The director’s rebuttal to Dylan Farrow’s allegations that he molested her depicts his ex, Mia Farrow, as a deceitful, manipulative, hate-mongering witch who brainwashed his child. A close examination of his own statements paints a different picture.
A version of the following originally appeared on the blog Excremental Virtue.
Charles Platiau / Reuters
In the last weeks, we've all watched everyone become an expert on false-memory syndrome. Happens all the time! It's easy to do! Allen's defenders say. Totally mythic! False epidemic! say Dylan's supporters. Allen's case, as laid out in a New York Times op-ed last Sunday, rests largely on the assertion that he's the one being honest. To prove that he is not a liar, he cites the fact that he took a lie detector test (though not the one the Connecticut State Police asked him to take). Mia, he says, refused. The implication is that one is a liar and the other is not.
I'm not an expert on false-memory syndrome, so I'm going to leave that alone, though I suggest we make a habit of implanting happier memories into children with traumatic pasts if it's really that easy. What I do know a little about is polygraphs, and given that Allen resorts to using one to prove his credibility — which is easily disproved using other means — I think it's worth mentioning that polygraphs are junk science. The American Psychological Association notes that "there is no evidence that any pattern of physiological reactions is unique to deception. An honest person may be nervous when answering truthfully and a dishonest person may be non-anxious."
I submit that, rather than accept Allen's own framework for what proves his honesty, we should examine his credibility by looking at his own record.
One last thing about polygraphs: The theory behind polygraph tests is that you get nervous when you're lying. But if we've learned anything from watching this awful case unfold over the past 21 years, it's that Woody Allen wouldn't be nervous because he doesn't believe himself to have done anything wrong — not with Dylan, and (this is where this becomes relevant) not with Soon-Yi Previn. When asked whether he destroyed a family, his response is matter-of-fact. From The Baltimore Sun:
Q: But Soon-Yi is the sister of all those kids.
A: Yes, but it's not that they're really sisters.
That's all right then. Note the narrative Woody tries to propagate here — one far more pernicious than the distortion Dylan's defenders resort to when they accuse him of incest. (True, he was not Soon-Yi's legal stepfather.) Woody's story, which he has doubtless passed on to Soon-Yi, is this was never your real family.
Or this, to Time magazine:
Q. Did you talk to your analyst about how this would affect a child?
A. It wasn't so complex. It doesn't have that quality to it that you think.
Q. What about how it would affect her siblings?
A. These people are a collection of kids, they are not blood sisters or anything.
"These people are a collection of kids," he says. They're not a family. They're not related by blood. (One wonders why he bothered to adopt four times, if blood was the precondition to family.) To hear Allen tell it, his three children and Mia's other children are a "collection" of people that happened to include Soon-Yi. Yes, that group happened to live in a house he visited every day for the better part of 12 years, but who's to say — he really said this in that same interview — he might not have met Soon-Yi "at a party or something"? Yes, Mr. Allen, it's true that in another timeline you might have met your wife as an adult at a party, but you didn't: You met her when she was 9 years old and — this is the important thing — ignored her for a decade.
Soon-Yi and Woody insist that he barely spoke to her the whole time he and Mia dated. This has been offered to excuse Allen from charges of impropriety with Soon-Yi while she was underage, and Allen's charisma and powers of persuasion have kept many of us from noticing that it's actually incredibly strange. (Almost as strange as Allen defenders who refute charges of moral incest by repeating that Soon-Yi had a father — as if the existence of a live father made stepfathers and father figures impossible.) It's hard to imagine a situation in which you ignore your children's siblings but consider yourself a "model father," which Allen does. He has some corroboration. Allen's pal Dick Cavett testified to his good parenting: "He completely rearranged his man-killingly busy life so that he could lavish time and money and attention on the children, probably more than many orthodox parents do. He'd get up at 5 and religiously make it over there seven days a week," he said.
Ah, but what children?
Here's how Soon-Yi describes it, again to Time, in 1992:
I was never remotely close to Woody. He was someone who was devoted exclusively to his own children and to his work, and we never spent a moment together. We rarely ever spoke, and were polite but uninterested in one another. The fact is I really had no interest in knowing him better, nor he me.
