Just want to talk a little bit more about Woody Allen, since the same kinds of responses seem to pop up again and again whenever his sexual history comes up.
As I said yesterday, the bulk of what we know about Allen's sexual grossness is in the public record. We know about his pursuit of sexual relationships with multiple teenage girls (at least three named, more unnamed) when he was in his forties.
We know that several of the girls he pursued sexually in the seventies were still in high school. We know—from compelling personal accounts from multiple women—that his behavior toward them was shabby, and creepy.
We know that Manhattan was autobiographical, and that it was a whitewashed composite portrait of multiple sexual relationships with teenagers, some of them apparently simultaneous.
And we know about his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, which began (non-sexually, they claim) when she was in high school and he was in his mid-fifties, and became sexual (they claim) when she was 21 and he was 56.
We know that she was the daughter of his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend, depending on who you ask), and the stepsister of his kids, and we know that he has described the relationship as starting as a "fling."
None of what I've described here is particularly controversial. None, as far as I'm aware, has been denied by Allen. Much of it is public knowledge, much of the rest of it is well-corroborated.
I don't have an opinion on whether Allen molested Dylan Farrow. I don't have any information about whether, as has been suggested, he committed statutory rape in the 1970s. But those are not questions we need to resolve in order to form conclusions about Allen's character.
So when you say that Woody Allen is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, or that he shouldn't be judged without evidence, it's hard for me to understand what you mean.
If you say "I know what he did in the seventies, and I don't have a problem with it," I know what that means. If you say "I think Mariel Hemingway, Stacey Nelkin, and Christina Engelhardt are lying," I know what that means.
And if you say "What happened between him and Soon-Yi doesn't make my skin crawl," I guess I understand what that means too, though I don't understand why it wouldn't.
But if you say something like "We can't know what happened, and so we shouldn't judge him," I don't know what the hell that's supposed to mean. We know what happened. We know what he did. We know who he is. We know.
(When I say I have no opinion on the Dylan Farrow allegations, by the way, what I mean is just that—that I don't myself have a settled position on them. I don't discount the likelihood that they may well be true, and I don't think it's wrong for others to reach that conclusion.)
Just one more thing here: Both of the women who have come forward to say that they, as teenagers, had sexual relationships with Allen in the seventies have said that they were past the age of consent at the time. They don't allege statutory rape.
But "is it illegal" is not the only metric by which sexually predatory behavior can be measured, and the picture of Allen that emerges from Christina Engelhardt's account is that of a predator. hollywoodreporter.com/features/woody…
