I think after 23 years together, 17 married, time to give Woody & Soon-Yi a break. Human emotions are complicated, and deep love difficult to find - obviously not a Hollywood 1-night-stand.

Can imagine Mia Farrow's feelings, even if not married to Allen, but the Dylan charges of "all the time" molestation - not 1 or 2 times - would seem to me to stand up with psychological investigation. Having it come up after revelations about Soon-Yi, I mostly chalk it up to vicious custody battle/bitter lover-mother. That Dylan/Eliza is still announcing this gives me pause, but not too much. Allen's tastes have been documented as as young as 17, but that's a long way from 7 (previous actress). And unlike certain other directors, no evidence of a qualuude as date/photoshoot-rape drug.

Farrow doesn't help herself with the Sinatra bit - so she can fool around with her old love & have a kid with him several years before the Soon-Yi relationship, but Allen's behavior is subject to deeper scrutiny?

As for Krystof, he's a hack - always an "emotions on sleeve" type writer, not someone you could depend on.

The Times should never have allowed this.  It's yet another example of lack of editorial oversight over the op-ed columnists.

This is what interests me most about your essay Michael, and it's an area that I don't know much about and probably should know more.  Generally speaking, what role would or should the Times have in regulating the content of an op-ed writer's column, and how does that compare with what is printed in the "news" sections?  Are there industry standards, or would such standards in and of themselves venture too closely to some sort of self-censorship?  

Nice work by the way. 

I disagree with you here. I think Kristoff and Mia Farrow are beside the point. An adult is coming forward with something that happened to her as a child. Why didn't she come forward before? I don't know, but I'm guessing it had something to do with shame and humiliation. People molested as children tend to carry those feelings with them for a lifetime. Why did she choose now? Probably the achievement award was a tipping point. 

I don't buy the argument that Mia Farrow planted the memories. Does it happen? Sure, to kids who are 3 or 4. By 7, kids pretty much understand the reality of their world and are able to separate fact, fiction, and fantasy. 

And, completely beside the point, I guess I'm the only person here who finds Woody Allen movies utterly unwatchable. Boring. Stupid. Pointless. Annoying. 

I'd say you can watch Woody Allen movies and not ignore the controversy. Not too long ago, your wife posted a piece about an old Roman Polanski film worth watching. I read that and wondered how long it would be before someone brought up Polanski's status as a child rapist. It wasn't long.

Last week I saw an article about some "painting" by George Zimmerman. Even if Georgy-Porgy hadn't essentially appropriated someone else's image, it would be hard to imagine that I could post about the merits of his painting without someone noting that the artist had also gotten away with killing a young man, and seems likely to shoot someone else before he's done. 

George, Roman and Woody did what they did and it will color their artistic efforts. 

I have to admit that I've been less inclined to watch Allen's films since I heard about him and Soon-Yi. I did watch a couple that were on TV and I did watch a documentary about him with Soon-Yi, but I no longer feel the automatic, "I have to go see that!" reaction that I felt up until Purple Rose of Cairo or Broadway Danny Rose. 

And when TCM was showing The Front, it was a bit harder for me to accept Allen as the emotional patsy he often plays. Dylan's accusations are just that much more to think about.

I can enjoy Chinatown. Roman Polanski should be in jail.

Polanski is a convicted rapist of a thirteen-year-old. He has not even disputed the facts of the case.

And Chinatown is a great movie.

This is a basic principle: until it is proven otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s important to extend the presumption of innocence to Dylan Farrow, and presume that she is not guilty of the crime of lying about what Woody Allen did to her.

 

If you are saying things like “We can’t really know what happened” and extra-specially pleading on behalf of the extra-special Woody Allen, then you are saying that his innocence is more presumptive than hers. You are saying that he is on trial, not her: he deserves judicial safeguards in the court of public opinion, but she does not.

 

The damnably difficult thing about all of this, of course, is that you can’t presume that both are innocent at the same time. One of them must be saying something that is not true. But “he said, she said” doesn’t resolve to “let’s start by assuming she’s lying,” except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured. It works both ways, or should: if one of them has to be lying for the other to be telling the truth, then presuming the innocence of one produces a presumption of the other’s guilt. And Woody Allen cannot be presumed to be innocent of molesting a child unless she is presumed to be lying to us. His presumption of innocence can only be built on the presumption that her words have no credibility, independent of other (real) evidence, which is to say, the presumption that her words are not evidence. If you want to vigorously claim ignorance – to assert that we can never know what happened, in that attic – then you must ground that lack of knowledge in the presumption that what she has said doesn’t count, and we cannot believe her story.

