Opinion: Second-Guessing Woody Allen – Version 2

by Michaeley O’Brien

Stephen Vagg is a friend, a colleague and a fellow screenwriter. I greatly admire all his writing, but was troubled by aspects of his piece on Woody Allen.

The trouble started with the intro. Specifically: ‘I (a) think both people who were in the room at Bridgewater on that day believe wholeheartedly that they’re telling the truth’.

Dylan Farrow alleges her father deliberately put his fingers in her labia and vulva. (To keep this simple, I am relying on Dylan’s version of events in her 2014 open letter and her subsequent 2018 CBS interview.

Woody Allen says he didn’t.

Either that act happened or it didn’t. I can’t see how in any gymnastics of POV you can reach a point where both believe they are telling the truth. There are only two ways the internal logic of that sentence holds: Either Woody Allen is guilty, but he has been lying for so long that he genuinely believes the incident never happened. Or, Woody Allen is innocent, and Dylan has invented the story. And the only way she can ‘believe wholeheartedly that she’s telling the truth’ is if she made up the story but she’s been lying for so long that she genuinely believes it. Or she has been coached/brainwashed by her mother.

My sister works in child protection. My best friend is a psychologist who investigates allegations of sexual misconduct made by school students against teachers. Like everyone who works at the top level in their field, they stay on top of the research into victim and perpetrator behaviour. I have a degree in Science (Psychology) graduating with Honours. I have spent 30 years researching criminal behaviour while writing police and crime drama. The bottom line? Children do not make up stories about being sexually assaulted and their mothers do not coach them to lie about such behaviour.

Yes, I’m that categorical. Sure, you can drag up obscure (Canadian) studies and attempt to wrangle examples of fabrications and coaching from the stats. Some who would defend Woody Allen cite the cluster of day care sex abuse allegations in the U.S in the 1980s where innocent teachers were gaoled on the basis of outlandish claims that they’d kidnapped children in their charge and involved them in group sex, satanic rituals and animal torture. All charges were eventually dropped. Most scholars now attribute the false claims to be the result of an initial (spurious) claim fanned by the flames of parental hysteria and fed by the confirmation bias of the interviewing techniques employed by untrained investigators to probe the children’s accounts. 

But there are significant clinical differences between those cases of moral panic and allegations made by individual children about family perpetrators. It is extremely difficult to find cases where children make explicit allegations of sexual assault/touching by a parent that carry over time into adulthood – where their story is unwavering in the face of the incredible number of times they have to tell it to the police/courts, etc.

When I did my psych degree, my main area of interest was research on lying. I studied experiments, conducted experiments, was part of experiments, read widely and wrote scientific reports on the subject. I also spent a lot of time with investigators who parse the written interviews of suspects to find linguistic indicators that they’re not telling the truth. As just one example; when a narrative breaks from past tense to present tense, it’s usually because the interviewee is making the story up as he/she goes: People telling the truth speak almost exclusively in past tense. There are other fascinating linguistic flags to indicate people are not telling the truth, but the quick takeaway from 4 years of Psych is that it’s very hard for human beings to fabricate a story and repeat it over time. If we tell the truth it never changes, it’s locked in our brains as an event that happened, and we can tell that story forever. There are two minor caveats to this: 1. Due to trauma there can be inconsistencies about specific times, dates, etc. for survivors of DV and sexual assault, particularly when the abuse is episodic across time and not a one-off incident, and 2. We all know from our own long-winded anecdotes that with memory in general, there is a slight fraying of details over time.

Of course, human beings – including children – tell lies. But people can get confused between the types of stories children tell when they’re experimenting or fantasising or playing or being alliterative, versus telling a parent that something awful and uncomfortable has been perpetrated on them. A child might breezily tell a parent that there’s a dragon living in the dog house in the garden, but that’s inherently different from recounting an incident of sexual abuse and repeatedly describing who, when, where, how often, what did he do, how did he do it, where did he touch you, which room, what else was there, who else was there, how old were you, what were you wearing, what was he wearing…

And to tell that story over and over to doctors, police, detectives, prosecutors, social workers, the media…

In short, if you kill someone and try to make up a story of where you were instead, or if you try to fabricate an entire scenario of being sexually assaulted when you weren’t, those stories get very inconsistent quite quickly and are difficult to withstand the multiple times you have to repeat them under police/court interrogation. (Woody Allen’s 60 Minutes interview contains a significant number of linguistic red flags whereas Dylan’s CBS interview is consistent – in terms of the tools investigators use to analyse testimony – with her telling the truth.

