Let us assume – because it might be true, even in these daunting internet days where columnists find themselves answerable to an impossible audience of potential millions – that you are a typical Observer reader. Like me.
If so, you're probably a Woody Allen fan. You love his wordy, nerdy artistry; you think he's gone off a bit in recent years but hope Blue Jasmine signals a return to form.
You are also facing a horrible conundrum, thrown up by the open letter published by Allen's adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, repeating allegations of childhood sexual abuse – allegations that Allen again denied yesterday.
You don't need to be Alec Baldwin or Cate Blanchett (specifically named by Farrow as collaborators in Hollywood's failure to reject her alleged abuser) to feel that you should take a view. Farrow challenges Woody Allen's audience, too.
Although you cannot know what happened in the attic when Dylan was seven years old, and would no doubt prefer to feel it's none of your business, she is implying that a blind eye from cinemagoers is a form of culpability.
Here, if you are anything like me, is your problem.
Even in your own private thoughts, you do not want to label a man as a child molester when he hasn't been charged, let alone found guilty. You believe that if an allegation is enough to see a man tarred with the darkest brush there is, then we're all sunk. Perhaps you read the unbearable recent story about Bijan Ebrahimi, burned to death on a housing estate after a false accusation of paedophilia. You believe fervently in the principle of presuming innocence unless guilt is proved.
However. You know the world is full of abused children and raped women who will never see justice because, by the nature of the crime, there are no witnesses and proof is often impossible.You know that a series of individuals who have never been found guilty, so must individually be considered innocent, adds up to a vast crowd of abusers who walk free across the planet. And you know the trauma of the abused is massively compounded by the horror and loneliness of being disbelieved.
So, trapped between labelling Woody Allen a child molester or his daughter a liar, you feel utterly stuck. Either way, you are breaking one of your own deeply felt principles.
I have given this a lot of miserable thought and, I think, found a way through. Woody Allen may have assaulted his daughter in the manner defined by law; but, while principle obliges you to assume not, that doesn't mean you have to reject his daughter's truth.
It could go like this.
At the time of the alleged incident, Dylan Farrow's family has fallen apart because her father's having an affair with her sister. To the family, the fact that he never adopted or lived with Soon-Yi Previn is a meaningless nicety. He's been with Mia Farrow since 1980, when Soon-Yi was around eight (her exact age and birth date are not known). Twelve years later, Mia Farrow has found naked photographs of Soon-Yi that Allen has taken.
Seven-year-old Dylan is adjusting to a world where her parents have split up and her father's having sex with her sister. In all meaningful ways, when it comes to what it feels like for the family, he is committing incest. Technically, no. Emotionally, yes.
To her mother, it must also feel like child abuse. All the definitions of all the relationships have been disrespected and are crumbling apart. Now that Mia Farrow knows it's possible for Woody Allen to feel a sexual interest in her children, at any age, she is fighting for sole custody. So, Dylan is dealing with a father who's having sex with her sister and a mother who is trying to protect her from him.
In this context, Dylan does not want to be touched by him. That means being touched by someone who's become frightening, who is not the innocent father she believed. She has been stroked, kissed and told she is beautiful by a monster who's been casting his sexual eye around the family. It's sinister. She doesn't want it. She may not understand the detail, but everything has turned horrible and weird.
The long-term success of Allen's marriage to Previn, and the relative horror of Dylan's allegations, might cause us to forget how foul it is that he slept with his girlfriend's child. His children's sister. He stood sweaty and excited behind the camera as he snapped her nude in secret. Even if only in this way, his sexuality violated his children's innocent universe.
God knows, he's a great comedian, talented musician and skilled film-maker. But if he were my father, and his lust for my sister had been similarly exposed, then I, too, would realise that I'd spent years being touched by a creep; and my disproportionate, inappropriate awareness of his physical desires would make those touches feel like a violation.
The family boundaries were transgressed. The caresses became sinister. The memory of them felt dirty and shameful. Wherever Woody Allen did or didn't put his hands, these are the feelings of child abuse.
So, even with Allen's innocence of a crime presumed, there is no version where Dylan Farrow is lying. Either way, her father brought sex into her childhood consciousness, mixed up with family life, in a way that left psychological scars. Either way, her development was compromised by something disturbing and wrong. Either way, she remembers unwanted touches; was a victim and is a survivor.
This means that, challenged to take a view without knowing what happened, we need not be stuck with a choice between two ghastly slurs.
You cannot label Woody Allen a child molester, when he has never faced this charge in court, but it's a false and simplistic corollary to call his daughter a liar.
