Woody Allen’s abuse is everybody’s business

Alec Baldwin lashed out on Twitter at a fan who questioned his connection with Allen, Tweeting ‘what the fuck is wrong w u that u think we all need to be commenting on this family’s personal struggle?’ Kate Winslet, who worked on Allen’s film Wonder Wheel (2017), stated in an interview that ‘As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don’t know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false’. Blake Lively, who appeared in his 2016 film Café Society, has said that ‘it’s very dangerous to factor in things you don’t know anything about’. This is the same Blake Lively who also spoke out at the crest of #metoo, saying ‘it’s important that women are furious right now… it’s important that we focus on humanity in general and say, ‘this is unacceptable’’.

Other actors who’ve refused to condemn Allen or their decision to work with him include Scarlett Johansson, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez, and Michael Caine.

As you can see, the general decision from these otherwise proponents of female justice, these warriors of a cause that promised to leave no one behind, was to look at Farrow’s reliable accusation square in the face and shrug their shoulders.

Said credibility becomes apparent about five minutes into researching into not just Farrow’s accusations, but Allen’s personal life. There are many reasons to believe Woody Allen is, and always has been, a bonafide creep. First of all, what more convincing evidence do you need that Allen had a penchant for finding his stepdaughters sexually attractive than the fact that he quite literally married one of them?

Allen’s current wife, Soon-Yi Previn, is 35 years his junior, and at one point she too called him ‘dad’. Previn is another adopted daughter of Allen’s ex-partner Mia Farrow, making her Dylan Farrow’s non-biological sister. She was adopted by Mia Farrow along with Mia’s long-time partner André Previn, though her parents split up soon after, leaving Mia free to pursue a 12-year relationship with Allen (when Allen first met Soon-Yi she was eight). Whilst together, Mia and Allen adopted a baby (Dylan) and had a biological child together.

Their high-profile marriage ended dramatically in 1992 when Farrow found nude photographs of Soon-Yi, then 19 years old, in Allen’s possession. In August of 1992, Allen released a statement that he was ‘in love’ with Soon-Yi, and soon after they married. That same year, seven-year-old Dylan accused her father of assault.

Even if Hollywood chose to throw out the accusations to which Dylan has so vehemently stuck to, which it seems want to do, it’s still impossible to believe in Allen’s innocence because of who his wife is. That Soon-Yi and Allen have been together for 25 years and that she is now undeniably an adult proves nothing.

By way of being an orphaned child of uncertain origins, she was inherently vulnerable in the chaos of Allen and Farrow’s tumultuous relationship. Though they go to great lengths to impress on the public that Allen was at no point a ‘father figure’ to Soon-Yi (despite being her mother’s life partner her entire childhood), he still has an eerie penchant to cast himself in a paternal role in her life.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Allen seems to want to take credit for ‘fatherly’ contributions to her upbringing, implying that it was he and not Farrow that plucked her from poverty: ‘She was an orphan on the streets, living out of trash cans and starving as a 6-year-old. And she was picked up and put in an orphanage. And so I’ve been able to really make her life better’.

If he is not a paedophile, Allen certainly knows an easy mark when he sees one.

To claim that his current marriage situation doesn’t cast new light on Dylan Farrow’s assertions is farcical. Though Allen claims his sexual relationship with the teenaged Soon-Yi started just weeks before her mother discovered the pictures, her true age when they began having sex is unknown.

Allen’s personal obsession with teenaged girls is littered throughout his films. One of his greatest success stories, the 1979 film Manhattan, centres around a frustrated, middle-aged television writer (played by Allen himself) and his sexual relationship with a high schooler. There’s a particularly disturbing scene in his 1989 film Crimes & Misdemeanours (the clue is in the name guys!) when Allen’s character glances at none other than Soon-Yi herself, who Allen often used as an extra in his films, and quips ‘the last time I was inside a woman was the Statue of Liberty’. In the upcoming A Rainy Day in New York, 21-year-old Elle Fanning plays a teenager who becomes sexually involved with another middle-aged man, played by Jude Law.