So, if children don’t lie about being sexually assaulted, how then do these cases end up such a mess of he said/she said when they get to court? Because (in Australia) invariably this is what happens:

The child tells his/her mother ‘daddy did something funny to my bottom’. Child protection workers investigate. Child sticks to the story. Dad gets a lawyer. The criminal justice system (predominantly white, middle-aged men who come from privileged backgrounds) relies on innocent until proven guilty (a noble presumption for most crimes but for child sex abuse where the vast majority of accused are men, the presumption of innocence ipso facto means the presumption is that the child or mother is lying). Dad gets bail and – through a protracted court process – is allowed to keep seeing the child throughout. Mum gets more and more hysterical about dad having (sexual) access to the child.

Court appointed psychologists interview dad, mum and the child but they are often very inappropriate in how they do this. They will see the dad and child victim together (Mind boggling. How can anyone expect a child victim to repeat what happened to them in front of their perpetrator?) These psychologists often have no understanding of trauma and are not experts in DV or sexual assault. In essence, they heighten the danger. They do not test the evidence and do not risk assess. In addition, perpetrators can groom/charm professionals (if this is their MO) and fool them into believing them over the child’s mother.

A lot of family court cases fail not because the child recants (a conclusion some erroneously conclude from the stats on cases that didn’t proceed), but because the system is so relentless and blaming of the mother that the pressure leads mums to give up as they are terrified that they will be perceived as lying, thus unstable, thus an irresponsible parent. So, they either relinquish their support of their child’s testimony or risk custody being awarded to the (abusive) dad, where there will be no safety in place, no eyes on the child, and dad will control any contact mum gets once court cases are finalised.

That is the Australian experience, but Mia Farrow’s experience was not inconsistent with it:

The court report written by the Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sex Abuse Clinic (engaged by the Connecticut state prosecutor Frank Maco to determine whether Dylan would be able to perceive facts correctly and be able to repeat her story on the witness stand) was based on the findings of a panel that consisted of: ‘two social workers and a pediatrician, Dr. John Leventhal, who signed off on the report but who never saw Dylan or Mia Farrow. No psychologists or psychiatrists were on the panel. The social workers never testified; the hospital team only presented a sworn deposition by Dr. Leventhal, who did not examine Dylan’. 

And that quote just skates the surface of the problems with that team’s conduct and their processes (including destroying their original notes and refusing to testify at the hearing). A perpetrator of child sexual abuse really has only two lines of defence: 1. The child is lying, or; 2. The child is being coached by an hysterical, vindictive mother. (Who by the end of such one-sided court proceedings may well be hysterical and vindictive! But didn’t start off that way).

That’s the only defence perpetrators have. Which is why we hear it all the time.

It’s Woody Allen’s defence.

And that’s my trouble with Stephen’s opening sentence. Even as he – with the best of intentions – tries to remain impartial – he’s accused Dylan. Because the most generous reading of that sentence is that Dylan is obliviously fabricating.

(My personal version of that sentence would be:  Only the two people who were in the room at Bridgewater on that day know who is telling the truth and who is lying.)  

But my other difficulty with this intro is it reduces Dylan’s allegation down to one day in one room in Bridgewater. If Dylan was trying to make a criminal case out of that, it might well fall down on he said/she said and misunderstanding of an accidental touch (which is the most generous way a defence lawyer might defend what Dylan alleges was a deliberate sexual assault, not an accident).

But everything she describes in Woody’s behaviour towards her (in both letter and CBS interview) is classic and persistent sexually predatory grooming. And that view is supported by other adults, including Dylan’s psychologist, witnessing Woody’s inappropriate and alarming behaviour towards Dylan in the 2 years preceding the allegation (remember Woody was already in voluntary therapy for inappropriate behaviour towards Dylan months before the Bridgewater incident).

