THE
MORNING AFTER Woody Allen was awarded a lifetime achievement award at
the Golden Globes, his son Ronan Farrow tweeted a question that
re-awakened inquiry into the sexual abuse allegations made against the
director more than 20 years ago.
“[D]id they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after
Like
many people, I immediately fell down the rabbit hole. I’ve spent hours
reading and thinking about the allegations that Allen had molested his
daughter Dylan and sorting through my own and others’ reactions to those
allegations. So many of us have a personal stake in this matter. The
issue has particular resonance for me because of my own history with
child sexual abuse.
When I was between the ages of four and five, I
was molested repeatedly by a cousin in his late teens who had come to
live with my family. I told a friend about it when I was 12, having by
then gained some language to express the facts of what happened if not
my feelings about it, and I told a few other people over the years as I
continued to try to make sense of the past, but I never quite got a firm
grip on it. The vivid memories and their implications lurked like the
sea cucumbers I spied on the sea floor the first time I went scuba
diving—mysterious and disgusting things I didn’t want my skin to come in
contact with, something to hold my breath and paddle away from.
By
early adulthood I had grown into a reasonably well-adjusted person who
had positive experiences with sex and romance, and although I had a
particular interest in the dark side of life, I mostly didn’t want to
dwell on this shadowy chapter of my own. I was very aware of the way
those marked as victims were viewed by society—with kid gloves and pity
on the one hand, with skepticism and dismissal on the other.
My
attitude changed in my early thirties, when I learned that the boy who
did this to me was now a man facing trial for molesting another little
girl around the same age I had been. This news affected me profoundly. I
had two overwhelming senses: a huge amount of guilt for not stopping
the violation somehow, and a terrible relief that the crime was
externalized, given life outside my own head. The charges against him
were proof that something very bad had happened to me, and that it
wasn’t allowed. As strange as this might sound, these things hadn’t
always been perfectly clear to me.
My
cousin was sent to prison. Although the accuser and the child would
later recant, the courts maintained their original ruling. I ordered the
hearing transcripts and read the original accusations, the medical and
legal reports, and the child’s statements. These only reaffirmed my
certainty that the original charges were correct, and I was grateful
that the verdict held. I know charges of abuse are not always—are
seldom— resolved clearly in the eyes of the law. Most never make it
anywhere near a court.
For the past several years, I’ve been
writing a book about my own experience, and in the process I’ve spent
time researching child sexual assault, with a particular focus on how
societal views of it have changed over the past 40 years. Having quickly
gained a lot of emotionally charged knowledge, I sometimes feel
overfull with it, as if it might seep out of my body involuntarily,
burped like a gas. I’ve encountered certain facts so often that
sometimes I assume much of what I’ve learned is common knowledge and
doesn’t bear repeating. However, the current heated conversation around
Woody Allen reveals I’m wrong about this. Many people’s assumptions
about abuse in general are relatively unexamined and have basis in
understandings that have shifted in the last 20 years or so, as more
research in the field has been done and legal and therapeutic approaches
have evolved.
Allen was accused of molestation during the custody
case resulting from his split with Mia Farrow, which was prompted by
Farrow’s discovery of Allen’s relationship with her 19-year old daughter
Soon-Yi Previn. Due to the celebrity status and personal histories of
the people involved, there’s no doubt that the allegations trail behind
them an unusually baroque weave of complexities. I’m going to try to put
aside for a moment the question of whether Allen actually molested his
daughter or whether he should continue to receive accolades and awards
if that is true. Instead, I’m going to present some typical responses to
the accusations against him, gleaned from the thousands of comments
I’ve read, and examine the way they mirror reactions to child sex abuse
in general and reveal some common misperceptions.
~
Ignorance: Many people reacted to Ronan Farrow’s tweet as I did, with a big giant
What?
Up until that moment, we’d had no idea that Allen had ever been accused
of molesting his young daughter, despite the fact that it was public
knowledge. Some in this camp are surprised that there wasn’t a bigger
bang, an exploding ink stain from a tampered-with clothing tag that
would be impossible to miss, even to those who weren’t paying close
attention.
Similarly, most of us don’t know how many victims and
perpetrators of child sex abuse walk in our midst. Estimates are that
one in four girls and one in six boys have been sexually abused. Most of
these instances are not discovered or disclosed when they occur (the
average age at which victims disclose is 12 years after the event), but
some are. And although many of us assume that once discovered, such a
crime will trigger a strong response—that surely we’d hear about it
within our community, situations would be changed, charges would be
brought, protection or therapy would be offered to the children—very
often, that’s not the case. Families frequently deflect the knowledge
when it’s presented or accuse the accuser, and, although there’s been
improvement in the last five years or so, institutions have commonly
turned a blind eye—think of Penn State, Horace Mann, the Catholic
Church.
Told Ya So: Some people responded to the resurfaced allegations by stating their negative opinion of Woody Allen and his work:
I loathe his movies; I tried and I tried but I never could stand Annie Hall
; I always thought he was such a creep, getting the young pretty girl like a trophy. These
comments suggest that Allen’s art hinted that something gross was wrong
with him, and so whether or not the commenter had been aware of the
specific accusations, he or (usually) she is not surprised by them.
