Woody Allen Strikes Back: “Of Course I Did Not Molest Dylan”; Dylan Farrow Responds UPDATE
One week later after The New York Times published Dylan Farrow’s Open Letter in last Sunday’s NYT, the paper of record has published Woody Allen’s response to his daughter. Well, we already knew the man can write. He repeats much of what his documentarian Robert Weide wrote in a widely circulated piece in The Daily Beast. But it’s in his own words. He starts off:
“TWENTY-ONE years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused me of child molestation, I found the idea so ludicrous I didn’t give it a second thought. We were involved in a terribly acrimonious breakup, with great enmity between us and a custody battle slowly gathering energy. The self-serving transparency of her malevolence seemed so obvious I didn’t even hire a lawyer to defend myself. It was my show business attorney who told me she was bringing the accusation to the police and I would need a criminal lawyer.”
I naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand because of course, I hadn’t molested Dylan and any rational person would see the ploy for what it was. Common sense would prevail. After all, 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. Now, suddenly, when I had driven up to her house in Connecticut one afternoon to visit the kids for a few hours, when I would be on my raging adversary’s home turf, with half a dozen people present, when I was in the blissful early stages of a happy new relationship with the woman I’d go on to marry — that I would pick this moment in time to embark on a career as a child molester should seem to the most skeptical mind highly unlikely. The sheer illogic of such a crazy scenario seemed to me dispositive.
Notwithstanding, Mia insisted that I had abused Dylan and took her immediately to a doctor to be examined. Dylan told the doctor she had not been molested. Mia then took Dylan out for ice cream, and when she came back with her the child had changed her story. The police began their investigation; a possible indictment hung in the balance. I very willingly took a lie-detector test and of course passed because I had nothing to hide. I asked Mia to take one and she wouldn’t. Last week a woman named Stacey Nelkin, whom I had dated many years ago, came forward to the press to tell them that when Mia and I first had our custody battle 21 years ago, Mia had wanted her to testify that she had been underage when I was dating her, despite the fact this was untrue. Stacey refused. I include this anecdote so we all know what kind of character we are dealing with here. One can imagine in learning this why she wouldn’t take a lie-detector test.
And so on. UPDATE: And Dylan comes back with her response to Allen.
The saddest thing about this whole sordid business, as Allen points out, is the impact it has had on their children. And the impact it’s having now on Cate Blanchett, who wisely withdrew from some New York television interviews, partly out of grief for her friend Philip Seymour Hoffman, but also because the questions about the scandal would be inevitable. Her well-deserved Oscar should not be at stake.