Actress Jessica Chastain once Tweeted that whilst she had never worked with Allen she had ‘read decades of [his] private notes.’ She states ‘He’s obsessed with teenage girls.’ And in another Tweet, she points to one of his scripts as ‘Crime disguised as art’.

UGH 😝 Crime disguised as art.https://t.co/02tc2FaNl5 pic.twitter.com/nrUiSLoFI7

— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) January 4, 2018

So consider the fact that despite all of this information being public record, and despite the fact that the clip of Dylan Farrow breaking down, crying and shaking, after being shown a clip of her father during her CBS interview – at the very sight of him – is publicly available, supposedly feminist actors claim that they don’t have enough information to comment. Not necessarily to make a definitive decision either way about Allen’s guilt, but to even discuss it.

This is, put simply, cowardice in its highest form. Let’s go back to Lively’s comment about the necessity of improving the world by acknowledging victims of sexual assault. To quote her fully, ‘It’s important that women are furious right now. It’s important that there is an uprising. It’s important that we don’t stand for this and that we don’t focus on one or two or three or four stories, it’s important that we focus on humanity in general and say ‘this is unacceptable’’.

This is not the passive language of a fence sitter. This is the language of revolution. But apparently Blake’s revolution doesn’t extend past those one, two, three, or four stories that she deems worthy of platforming. It doesn’t extend to Dylan Farrow.

Dylan stated in her op-ed for the LA Times, ‘although the culture seems to be shifting rapidly, my allegation is apparently still just too complicated, too difficult, too ‘dangerous’, to use Lively’s own term, to confront.’

The truth is hard to deny but easy to ignore. It’s especially easy to ignore when we perceive it as complicated. And by making this truth seem sensitive and multi-layered, seem too ‘dangerous’ to acknowledge, Allen and his PR team have succeeded in obfuscating it. And the truth is that this is very open and shut case of sex abuse by a man who deserves to be blacklisted along with his obscene colleagues. It’s a truth dangerous only to Woody Allen.

The entirety of the #metoo movement is built on believing survivors, and the platform women have built our credibility on will begin to crumble if we continue to credit some survivors and not others. The acknowledgement that the decision to work with someone in Hollywood is now a political one, and one that bears the weight of moral responsibility, is the most valuable thing that #metoo has given us, and so for actresses like Winslet to state that it’s her job ‘to step away’ from the allegations, merely to act, is ludicrous and antithetical to everything the brave survivors of LA’s insidious underbelly have been fighting for the past two and a half years.

It took me one morning to access extensive notes on Allen’s 1992 trial, and to find Dylan Farrow’s thoughtful and introspective retellings of her abuse. If these supposed professionals have failed to look into the allegations then they are negligent, and if Farrow’s accounts aren’t enough to give them pause then they are morally bankrupt.

Blake Lively is right, the truth is dangerous – for abusers. Abdicating your responsibility to engage in the #metoo movement is one thing, but nobody should profess to be its champion if they’re going to half arse it. If this industry, and indeed any industry, is going to completely remove the threat of sex abuse then it must be a ubiquitous decision – any leak in the defensive armour, particularly by people as high profile as some of Allen’s advocates, and uncertainty will come flooding through once more. And it’s in the fog of uncertainty that Allen and his ilk operate.

I applaud stars like Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Hall, who have pledged their salaries from A Rainy Day in New York to assault relief charities TIME’S UP, The New York LGBT Centre, and RAINN. But it’s important to acknowledge that they’re not doing a good deed ex nihilo. They still chose to work with Allen. By the time A Rainy Day in New York was filming, Dylan’s account was common knowledge. These stars are correcting a mistake that they made, and frankly it’s the least they can do.

And as for other actors who believe that #metoo is a part time moral sentiment, I have no sympathy and no respect. The industry owes Dylan Farrow more than this. Whilst the real villain here is unmistakable Allen himself, actors have a responsibility to at best hold him to account and, at the very least, to platform a discussion about his worthiness to continue working and profiting.

So Lively, Johannsson, Eisenberg, Baldwin, and all of you other hypocrites I have but one message: put up or shut up.