I remember Bady from posts about Assange and Wikileaks at zunguzungu but he seems now to put more effort into TNI.

From another perspective. 

Ignore the principle if you wish. 

17 yIn your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. John 8:17

6 qOn the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses the one who is to die shall be put to death; a person shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness. Deuteronomy 17:6

A further examination of the legal status of expert witness testimony from a licensed polygrapher:

In a case where a defendant accused of perjury took the stand to affirm his prior testimony that he was ignorant of a conspiracy in restraint of trade, his proffer of the results of a  polygraph confirming the truth of this assertion was denied  On appeal, the 11th circuit held that where the polygraph was administered by a licensed operator, who was available for cross examination on the manner in which the test was administered and his interpretation of the results, the evidence would be admitted, over the objection of the prosecution.

Since Ramona and Donal are convinced I think I know, for a fact, what happened between Woody and Dylan, I'm going to come clean.

I do. Here's what happened. Please note how this story perfectly accords with all the facts as they are known, or at least with all facts suspected of being facts.

• Once upon a time, Dylan was Daddy's little girl, his favorite. He showered all kinds of attention on her. She was in paradise, and so was he.

• As is common in families where these strong dyadic relationships develop, jealousy soon comes a-visiting. Unbeknownst to Dylan or Daddy, the other kids were getting kinda pissed off at all the attention he showed her at their expense. They used to chant "Daddy and Dylan sittin' in a tree. K.I.S.S.I.N.G..." and march about the apartment when Daddy and Dylan were off on one of their father-daughter bonding strolls down 5th Avenue. Mia thought it was so cute and creative how the kids were putting on their own productions and learning to express their feelings.

• But under the surface, the seeds of sibling discord were being sown.

• And truth be told, Mommy was also getting kinda irked. Dads are supposed to love their daughters; that's admirable. Super Mom meet Super Dad. But enough was enough! And wasn't this all a little too close to all those January-December relationships Allen had portrayed in his movies and even talked about approvingly in public? She used to feel hip and avant-garde being linked in public with someone with the courage to openly defy bourgeois morality and profess libertine principles. Bourgeois morality was so, so very bourgeois. Artists didn't need no stinking morality; they set their own rules. Didn't Baudelaire and Rimbaud?

• But all this was supposed to be left on the cutting room floor. It was great when Woody was being lionized by the hoi polloi for his celluloid lifestyle. Somehow it all felt differently when it was happening to her.

• In short, she began to brood.

• Then one day, Dylan noticed a change. Kids notice things way before adults do, and Dylan was no exception to this rule. Daddy's affections which, heretofore, had been focused almost entirely on her had begun a subtle shift which were growing in intensity day by day. Someone else had caught his eye and begun to worm her way into his affections. But who???

• The worse person possible! Her older sister! Dylan used to look up to Soon-Yi even as she secretly pitied the poor Oriental girl with a lopsided face whose traditional place as "elder sister" she, Dylan, had inevitably usurped in the eyes of their father while she was still in the salad days of single digits. Soon-Yi had been cursed with a face only a mother could love and, as Dylan saw it, that was what their mother was for. Daddy was an artist, a genius, a smart, talented, witty man. He wasn't going trade a flower with peerless scent for a bottle of kimchee!!!

• But not every fortune cookie bears a message of unadulterated good fortune. "Never Trouble Trouble Till Trouble Troubles You" was wise advice, but goddamn-it! Trouble WAS troubling Dylan, and big time! And the more she watched Daddy and Soon-Yi (the fools thought she was playing with Barney or napping with Beanie Baby) the less she liked it and the angrier it made her.

• You see, it wasn't just that Daddy was shifting his focus toward Soon-Yi, it was the nature of the focus that Dylan found particularly troubling. Daddy and Soon-Yi weren't just spending a lot of "time" together, they were also doing different things together, things that were just over the horizon for a girl still in her single digits. And though Dylan had no well-formed notion of "romantic love" and what it entailed, our human biology still gives us an inkling of what is to come even before it has arrived.

