Woody Allen has been repeatedly accused since 1992 of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was 7 years old. Though the allegations against Allen were not pursued by a Connecticut prosecutor, they tend to resurface when he releases a movie, before quickly fading out of the news.
Now, however, they're being publicly reexamined by many in Hollywood in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
Unlike many of the powerful men felled by the #MeToo movement such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, Allen still retains a few famous defenders. Loudest among them are movie stars Diane Keaton and Alec Baldwin.
Keaton gave a staunch defense of Allen on Monday. The actress, who has appeared in several of Allen's movies including "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan," tweeted a video clip from a 1992 "60 Minutes" interview with Allen along with the words, "Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him. It might be of interest to take a look at the 60 Minute interview from 1992 and see what you think."
In the interview, Allen denied the allegations against him, calling what happened "a total nonevent."
Baldwin has been even blunter. In a series of tweets from a now-deleted account, the actor - who also appeared in several of Allen's films including "Blue Jasmine" - compared Dylan Farrow to a Mayella Ewell, a character in "To Kill a Mockingbird" who lies about being raped.
"[One] of the most effective things Dylan Farrow has in her arsenal is the 'persistence of emotion,'" Baldwin tweeted on Sunday, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "Like Mayella in ["To Kill a Mockingbird"], her tears/exhortations [are] meant [to] shame u [into] belief in her story. But I need more than that before I destroy [someone], regardless of their fame. I need a lot more."
Baldwin has previously defended Allen, saying in a tweet,"Is it possible to support survivors of pedophilia and sexual assault/abuse and also believe that WA is innocent? I think so."
The two actors spoke out after Dylan Farrow appeared in an emotional interview on "CBS This Morning" on Jan. 18 and detailed her allegations against Allen.
"I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother's country house in Connecticut by my father. He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother's toy train that was set up," Dylan told Gayle King. "And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted . . . As a 7-year-old I would say, I would have said he touched my private parts."
"I have been repeating my accusations unaltered for over 20 years, and I have been systematically shut down, ignored or discredited," she added. "If they can't acknowledge the accusations of one survivor, how are they going to stand for all of us?"
Allen again denied the allegations in a statement to CBS, saying, "Even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time's Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn't make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter - as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago."
While Keaton and Baldwin have defended Allen, many other actors have spoken out against the famed director.
"Ladybird" director Greta Gerwig, who appeared in Allen's 2012 film "To Rome With Love," recently told the New York Times: "If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film. I have not worked for him again, and I will not work for him again."
Colin Firth and Rachel Brosnahan, both of whom worked with Allen, made similar statements. "Call Me by Your Name" actor Timothée Chalamet said he would donate all his salary from his work on Allen's "A Rainy Day in New York" to Time's Up, the LGBT Community Center in New York and the anti-sexual-violence organization RAINN.
- The Washington Post.
