allen -- Don't Lump Him in With the Real Sexual Predators

There was a story online the other day about how the actress Ellen Page was joining the many voices decrying the perpetrators of sexual abuse whose actions have been brought to light — thankfully — in recent weeks she made particular note of the director Brett Ratner who is among the accused and outed Ms. Page in front of an entire cast and crew when she was still sexually unsure. However in sharing her story and making her important points about sexual abuse she did what so many and lumped Woody Allen in with the many celebrities accused of abusing women.

Doing so is lazy and more than that inaccurate and more than that a lie. Allen, of course, was charged with molesting his daughter, Dylan, in the early 1990s. In that case there were two investigations but no charges were brought against Allen, he even passed a lie detector test. Indeed there are more witnesses (most notably Allen’s son, Moses) to the fact that Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow coached Dylan. (This was after Farrow discovered that Allen was having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi.)

In Allen’s own words: “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. Notwithstanding, Mia insisted that I had abused Dylan and took her immediately to a doctor to be examined. Dylan told the doctor she had not been molested. Mia then took Dylan out for ice cream, and when she came back with her the child had changed her story. The police began their investigation; a possible indictment hung in the balance. I very willingly took a lie-detector test and of course passed because I had nothing to hide. I asked Mia to take one and she wouldn’t.”

Sexual predators have histories; they have behavior patterns. Jerry Sandusky (the football coach found guilty of multiple acts of pedophilia) was a serial pedophile. The greater majority of the convicted pedophiles have had multiple complainants against them. There is no reliable record of any pedophile who acted but once. Yet no other child or adult besides Dylan has accused Woody Allen of sexual abuse. The accusations come from a woman who had no qualms about breaking up the marriages of Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn marriages, when she was about the same as Soon Yi when she took up with Woody.

Moses Farrow told People magazine the following: “Of course Woody did not molest my sister,” says Moses, who is estranged from Farrow and many of his siblings and is close to Allen and Soon-Yi. “She loved him and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him. The day in question, there were six or seven of us in the house. We were all in public rooms and no one, not my father or sister, was off in any private spaces. My mother was conveniently out shopping. I don t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible.”

“Our mother has misled the public into believing it was a happy household of both biological and adopted children,” he says. “From an early age, my mother demanded obedience and I was often hit as a child. She went into unbridled rages if we angered her, which was intimidating at the very least and often horrifying, leaving us not knowing what she would do.”

Woody Allen is guilty of having been a terrible boyfriend, but to call him a child molester or lump him in with men who have raped and otherwise sexually abused women is grossly unfair. Ellen Page and others should know better and do better.