• In short, Dylan was getting the message even if she didn't understand all the words. And she didn't like it one bit. No, not one bit. But what to do? Things were getting worse by the day. Events were swiftly moving toward an ineluctable conclusion (even though her young mind couldn't flesh out what that was) with no exits, off-ramps, or turnabouts on the horizon.

• Until one day, things came to a head and the world flipped upside down. Worse--all the world knew the world had flipped!

• Sister Soon-Yi had taken Mommy's place! Sister was now Mommy! Mommy was now sister! It was sister against sister! Mommy against Mommy! Sister against Mommy.

• In one stroke, Mommy had been thrown into the dustbin of history--but never mind her--Dylan is whom we should care about, and she had been thoroughly and irrevocably cast out and dethroned from her position of privilege as Daddy's Most Gracious and Exalted Companion.

• What to do about this impossible turn of events???

• Some kids grow up fast, and Dylan had to grow up fast if she was going to put a stop to this. Desperate events call for desperate measures. Boiled down to its basics, the problem as she saw it was this:

• Daddy was diddling Soon-Yi when, by rights, he should've been diddling Dylan.

• Dylan knew diddly about diddling, but she knew it had put Soon-Yi way ahead of Dylan in Daddy's universe of affection. Whatever it was technically, diddling was powerful magic. It had to be! After all, ordinary magic couldn't have taken Daddy away from Dylan. What else could diddling be but powerful, powerful joo-joo.

• But what could a girl, still in single digits, do about it a force this powerful and, by her, so little understood?

• For months, nay years, the problem wracked her. She couldn't stand to be in Daddy's presence. She'd lock herself into the bathroom whenever he visited. Like a true Allen, she had somatic symptoms. His presence caused her to moan like a wounded wolf on moon-less night. Nothing worked.

• Then the solution hit her like a thunderbolt. Fight thunder with thunderbolts! Her solution fit her to a tee and was just the kind of thing someone like her in her position would come up with.

• Announce to the world: "Daddy was diddling me before he was diddling Soon-Yi. So there! If you think Woody Allen would diddle someone who looked like warmed over bee-beem-bap instead of someone like me...you don't know my Daddy!"

• And 20 years later: "He is, was, and will always be mine. If I can't have him all to myself...no one will. Not Mommy. Not Soon-Yi. Not those dumb actress. Not any of those people who go to see his movies."

• And the rest, as they say, is history. The only bit of lucky news for Dylan was this: Mommy became her Super Ally. Mommy had been a bit irked when Daddy and Dylan were spending too much "alone time" together. But that was nothing compared to how she felt about Daddy diddling Soon-Yi. One could almost see the long canons swiveling on their mounts as they searched out their new target.

• After all, even if Dylan knew diddly about diddling, such was not the case for Mommy. Mommy knew diddling like the back of her hand. She had diddled across large expanses of this great country of ours. In fact, I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I say that I myself, a young CT boy, gazed out at old Blue Eyes' XXX-foot yacht moored off an island in the Sound for many, many days, as much delightful and dilatory diddling took place aboard, bourgeois morality be damned.

• (Yes, I know this for a fact, too, but I'm not going to tell you how I know. I have my children to think of. Let's just say, JK told me. The yacht's name was Southern Breeze. You can look it up, if you don't believe me.)

• And yes, for the record, I was jealous of old Frank. But there was bright side to it, too. It was then that I learned the true meaning of that famous Mafia expression: To make one's bones. Frank was making his (again) and made no bones about boning whomever he wanted and wherever he pleased. And he didn't give a bone who knew about it, either--least of all, his wife or wives. Nor did Mamma Mia.

• In summary, what at first looked like an impregnable barrier to Dylan in her childish quest to be the center of Daddy's universe forever--Daddy diddling Soon-Yi--revealed itself to be an excellent battering ram--Daddy had been diddling Dylan first, so there!--and had the added benefit of impelling Mommy to pick up the ram and put her full weight into the effort of bringing Daddy to his knees. And it didn't hurt that a good part of the world agreed with them.

Anyway, that's the way it happened. You can make book on it.

I had to read this sixteen times.

I initially thought you were talking about Bob Dylan who was a well known drug dealer:

copyright probs

I like this lady anyway

Okay that is enough.