Indeed,
seen in one light, Allen, with his thick glasses, high-waisted pants,
and pasty complexion, does fit a stereotypical image of a child
molester, the maladjusted pocket-puller lurking on the edges of the
playground. But while some child molesters do fit this mold—the
extracurricular coach at my son’s school who was booted for
inappropriate behavior actually did wear bottle-bottom glasses and
radiate something strange—in fact most abuse is perpetuated by a person a
child knows well and trusts, and who is widely viewed as “normal” or
even exemplary. Approximately 90 percent of child sex abuse is committed
by a family member of the victim or someone known and trusted by the
victim’s family. A certain icky dweebiness combined with a trench coat
is not a clear indication of anything, and our Spidey sense isn’t
either.
When we believe that we’ll sense a child molester when we
see one, it can be harder to recognize and act clearly when reality
doesn’t fit our expectations. It can be harder, even, to recognize what
is abuse, or might be leading there:
That’s just fondling. Just stay
away from him when when you’re by yourself. I’ll keep an eye out, but I
don’t think he means anything by it. Indeed, accounts of the Allen-Farrow family in a
1992 Vanity Fair profile make
it sound like this was the dynamic around Allen’s relationship with
Dylan years before there was discord between him and Farrow.
Separation: People
who do like, or love, Allen’s work often argue that we should separate
the art from the artist. I don’t disagree; especially if we are able to
do the reverse, and separate the artist from the art, not grant him any
greater benefit of the doubt than we would another human. But we have to
acknowledge that this is difficult, just as it’s difficult for us to
recognize warning signs or baldly stated declarations of inappropriate
behavior when they concern someone we know, trust, love, admire, or
depend on to pay the bills and keep things running smoothly. If we like
the art, if we like the love or the family unit or the school community
or just generally the way things are, we can feel guilty if the person
at the center of it has committed a heinous crime.
Shouldn’t I have been able to see that or sense it? How could I have let him in? kept dropping her off? To
avoid those personal feelings of guilt, we can get extra invested in
casting doubt on or minimizing the allegations. When that’s not
possible, we can conveniently forget about them. Look how many
celebrities, including Mia Farrow, have supported Roman Polanski in
various ways since he pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a
child under 14. Look how many families continue to invite the pedophile
to gatherings.
Innocence: Some people believe
that in the case of Woody Allen, there’s no need to separate the art
from the artist because the artist is innocent; or, at the very least,
he should be regarded as such until proven guilty. Director Robert B.
Weide, a friend of Allen’s,
wrote an essay on The Daily Beast in late January that
has been widely referenced by those in this camp. As Weide points out,
the abuse was investigated as part of the custody hearing, and the team
found no evidence of wrongdoing. No criminal charges were ever pressed.
This part of the story is enormously complex—the battle raged for years,
and various judges and prosecutors and teams and committees ruled
various ways. (If you’re going to read Weide, you also have to read
Maureen Orth’s November Vanity Fair feature on Mia Farrow that
goes into detail about the lead-up to and aftermath of the accusation.)
Many people argue that those of us on the outside looking in can’t be
privy to what happened, so we have no choice but to let the matter go in
the absence of a legal ruling. They say Woody Allen should be free to
move through the world without these old accusations being lobbed at his
head again and again.
As I was writing this essay,
Dylan Farrow published an open letter to The New York Times in which she tells her story of the abuse and its aftermath. She’d already been quoted at length about it in Orth’s recent
Vanity Fair article,
including the devastating effect it had on her to feel disbelieved, but
I thought that the urgency of a dedicated letter appearing in the midst
of the reawakened controversy might shift perceptions. Based on the
comments I’ve read on dozens of response pieces posted since, it appears
that it largely did not. Those who believe that Allen is innocent, or
at least may well be, continue to argue that the allegations against him
were part of an extremely contentious custody battle. They point out
that Farrow had recently discovered Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi
and was enraged at him at the time she made the recording of Dylan
stating what Allen had done to her, which became a big part of their
custody trial. They say Farrow could have coached Dylan into making the
accusations, that the coaching of a suggestible child could be so
effective that, even as an adult, she remains deluded about her own
experience.
None of that is impossible, but it’s far less likely than people seem to believe.
It’s
a common assumption that accusations of sex abuse are frequently used
as a weapon, especially in contentious custody battles, and that an
aggrieved mother can turn a child against a father. To many people, this
possibility seems obvious. For example, a number of people have stated
that as soon as they learned that the charges brought against Allen
happened after Farrow found the nude pictures of her older daughter in
his home, they questioned Dylan’s veracity. Judges themselves are likely
to be on high alert for false accusations brought during a custody
hearing. However, research shows that it is not more common for
accusations made during custody battles to be proved false than it is
for any other sex abuse accusation, which is to say that it’s not very
common at all. “Most studies show that only between 1% and 6% of
allegations are maliciously fabricated,” according to
a well-documented fact sheet by Child Abuse Solutions. The few accusations that
are proved
groundless are more than 15 times more likely to be brought by fathers
than by mothers, who research shows make only 1.3% of the small number
of custody-related malicious accusations that exist.
