For Woody Allen haters, facts aren’t in the script

I have been a journalist for 25 years and during that time I’ve covered various subjects that spark passionate and not always entirely rational responses, from Julian Assange to Israel. But the one that triggers the most extreme reactions is, unquestionably, Woody Allen.

The 87-year-old filmmaker made one of his increasingly rare public appearances last week, walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of his 50th film, Coup de Chance. Once Allen was simply a revered director. Now his presence causes protests, and in Venice onlookers chanted, “No rape culture!”

This shift began a decade ago when, in 2014, the Golden Globes gave Allen the Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award. In response, two of Allen’s estranged children — his adopted daughter Dylan and his biological son Ronan, both of whom he shares with his (very) ex-partner Mia Farrow — reamplified their mother’s 1992 claim that Allen had once molested Dylan when she was seven, around the time of his deeply acrimonious break-up with Farrow.

Like most people, I hadn’t given much thought to this in the intervening two decades until Dylan and Ronan started writing about it, and there’s a good reason for that: no evidence was found to back it up. In the 1990s, Allen’s affair with Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi, who was then 21, was seen as the far queasier scandal and, unlike the claim of child molestation, it had clearly happened. Allen and Soon-Yi have now been married for nearly 30 years and raised two daughters together, so the outrage about their relationship has become blunted. Instead, it’s Dylan’s allegation that suddenly became — and remains — the focus.

I started writing about Allen because I was surprised at how quickly it became accepted wisdom that he is a paedophile. I have covered a lot of cases involving high-profile sexual predators, and it seemed clear to me that Allen’s case was very different. In 2019 I interviewed Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two men who accuse Michael Jackson of repeatedly molesting them as children. A member of the Jackson family tweeted that the only reason I defended Allen but damned Jackson was because the former is, like me, Jewish. I’m not sure how they would explain my many damning articles about Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski, who are also Jewish but, as I said, rationality is not in great supply when it comes to discussions about Allen. The reason I think the Allen case is different from these and other well-known sex abuse cases — from R Kelly to Bill Cosby — is because it objectively is. All of those cases involved allegations and repeated patterns of behaviour, charges and convictions. Allen’s involves one allegation, and he was never charged.

Naively, I thought that if I presented the facts there could be some kind of moderate consensus. So I read the two very thorough contemporary investigations into the original allegation. Neither found any evidence that Dylan had been abused. Ronan and Dylan’s psychologists stated in Allen and Farrow’s 1993 custody case that they did not believe Allen abused Dylan, and Allen’s long-term therapist echoed this. I interviewed Allen and Farrow’s adopted son Moses, and he defended his father and said Farrow had coached her children to turn against Allen after she discovered his affair with Soon-Yi. In 2020 I interviewed Allen, ostensibly about his latest film, but instead we just discussed the allegation, which he was perfectly happy to do. Everything he said to me was the same as what he said in 1992 when first asked about this by journalists, and it’s what he said to Variety last week in Venice: he didn’t do it, there has never been any evidence he did it, but people seem to want to believe he did it, so what can he do? My requests to interview those who believe otherwise, including Mia and Ronan Farrow, were ignored.

When a certain kind of person online wants to shout at me, they call me a “Woody Allen defender”. But I’m not defending Allen — I’m a journalist, not an activist, and it’s entirely possible that Allen has done awful things. Certainly his affair with Soon-Yi was — to borrow a phrase — unwise but not illegal, given that she was the adopted daughter of his girlfriend at the time (but not his adopted daughter or stepdaughter, contrary to popular misconception). His reported socialising with the now dead paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein absolutely calls his judgment into question, to say the least. (Allen’s spokesman said this year the director never “spent time with [Epstein] without Soon-Yi also being present”.) It’s true that powerful men have often dodged scrutiny, but Allen was as investigated as it’s possible to be, and no charges ever resulted. And yet so many people continue to act as if it were otherwise.

Whenever I write about Allen, I get two reactions: a ton of online rage from people who treat facts as irrelevancies, and quiet messages from journalists — often American, often film writers — saying they don’t believe Allen is a paedophile, but can’t say so openly because of the online reaction. Trashing Allen is now proof that one is a modern, thoughtful person, as much as liking his films once was.

I used to say that as a child Allen taught me through his films how to be a Jewish New Yorker. But as an adult he taught me something more important: to be wary of people who prefer emotional certainties to facts and an open mind. Allen will be absolutely fine. But a society that confuses mob consensus with due process is not a healthy one.