Mia Farrow's son -- Ronan Seamus Farrow -- really creeps me out!

I mean one of the most revealing damning things about McMartin/Friedmans sort of cases is how the purported victims all recanted in adulthood

shakey's otm there - I've always, always been a "believe the testimony of the victim" person and the McMartin case is a very very heavy thing to consider.

I said this upthread somewhere but the only parallel case I can think of is John Phillips - but even there Mackenzie claims the incidents didn't begin until she was 18, and at the time she dropped this bombshell Phillips had already been dead 8 years. so even that's stretching it. there's no real precedent for this kind of case afaik. at least, not one involving a celebrity of Allen's stature and the related public scrutiny.

could charges be brought at this point? I'm not even clear on that much.

idk the mcmartin case at all. but at least from the documentary on it, the nauseating thing about the friedman case was that he DID molest kids but the prosecutorial panic added a bunch of false accusations to his tab. right?

bady's point is that leaning on the few high-profile cases of false accusations is a really shitty mental convenience, taking anecdote over data. that sullivan blogpost lets someone air out the duke rape case one more time, smh. we'll never be able to talk about rape in this culture again w/o someone bringing up the duke lacrosse team.

he DID molest kids but the prosecutorial panic added a bunch of false accusations to his tab. right

this is not right

uh can you flesh it out then? my memory may faulty but god help me if i get through it again

the dad had child porn, and appears to have engaged in some possibly criminal behavior, but not with the kids in his class (possibly his son, and possibly one other case he confessed to in a letter iirc)

that thing is so tangled... dad pled guilty to try and spare his son (who had also been implicated)

the McMartin case also that was filled with all sorts of bizarre moral panic devil worship stuff, it doesn't seem like a good cautionary tale for pro-Woody concern trolls to rely on

Some of the accusations were described as "bizarre",[5] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting Satanic ritual abuse panic.[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins' lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[20]

"could charges be brought at this point? I'm not even clear on that much."

No they can't. It's passed the statute of limitations.

was thinking some of those Catholic church cases were decades old...? but maybe those are different somehow.

The catholic church cases in the USA were civil cases, not criminal cases. Dylan could presumably sue Mr. Allen, if she could produce compelling evidence for a tort.

Addendum: The most compelling evidence in the catholic church cases was contained in catholic church internal documents obtained through subpoena. Not very likely there is a trove of documentary evidence for her to produce on her behalf, but it would be nice to see some justice done.

yeah if it's just her word against his... I guess public defamation is really her only recourse

"was thinking some of those Catholic church cases were decades old...? but maybe those are different somehow"

Most of those cases were not actually able to be tried due to the statute of limitations.

A friend of mine just compared Woody Allen to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 'they may be horrible people but I'll continue enjoying their work'.

I'm genuinely undecided about this myself. But the more I think about it, the more his movies are ruined for me.

I don't mean, I'm taking a moral stand (like, can't in good conscience enjoy/ support work by someone so reprehensible, so I'm boycotting it), nor is it just a matter of negative association (like, can't enjoy his work without being reminded of his IRL despicableness). I mean, I find my aesthetic judgment of his works, his later works (as opposed to his "early funny ones") affected and altered in light of all this.

It's difficult if not impossible to disentangle ethical and aesthetic judgments in the case of a filmmaker like WA, when so many of his movies are-- not extraordinary visual or poetic works-- but psychological-ethical inquiries themselves. (In this respect like 19th-century novels.)

The more I think about it, the more I'm struck by the… shallowness, jejunosity of his movies' seemingly deep existential/ ethical preoccupations. The smugness. And the self-serving.

Came across an interview in which WA says how "lucky" it was for him that Farrow found those nude pictures of SY. Lucky. (Lucky for me you had such a devastating experience, Mia.) "The heart wants what the heart wants," and WA got his heart's desire, now happily married to Soon Yi.

I think of the cozy contentedness of Michael Caine (wiser and happier now) at the end of Hannah and Her Sisters. Landau's smugness (wiser and happier now) at the end of C&M.

What I can't help but see now in the movies is a kind of smug self-congratulation: WA's own self-congratulation for attaining-- beyond good and evil, as it were-- a (self)knowledge most of us pathetic deluded mortals (as he sees us) hide from ourselves. The smugness of the adolescent nihilist, yet something worse, more monstrous. Someone who flaunts his existential angst and thereby immunizes/ excuses himself from ethical judgment-- because (having achieved that harsh existential self-knowledge) he transcends ethical judgment. After all, ethical/ moral judgment has something naive/ banal/ loserish about it (like, only people who (need to) believe in God, like the blind rabbi, or embittered losers like the WA character in C&M, or writers of "Hollywood endings" think that way). The hero bravely bears the awful truth: he got away with his crime, and found happiness, and this gives him insight into the meaninglessness of the universe and the foolishness of all mortals (including WA's characters and his audience). The hero-filmmaker's mind is large enough to incorporate the ethical voice ("conscience") in himself-- or voice it as a character in his films-- but it's subordinated and detached and weak. It doesn't really touch him; he's beyond it.