What's emerging from these descriptions that are intended to defend Allen is an incredibly sad environment, especially for a child like Soon-Yi, who'd only been in the U.S. two years when Woody entered her mother's (but not her) life. It's an environment in which the only father figure with a daily presence in the house routinely favored his children over the others and regarded them as a "collection" and not a family. Allen said to Time that he "was not a father to [Mia's] adopted kids in any sense of the word." He visited the house daily, he says, but "the last thing I was interested in was the whole parcel of Mia's children."
He just wasn't "interested." We might ponder the extraordinary narcissism that explanation (and word choice) betrays, but as it happens, I'm not particularly interested in analyzing Allen. My object in writing this is to see what's on the record — what he has actually said. Given these straightforward admissions of indifference and Judge Wilk's assessment that Allen favored Dylan but "remained aloof from Ms. Farrow's other children except for Moses, to whom he was cordial," it's rather remarkable that Allen's camp charged Mia with treating the adopted children differently from the biological ones. ("There was a definite difference in the way she treated the adopted children and her own children," he says, recounting Soon-Yi's alleged problems with Mia.) It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that if this behavior hurt Soon-Yi coming from Mia, it might also have hurt her coming from Allen.
But the larger point — the point worth making at a moment when Allen is accusing all and sundry of magical malice — is that the accusation above is unbelievably cynical. He pretends to value an egalitarian ideal in which all siblings are treated equally in order to make Mia look bad, even as he openly withheld his affection from the other children.
It's a damning record that makes it much easier to imagine how Soon-Yi may have come to fall for him. Ignoring someone — a child — over a period of years spent in her company amounts, given the outcome, to an extreme form of negging. According to the judge's decision, of all Farrow's children, Allen "had the least to do with Soon-Yi. 'She was someone who didn't like me. I had no interest in her, none whatsoever.'" After they went to a basketball game he started saying hello to Soon-Yi, "which is something I never did in the years prior, but no conversations with her or anything." This is slightly unclear, but if I'm understanding it correctly, he had never even said hello to Soon-Yi prior to her timid overture.
I hope Soon-Yi has found happiness, and it seems she has, but this is a completely devastating portrait. A painfully quiet, socially awkward girl comes of age with a stepfather figure who never showed any interest in her or acknowledged her presence. Instead, he lavished his attention on her mother and her blonde little sister. She develops, and suddenly this man who has been in her house for years but seemed not to see her notices her! Her!
Soon-Yi went to college. Judge Wilk describes her as unhappy there: "She was naïve, socially inexperienced and vulnerable. Mr. Allen testified that she was lonely and unhappy at school, and that she began to speak daily with him by telephone." And so the grooming progressed.
No, this isn't child molestation. It is, however, predatory. Did Allen recognize that this might be an incredibly fragile person with a tortured past who came of age in an environment she found hostile thanks in part to the family dynamic he himself created? That in constructing a reality where only he, Mia, and their three children constituted "the family," he might have made her feel inferior and excluded? That by withholding affection from her throughout her entire childhood and adolescence, he'd created a power differential where she craved some of the validation and love she'd seen him lavish on her mother and sister? That in calling her daily when she most needed emotional support, he muddied that support by making it conditional, sexual?
Who knows? He's happy, anyway:
The very inequality of me being older and much more accomplished, much more experienced, takes away any real meaningful conflict. So when there's disagreement, it's never an adversarial thing. I don't ever feel that I'm with a hostile or threatening person. It's got a more paternal feeling to it. I love to do things to make her happy. She loves to do things to make me happy. It just works out great. It was just completely fortuitous. One of the truly lucky things that happened to me in my life.
I've emphasized what seems to me to be a problematic statement.
It is nice to be free of any "real meaningful conflict." For Allen, the ideal relationship is one in which he is the dominant paternal figure. This militates against his assertion — offered to contradict the fact that they were ever family — that they could have "met at a party or something." He's admitting here that his ideal romantic role doesn't start with equals at a party; he prefers a power dynamic that's essentially parental.
It's typical of Allen's distortions that he accords Soon-Yi full agency — she fell in love with him of her free will! — while insisting that his own children have none; they are brainless, dim-witted vessels for Mia's revenge. "If Mia did not keep them whipped up and enraged these days, telling them how to react," he says, "I don't think they would have cared two seconds."
