Abuse Allegations Revive Woody Allen's Trial By Media

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[URL="http://www.npr.org/2014/02/07/273058780/abuse-allegations-revive-woody-allens-trial-by-media"]NPR Link[/URL]

[quote=NPR]Allen was never charged, but his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, has of late revived her allegations, as have her famous mother, Mia Farrow, and brother Ronan Farrow. Allen and Farrow were romantic partners for a dozen years; Dylan and Ronan are their children.

In a piece posted on The New York Times website Friday evening, Allen depicted the accusations as part of Mia Farrow's retribution against him after a bitter split. "Of course I did not molest Dylan," he wrote. "I loved her and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father."

Back in mid-January, amid the broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, the actor Emma Stone helped pay tribute to Allen's career. She called him "a genius who takes chances and never compromises his vision."

That was enough for Mia Farrow, Allen's former movie co-star as well as girlfriend for a dozen years until their relationship ended in the early 1990s.

As the tribute came on, Farrow tweeted, "Time to grab some ice cream," followed later by one that said, "Golden Globe tribute showed contempt for [Farrow] & all abuse survivors."

In his own tweet, their son Ronan Farrow wrote, "Did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?"

[B]Allegations Via Columns, Defense Via Blog[/B]

Robert Weide, who made a PBS documentary about Allen's career and remains friendly with the director, decided to write an article for the Daily Beast defending Allen. "We can always have the discussion — as though it were our business — whether Woody had any right to get involved [with] Soon Yi," he tells NPR. "And I understand that people are creeped out by it because of the age difference and because she was the daughter of Woody's girlfriend. But that's not a criminal offense."

In his article, Weide emphasized a finding from experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who concluded that Dylan probably hadn't been abused. He also noted that a Connecticut prosecutor had been rebuked for saying there was proof of abuse, even as he decided not to prosecute Allen. "In the aftermath of the famous tweets from Ronan and Mia the night of the Golden Globe Awards," Weide says, "I went online and I was seeing all the Internet chatter about it — and found that people were still making the same mistakes that I had heard people make for 20 years."

Dylan Farrow, now 28 and using a different name, first revived her allegations last fall in a profile of her mother in Vanity Fair magazine. But Mia Farrow's claim that Ronan might actually be the son of her first husband, Frank Sinatra, drowned out those claims.

Dylan wrote a harrowing statement detailing her accusations. The ensuing debate over the allegations — and how to handle them — has split newsrooms and journalists of all ideological stripes.

The Los Angeles Times declined to publish Farrow's article, according to The Wrap, and Politico reports that the New York Times editorial department decided against printing it as its own opinion piece.[/quote]

I really hope its not true, because that would be horrible. I love Allen, his movies are great.