This Woody Allen script is familiar

Before launching into a discussion of an issue as emotive as the Woody Allen abuse allegation, it is always worth rehashing the facts. In this case, that shouldn't take long.

Legally, Allen is innocent. His adopted daughter Dylan Farrow’s allegation of abuse was never heard in court. He has not been convicted of any crime. He has said the claim is “untrue and disgraceful”.

That’s it. We don’t know what transpired in that attic bedroom in Frog Hollow in the summer of 1992. We don’t know for sure why it didn’t go to court – whether it was because of concerns about the “fragility of the child victim”, as Farrow herself claims, or whether it was because of a lack of credible evidence, as the Allen camp argues. We don’t know what would have happened if it had.

Alongside these facts are some other things we know generally to be true. Children do not regularly lie about abuse. Most abusers are not bogeymen passing in the night. Rather, they are loving fathers, trusted family friends, charismatic figures in their community. They may even be celebrated artists.

The difficulty for any observer is that, in a case such as this, there are two opposing rights at stake: the alleged perpetrator’s presumption of innocence, and the alleged victim’s right to be believed. The first is enshrined in law, the second in instinct, and our experience of what happens when victims are routinely dismissed as fantasists. In order for one right to be upheld, the other must be compromised.

As members of the public, we have no right to cast judgment on Woody Allen, or anyone. That’s what courts are for. But our default position when a child cries “abuse” should not be disbelief. It should not be to wonder who put them up to it. It should not be to decry them as disturbed. It should not be to blame their mother.

This is why the Golden Globes’ decision to go ahead with its Allen love-in last month was so ill-judged, and why he should not be further feted at the Oscars. To celebrate him while this abuse claim hangs over him is not a noble exercise separating the artist from the art – it is sending the message that those who claim abuse are inherently suspect.

That said, I don't think the New York Times was right publish her letter either – not because Farrow does not deserve to be heard, but because a newspaper blog was the wrong forum. Online, sentiment turns ugly quickly. Predictably, the immediate anti-Allen hysteria gave way to a backlash against Dylan Farrow and her mother, whom Allen has accused of "engineering" the claims.

A vast grey area
If the whole, sad mess feels familiar it is because versions of this particular Woody Allen script have been played out before, in every Irish community. There is a whisper of abuse. People make snap judgments. The waters are muddied with conjecture and misdirection and counter-allegations. Well-meaning people believe that they are doing the right thing when they choose not to get involved, as Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin did this week; one expressing vague sympathy, the other dismissing it as an issue for the family. But there is a vast grey area between withholding judgment and allowing an accusation like this to be brushed under the carpet. It is in this murky realm that the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and Catholic-run institutions flourished.

This started out as being a question about whether a man over whom such a serious accusation lingers should be celebrated as a great artist. But it has become a debate about so many other things: how we balance the right to reputation of the powerful with the rights of the vulnerable; how turning a blind eye is not always the moral choice.


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