It might behoove Mr. Allen to entertain the possibility that children do sometimes have feelings of their own — feelings that were not necessarily "implanted" by evil mothers out to destroy the psyches of the beings they went to extraordinary lengths to nurture. Be that as it may, his story is that the children wouldn't have minded in the least that he cheated on their mother with their sister, secretly, for six months. It's Mia who's responsible for their anger.
This is a pattern. The most egregious example is when Ronan (né Satchel) cried as an infant whenever Allen held him. This, too, according to Allen, was evidence of Mia's brainwashing: "Mr. Allen attributes this to Ms. Farrow's conscious effort to keep him apart from the child," Judge Wilk writes. (If Mia Farrow can brainwash babies into crying and stopping on command, she needs to write that how-to guide right quick.)
As for Mia herself, Woody claims she "would have thought more or less the same thing if it had been my secretary or an actress."
These are worrying levels of self-delusion. This is the behavior of a man so unaccustomed to thinking outside his own frame of reference, so amazingly narcissistic, that he genuinely thinks Mia Farrow's response to finding pornographic photos of the daughter she adopted from Korea and painstakingly raised would have been "more or less the same" as if he'd cheated on her with a secretary. This reasoning only makes sense in a universe where Woody Allen is the only thing that matters. The single emotion he imagines Farrow to be capable of is jealousy. Allen appears unable to imagine that either Mia or her children had a relationship with Soon-Yi that was irreparably damaged. (The other possibility is that he doesn't genuinely believe any of what he says here — in other words, he's either dangerously deluded or he's lying.)
Judge Wilk goes a step further — in his estimation, the divisive force in the home wasn't Mia, as Allen would have us believe. It was Woody:
Mr. Allen's response to Dylan's claim of sexual abuse was an attack upon Ms. Farrow, whose parenting ability and emotional stability he impugned without the support of any significant credible evidence. His trial strategy has been to separate his children from their brothers and sisters; to turn the children against their mother; to divide adopted children from biological children; to incite the family against their household help; and to set household employees against each other. His self-absorption, his lack of judgment and his continuation of his divisive assault, thereby impeding the healing of the injuries that he has already caused, warrant a careful monitoring of his future contact with the children.
So far, the discussion of this mess has revolved around the question of whether or not Dylan's allegations are true, with most of Allen defenders (and Allen himself in his latest) claiming that of course Dylan believes what she's saying but that doesn't make it true. Mia Farrow's veracity has been repeatedly impugned. She's been called crazy, unstable, out of touch — or a witchy mastermind who implanted memories in her daughter so robust that they've lasted two decades. I've seen Dylan Farrow called a liar, or crazy, or brainwashed. What I haven't seen, to my amazement, are what to my mind are the two more likely possibilities:
1) That if there's a "brainwashed" party here (and I'm not convinced there is, but if we're all performing thought experiments that strip the Farrow daughters of agency, let's at least be rigorous and thorough about it), it's far more likely to have been Soon-Yi, whose "lover" ignored her throughout her childhood, preyed on her as soon as she went off to college, and proceeded to isolate her from her entire support system, and/or
2) that if anyone's crazy here, or unstable, or out of touch with reality, it's clearly Allen. He may not even be lying as we understand the term. As George Costanza famously said, "Just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
How is it possible that — given the foregoing levels of self-delusion — we're applying the logic of the person-who-believes-their-own-lies to Dylan and not to Woody? Everyone keeps talking about the lack of evidence in this case. We've been looking at it from the wrong point of view. There is evidence EVERYWHERE. Not that Mia lied, but that Woody did. Over and over.
Let's count a few lies, some big, some small:
Woody Allen says in his response to Dylan Farrow's letter that:
"I was a 56-year-old man who had never before (or after) been accused of child molestation. I had been going out with Mia for 12 years and never in that time did she ever suggest to me anything resembling misconduct."
This is factually untrue. Farrow did express concerns about his misconduct, and luckily for her, it's documented: Dylan's therapist Dr. Coates testified that Farrow was concerned over Allen's treatment of Dylan. She raised the issue in 1990 and Coates worked with Allen to get him to discontinue some of his inappropriate behaviors:
I understood why she was worried, because it [Mr. Allen's relationship with Dylan] was intense, … I did not see it as sexual, but I saw it as inappropriately intense because it excluded everybody else, and it placed a demand on a child for a kind of acknowledgment that I felt should not be placed on a child.