Here’s a sentence for our times: Margaret Atwood recently had to defend herself against claims that she is a bad feminist. For those of us who experienced our feminist awakening when we read The Handmaid’s Tale, a headline like “Margaret Atwood faces feminist backlash” causes as much of a mind-melt as the consecutive words “President Trump” still do.
Atwood’s crime was to sign a 2016 petition calling for due process in the case of a former University of British Columbia professor accused of sexual misconduct. “If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place?” Atwood wrote last week. “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated… The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.”
Moderation is not cool now, politically or morally, and when it comes to responding to suggestions of sexual misconduct it is seen as fence-sitting, even enabling. Some have argued that following Atwood’s logic would lead to letting Harvey Weinstein and others like him off the hook – men who have been accused of sexual misconduct but not actually charged with anything (yet). But when I read Atwood’s piece I didn’t think of those recent cases. I thought of Woody Allen.
The Allen saga has always had a shape-shifting quality. Back in 1992, shortly after it emerged that Allen was having an affair with Mia Farrow’s 20-year-old daughter, Farrow accused him of molesting their adopted seven-year-old daughter, Dylan. The public response to this mess has altered with the times. In the 90s people seemed weirded out more by Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi, to whom he has now been married for more than 20 years, than by the suggestion he might have molested a child. But in 2014, as a new wave of feminism was cresting, Dylan and her brother Ronan made a push for their father to be held accountable for what they allege he did; and increasingly, people have listened.
Last week Amazon Studios was said to be considering ending its relationship with him, while actors have been falling over themselves to create some distance from Allen, having apparently just heard about these 26-year-old allegations. This is understandable in the case of Timothée Chalamet, who wasn’t born until 1995, but more mystifying in the case of Colin Firth, who was all of 32 in 1992 and, presumably, able to read the newspapers. As I said, times change.
Today, Allen’s name is so toxic that it feels almost transgressive to talk about him as an individual case and not lumped together with Roman Polanski, a child rapist, and Bill Cosby, currently awaiting re-trial for sexual assault. But Polanski was convicted and, in the case of Cosby, multiple allegations quickly followed the first. Allen may yet face criminal proceedings, but in the past 26 years the only new development has been the emergence of Moses Farrow, Dylan’s older brother, who has become increasingly vocal about the abuse he claims he suffered at the hands of his mother; he claims Farrow brainwashed her children about Allen. Dylan has dismissed her brother’s allegations as “irrelevant”. But why is one child’s claim of abuse irrelevant and another’s urgent?
It’s worth re-establishing some truths about the original case, which is too complicated to fit within the black-and-white outlines some now draw around it. To say that Allen was never charged is not a defence of him, but it is a statement of fact. Two separate investigations, in 1992 and 1993, concluded that he had not abused Dylan. A state attorney subsequently said he had “probable cause” to prosecute; but during Farrow and Allen’s custody battle, Allen’s relationship with Dylan was described by a doctor as “not sexual” but “inappropriately intense, because it excluded everybody else”. The case is far from clear-cut.
I get why people feel icky about Allen. Some of us were rolling our eyes at Manhattan, his film about a man’s relationship with a schoolgirl, before the leading lights of #MeToo were born. But this is not a case that should be tried by public opinion, and I find it extraordinary that people point to Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi and his films as evidence for the prosecution, as if his fondness for pairing much younger women and older men is proof of paedophilia. Young women are not little girls.
MeToo emerged because so many women have lost faith in the justice system. Too many victims have been silenced – but that is not the situation in Dylan Farrow’s case. Justice is not “Believe all women”, as I’ve seen many people claim; it is “Listen to all women”. And now that women are being listened to, we need to decide what to do with this long-awaited power. How do we handle ambiguity, and the right to a presumption of innocence? Condemnation needs to have real substance, or this much-needed movement risks becoming meaningless.