It's like, the more transparently WA confesses his sins through his films, the more unsparingly he depicts his character stand-ins as the utter bastards they are, the more he (thereby) excuses and congratulates himself. Doesn't just excuse himself, but presents himself as superior to those who would judge him-- because he has attained a nihilistic wisdom others lack.

It's repellent. The sociopath congratulates himself for his philosophical wisdom.

I don't know how to express my feeling here, exactly. If I was witty I'd put it in the form ILXors riffed on in the "My mom thinks I'm cool" thread.

NB It's not the nihilistic/ cynical/ immoral worldview expressed in movies I have a problem with. It's that now, I can't help but see WA's movies as ways in which, again and again, WA rationalizes/ absolves himself of any guilt… and even more perversely, congratulates himself for it, turns his vice into virtue, his crime into wisdom.

As WA himself has said, there's no such thing as morality/ justice in the WA universe; there's only luck. The Michael Caine, Landau, Rhys-Myers characters-- at the end of the day, they're *lucky* they did what they did (had an affair with his wife's sister; murdered his mistress). All in all, on balance, things turned out for the best. Only philosophically naive or resentful losers would begrudge them their happiness/ luck.

I congratulate you on your luck (so far), Woody.

This revenge-brainwashing defense must be common for predators. A long time ago a girl my mom babysat accused her father of abuse and he claimed that she was coached by her adult sister who had a grudge against him (i wonder why)

"I'm open-minded about sex. I'm not above reproach; if anything, I'm below reproach. I mean, if I was caught in a love nest with 15 12-year-old girls tomorrow, people would think, yeah, I always knew that about him." Allen pauses. "Nothing I could come up with would surprise anyone," he ventures helplessly. "I admit to it all."

-Woody Allen, 1978, People Magazine: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20066950,00.html

I think the strongest evidence that Woody is very very guilty is that Dylan/Malone still believes he molested her That is almost definitively damning and it is very difficult to imagine no matter how screwed up Mia Farrow is (and I am definitely of the opinion that she's pretty screwed up) that she could have coached her daughter into carrying that around for 20+ years. That said prior to the recent Vanity Fare article and the letter, it was also very easy to dismiss this all as a convoluted and ugly divorce proceeding with a lot of he saids/she saids so I think most people (read: most people like myself) can be somewhat forgiven for not giving it a tremendous amount of weight until now. But now come on.

otm

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/03/the_uneasy_ambiguity_of_the_woody_allen_case/

that's how i feel too xxp. the descriptions of being overwhelmed by bad feeling at the mention or sight of WA were what made me decide i couldn't wonder anymore if this was something blown vaguely up by mia; now i feel like the only honest way i could defend allen would be to say that dylan's lying. even if i put aside higher concerns like avoiding victim-blaming combating rape culture etc., that would still seem hugely unlikely and pointless. whereas allen lying is... likely and pointy.

there's also plenty of witnesses to WA's creepy and inappropriate behavior toward her. anyone who can read the VF article + dylan's letter and come away with nothing but a vague 'eh, i guess they're all just a bunch of weirdos' attitude didn't read carefully enough imo.

xps that reminds me, Hurting, a few weeks ago you wrote And "false accusation" child molestation stories, aside from the occasional weird "repressed memory"/hypnotherapy hoaxes, idk, you just don't hear about them very often,

and I wanted to ask ('cause you're a lawyer iirc) if you know or regularly talk to many criminal defense attorneys, and whether you thought they would find false accusations of sex crimes to be rare in *their* experience. The ones I know can often be cynical about their clients' guilt even after an acquittal, but I still think most would differ with that statement. And with the one today about the failure to recant in adulthood as "definitively damning." Not that anyone has to regard criminal defense attys as paragons of moral virtue (lol) but many of them do work with scenarios like this day in day out.

I don't really have anything to do with criminal defense attys in my line of work, it's more just a matter of what I've read. To be fair, the one scenario where false accusations are RELATIVELY most common is in divorce/custody battles, which is not to say they're extremely common, but it does happen. But I've never read about a case where an adult continued to hold a "false" belief about having been molested from age 7 through adulthood.

wonder if i wrote a thing defending Allen or expressing ambiguity about the situation that regurgitated every talking point from their side, how long it would take for morbs to post it here

That Salon article and most of the defenses of Allen linked thereoin are really terrible. If you are going to basically say that an adult woman is lying or deluded about being raped at least be upfront about it. Don't be like "well I'm sure that's what she thinks happens". Give me a break.

What really bothers me too is how much irrelevant noise they create around the issue, as though if the public gets some facts wrong about Soon-Yi that somehow has anything whatsoever to do with whether Dylan's story is true

NB It's not the nihilistic/ cynical/ immoral worldview expressed in movies I have a problem with. It's that now, I can't help but see WA's movies as ways in which, again and again, WA rationalizes/ absolves himself of any guilt… and even more perversely, congratulates himself for it, turns his vice into virtue, his crime into wisdom.

yeah i think this is a pretty textbook reading of bananas.