In the 1992 custody hearing, Judge Wilk concluded that based on the evidence it was unlikely Woody Allen ‘could be successfully prosecuted for sexual abuse’. Allen supporters usually stop quoting Judge Wilk right there. It is inconvenient for their case to repeat Wilk’s other conclusions: ‘I am less certain, however than is the Yale-New Haven team, that the evidence proves conclusively that there was no sexual abuse’.

Apart from the team’s other shortcomings, Judge Wilk cited the fact that they made recommendations without seeing Woody Allen interact with Dylan, they made recommendations about Dylan’s younger brother Satchel (now known as Ronan) without seeing him at all, and they made observations and recommendations outside their mandate.

He was also ‘not persuaded that the videotape of Dylan is the product of leading questions or of the child’s fantasy’. And he was alarmed enough by Woody Allen’s behaviour towards his adoptive daughter to describe it as ‘grossly inappropriate’.

The result of the case: Rather than hand over custody of Dylan to Woody, which is what Allen was fighting for, Judge Wilk concluded: ‘measures must be taken to protect her’. (The full brutal transcript here)

If you take away the job of the accused, you’ve got a case that child protection workers see every week. Child makes an allegation which is plausible and consistent over time. Dad defends with the usual clichés (vindictive partner, everyone’s lying except me).

At the end of the day there are only two possibilities. Either Woody Allen is innocent of sexually assaulting his daughter. Or he’s guilty.

Either Dylan is one of the really quite rare cases of a 7-year-old who can make up a story of ongoing inappropriate sexual contact by her father, culminating in a specific instance of sexual assault and hold to that story over 2 decades. Or Woody Allen is just another of the hundreds of thousands of predatory grooming pederasts with a preoccupation with underage women which he wrote about in his films and translated at some point into real life – who just happens to have a job many people admire.

I’m a gambler. But I’m pretty sure where the safe money is here.

So, for the purpose of what follows, I’m going to operate on the (not outlandish) assumption that the following is true: Dylan Farrow spoke the truth – at the age of 7 and from 2014 onwards; Woody Allen sexually assaulted her. Woody Allen knows he did this. This was not a one-off mistake/misunderstanding. This was the culmination of a pattern of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards his adopted daughter.

In Stephen’s analysis of Woody Allen’s catalogue he divides the filmmaker’s work into 4 phases. The fourth phase dates from the time Woody married Soon-Yi (his partner’s daughter) to the present and Stephen argues that during this time period, Woody switched off the art of self-examination: ‘Since the late nineties, Woody Allen has stopped seriously investigating what it means to be Woody Allen’.

Stephen goes on to wonder what we might have seen in Phase 4 if Woody Allen was still being brutally honest about himself?

Here’s his paragraph, with my take in brackets (assume an ‘alleged’ before every verb):

‘Because there is surely rich material in what Allen has been th(r)ough over the past three decades. (I couldn’t agree more!) What is it like to have your own adoptive daughter accuse you of sexual abuse? (What is it like to sexually assault your own adoptive daughter, be caught out and come so close to criminal charges?) To have an ex-partner so consumed with loathing towards you, and you towards her, that you claim she brainwashed her children?’ (To employ the time-honoured defence of the paedophile defendant and be so thoroughly excoriated by the presiding judge in your 1992 custody suit who concluded that there is no ‘credible evidence to support Mr Allen’s contention that Ms Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi. Mr Allen’s resort to the stereotypical ‘woman scorned’ defence is an injudicious attempt to divert attention from his failure to act as a responsible parent and adult’.)

‘To have your own biological son become a world-famous celebrity in his own right, in part by exposing cases of sexual harassment partly motivated on his part by your alleged behaviour? (… by the behaviour you know to be true). To have world famous actors publicly regret that they have ever worked with you and to swear they will never do it again, for a crime you say you did not do’. (To be furious that the actors whose careers you made and the audiences who lapped up your work when they thought your writing was mostly fiction have turned their back on you now that they realise it’s based on a sordid reality.)