Research also
shows that children are not nearly so suggestible on the topic of sex
abuse as previously believed, especially school-aged children. In the
past 40 years, children’s testimony has gone from being inadmissible in a
court of law to being not only allowed as evidence but sometimes used
as the sole evidence in cases involving sex abuse, which is
notoriously difficult to prove (physical proof is rarely present even in cases of vaginal penetration).
Child
testimony is a complicated area and legal and psychological experts
take it seriously. Research is ongoing. One thing studies have revealed
is that some inconsistency is common when children are questioned
repeatedly about sexual assault. Twenty-three percent of all children
who disclose sexual abuse recant at some point in the investigations. As
pointed out by Weide and others who cast doubt on her reliability,
Dylan was among this group—during one early questioning session with a
doctor, she pointed to her shoulders rather than her genitals when she
was asked where Allen had touched her. But
the research shows that
the large majority of those who recant had been telling the truth when
they first told of abuse—that embarrassment, confusion, shame, and fear
of consequences can lead them to back off temporarily, and that this is
especially likely to happen when the accused is a parent held in
low-esteem by the non-offending parent.
Similarly, doubt has been
cast on Dylan’s statements because of her affect in some of the
recordings made of her as a child—she’s said to seem uninterested and
bored, stiff, coached. Children’s advocates point out that although we
might expect children’s testimony about sex abuse to be highly emotional
and involve expressions of anger, shame, and pain,
this is often not the case,
especially when the abuse has occurred at the hands of someone close to
child. Depression can flatten a victim’s response. Today, in an
enlightened courtroom, a temporary retraction of an account of sexual
assault and a deadened responsiveness under investigation would probably
not be enough to cast doubt on a testimony.
Of course, this case
never was tried in an enlightened courtroom or any other criminal court.
A guilty verdict in a child sex abuse case can ruin a person’s life,
and so extreme care must be taken in arriving at it. And it’s dangerous
for the public to see itself as an extension of the law. But despite the
fact that we shouldn’t be the ones holding Allen and Dylan’s fate in
our hands—and we aren’t, especially when it comes to Allen—I still think
our thoughts and opinions on this story matter. When we eventually turn
away again from the gaudy celebrity pileup, whatever side we have come
down upon, if any, it’s important to remember something: research shows
that if a child discloses sexual abuse, chances are very, very good that
no matter how young he or she is, how angry his or her parent is at the
accused, how numb or stiff he or she seems discussing it, how willing
she or he is to back off from the claim at any one point, how little
physical evidence there is, that child is probably telling the truth.
Ick: Plenty
of people just don’t want to wallow in this kind of mud, and if they’ve
dipped their toes in it accidentally during the last few weeks, they’re
anxious to wash it off. They point out that we’re talking about an
inconclusive hearing for something extremely distasteful that happened
very long ago to an overrated neurotic/cultural treasure. Let’s look
away, and keep ourselves clean. That’s what I ended up doing 20-some
years ago during the public breakdown of Allen and Farrow’s
relationship, and why the accusations regarding Dylan came as a surprise
to me now. And that’s what, although we swear we wouldn’t, many of us
will do again when the suggestion of child sex abuse rises from the
ocean floor and hovers just beneath the surface of our lives—which it
very well may, especially for those of us with children. I suspect this
is true even of people who make impassioned declarations about what
should happen to Woody Allen’s penis and where he should rot for how
long. I think encountering child sexual abuse up close is what being in
battle must be like, or otherwise coming face-to-face with the imminent
prospect of one’s own demise: no matter how much you might have planned
for the moment, you don’t know how you’re going to react until it’s upon
you, very likely looking nothing at all like you had imagined.
When Orth’s
Vanity Fair piece
came out in November, the big cultural takeaway was that Ronan Farrow,
handsome soon-to-be talk show host, might be Frank Sinatra’s son. The
several pages of the article devoted to reexamining the sex abuse
allegation and featuring Dylan’s first public words on the matter were
largely ignored, at least according to my headline surfing and social
media feeds. It appeared the world was happy to let the accusations
against Allen stay under the rug where they’d been swept in the ’90s,
even if his alleged victim was an adult now and could offer something
new on the topic. It took Allen’s lifetime achievement award and sharp
words from Mr. Maybe Blue Eyes Jr. to focus public attention back on the
horrible things that a young girl said were done to her by her famous
father.
We can be absolutely sure about very little in most cases
of sexual assault. This particular case will never be settled in any
legal sense or to many people’s satisfaction. But by being willing to
look at this uncomfortable picture and to monitor our own responses to
what we see, we have the chance to learn.
In her letter, Dylan
Farrow said something that struck me. “That he got away with what he did
to me haunted me as I grew up. I was stricken with guilt that I had
allowed him to be near other little girls,” she wrote. I have lived with
a similar guilt. I am very grateful to her for drawing heat to herself
and increasing the conversation around this difficult issue, because I’m
optimistic that the more attention that is paid to child sexual
assault, the better results there will be for more children in the end.
Woody Allen (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles)
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