"When I asked my mother if her dad did to her what Woody Allen did to me, I honestly did not know the answer. I also didn’t know the firestorm it would trigger. I didn’t know that my father would use his sexual relationship with my sister to cover up the abuse he inflicted on me."

xp

Abs, I meant the other way around though -- i.e. people making it seem like the fact that details of Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi have been exaggerated in order to somehow cast doubt on Dylan's story. I actually didn't notice that line though and I'm not sure what it means.

i think what she means is that allen's defense is that mia farrow invented this out of rage and vengeance over soon-yi. it's a useful defense because a) it allows you to defend him without calling dylan a liar and b) so many people get so many things wrong about the soon-yi case it adds an air of people rushing to judgement around woody allen in general. as hurting/mugatroid/everyone is saying, these two are the main tacks for all the defenses we're seeing now: emphasize that you're not saying this isn't what dylan thinks happens, but mia certainly was Very Upset about soon-yi; and remind everyone that people at parties are wrong about the circumstances of that relationship. i found it kind of brutal that she so clearly recognizes that the soon-yi thing has only helped WA in this sense.

instead of doing what you might think it'd do, i.e., ring a lot of alarm bells and swing people's evaluation of the truth odds in dylan's favor.

i mean, myself, before the recent adult-dylan stuff, my feeling was: this coaching/brainwashing theory seems crazy and is p much textbook misogyny, but allen's marrying soon-yi was such a weird violation it throws the whole situation into the territory of the grotesque and i can at least conceive of someone so enraged over allen's behavior being technically legal, flaunted, that she decides to manufacture an actionable crime (or inflate something into one) in lieu of the inactionable one. a moral substitution. that seemed possible and i was never able to dismiss it. i think i've dismissed it now, but i think it seems possible to a lot of people and it wouldn't if it weren't for soon-yi.

it's a facile thing to say, but this whole thing has just made me think that you can never know what a person is really like from how they present themselves to the outside world, even if part of their presentation to the outside world involves highly personal works of art.

Mediated reality is always tricky.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bfl49gdCIAEUk3S.jpg

from honeymoon motel, 2011

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqs6klGMsq1qcsmqlo1_500.jpg

didn't know until recently that his relationship in manhattan was based on his relationship w/ 17 yr old stacy nelkin three years prior. nelkin fwiw says she believes allen is innocent.

Didion on Manhattan/Interiors/Annie Hall:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/?pagination=false

yeah classic piece. in my head for some reason i always want to credit renata adler w/ it but that might be just cuz that piece angered me when i was younger and then i got older and found myself agreeing w/ it, just so much stuff that i've come to agree w/ adler on (kael the big obv one).

Tracy put me in mind of an American-International Pictures executive who once advised me, by way of pointing out the absence of adult characters in AIP beach movies, that nobody ever paid $3 to see a parent.

lollllllllll

That Didion article says better than I've ever been able to the other reason I avoid WA movies:

(Similarly, we are meant to know that the “Jack and Anjelica” to whom Paul Simon refers in Annie Hall are Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, and to feel somehow flattered by our inclusion in this little joke on those who fail to get it.)

People tried to show me Annie Hall et al after I moved to NY, and although I could catch some of the references, it was just barely and with a slightly panicked air. Instead of feeling pleased that I was getting on the inside of something exclusive, they made me really anxious and angry to always be chasing down the joke and perpetually reminded who was "in" and who was "out."

It was a summer in which the more hopeful members of the society wanted roller skates, and stood in line to see Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a picture in which, toward the end, the Woody Allen character makes a list of reasons to stay alive. “Groucho Marx” is one reason, and “Willie Mays” is another. The second movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.” Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. This list is modishly eclectic, a trace wry, definitely OK with real linen; and notable, as raisons d’être go, in that every experience it evokes is essentially passive. This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.

I shivered because that paragraph is, with its repetitions and beats and measured build-up, classic Didion.

xp This similar line really summed it up for me:

“When it comes to relationships with women I’m the winner of the August Strindberg Award,” the Woody Allen character tells us in Manhattan; later, in a frequently quoted and admired line, he says, to Diane Keaton, “I’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.” These lines are meaningless, and not funny: they are simply “references,” the way Harvey and Jack and Anjelica and A Sentimental Education are references, smart talk meant to convey the message that the speaker knows his way around Lit and History, not to mention Show Biz.

this article keeps reminding me how often the laughed when my college film professor showed Interiors and when the lights came on he looked genuinely pained and saddened.

That's how I've often felt reading his writing -- there are so many "jokes" that rely on nothing more than "ha ha I know who that is" or "ha ha I am familiar with a notable biographical detail about that person." It's disappointing because he is capable of more than that, as I think C&M shows.

And you thought Family Guy was bad *rimshot*