Stephen gives a number of possible reasons why Woody Allen has switched off the art of self-examination, but these reasons are all (unconsciously) predicated on the assumption that Allen is innocent. Because, if he’s guilty, he can’t possibly tell the truth, which would be something along these lines (and this is just my educated guess, again assume an ‘alleged’ before every verb):

As a result of losing four separate court cases, Woody Allen was genuinely shaken by how close he’d come to being caught out. During his heyday of Phase 3, he was so confident, so feted, so celebrated that he could do anything, say anything, write anything. He could flaunt his deepest, darkest, nastiest preoccupations without fear of recrimination. Sexual predators get much of their thrill from the risk of being discovered. They often use it as a defence (As if I’d grope him in the kitchen, his parents were in the next room!), whereas it’s actually part of the behaviour – both a warning to the child that they’re invincible if they can do this right in front of the child’s parents, and the thrill of being so close to discovery and getting away with it. Woody’s defence in his 60 Minutes interview follows the same line: ‘Isn’t it illogical that I’m going to – at the height of a very bitter acrimonious custody fight – drive up to Connecticut where nobody likes me and I’m in a house full of enemies…  and suddenly on visitation, pick this moment in my life to become a child molester…’

That’s exactly why he’d do it. Like the man who drives his kids into a dam on Mother’s Day. It’s all about power and control. And there’s no satisfaction like punishment.

But I digress. So, Woody has narrowly escaped a criminal prosecution. He has married Soon-Yi to legitimise the relationship. He doesn’t love her any more than he genuinely loved any of the other underage women he used, then tossed away (Babi Christina Engelhardt, Stacey Nelkin). Any feelings he has are about wanting, possessing, owning and controlling. Now he’s snookered himself into spending the rest of his life with her and he’s stuck in a lie (and alibi) of his own construction.

Of course, a public partnership has never stopped Woody having affairs on the side, but now he’s getting older and the gloss of fame is being tarnished by the lingering stench of the accumulating accusations against him. Fewer Babi Christinas are dropping their phone numbers on his table at Elaine’s. And he also has to face the fact that behaviour he might have justified to himself when he was younger (everyone was doing it, it was the seventies, they propositioned me…) crossed a definite line when he stuck his finger in his 7-year-old daughter’s vagina. When he looks in the mirror, it’s hard to see the ‘auteur’, the ‘comedic genius’. The words that apply now are ‘ageing’ and ‘paedophile’.

He has no more children of his own and the one child he claims to have fathered (Ronan Farrow), everyone believes (including Ronan!) is actually the son of Frank Sinatra. Even if that’s not true, the widely held belief that Ronan could not possibly be Woody’s son because he’s too good looking must hurt. And so, he adopts more children with Soon-Yi, which just makes a lot of people even more nervous. Because based on his patterns of behaviour and multiple boundary violations, it would be hard to find a child protection worker who’s not saying ‘watch this space’ with regard to those two kids.

So, how does he put any of that material, that true autobiographical material into his films? He can’t.

And that’s my answer to Stephen’s question of why Woody Allen has had a problem being creatively honest since 1997.

The challenge Stephen set himself was to try and have a discussion about Woody Allen that’s just about the work. The trouble with trying to separate Woody from his work is that Woody’s life is his work (as Stephen so clearly articulated in his excellent analysis of Phase 3).  Post the court cases, people who love his films try to silo Woody the perpetrator from Woody the ‘genius’ filmmaker.  Or they try to silo the one allegation made by Dylan from every other boundary violation and inappropriate thing Woody thought, wrote, and acted out in his other relationships. (‘Let’s just talk about the films, the genius, the cinematography… and not about that pesky day in the attic’).

Criminal investigators and child protection workers look for patterns. The red flags pop up like mushrooms throughout Woody’s life and work (and unconsciously in his interviews). It’s almost impossible to make a coherent case that he’s not a paedophile.

At the end of the day, either Woody Allen is a liar or Dylan Farrow is a fabricator. I don’t think there’s a fence you can sit on here. If you write about the man and his work, you have to take a position. Because, there is now out there in the world another piece about Woody Allen which (unintentionally but nonetheless) reinforces the thesis that Woody Allen is innocent, which by implication unfortunately also reinforces the theory (despite a bank of scientific research to the contrary) that children lie about being sexually abused and/or their vengeful mothers coach/brainwash them into fabrication.