Dylan Farrow, Woody Allen and the politics of disbelief [TW]

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Dylan Farrow, Mia Farrow's daughter and Woody Allen's adoptive daughter, recently published an open letter in the New York Times about being sexually assaulted by the renowned filmmaker when she was 7 years old.

It is a harrowing read. We don't like to believe children can be used like this, particularly by those who purport to love them. It is, however, disturbingly common. Studies by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, show that:

• 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;

• Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;

• During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;

• Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;

• Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.

• According to a 2003 National Institute of Justice report, 3 out of 4 adolescents who have been sexually assaulted were victimized by someone they knew well.

As horrifying as the numbers in those stats are, they are probably much lower than they should be, because as everyone involved in compiling them admits, childhood sexual abuse is chronically underreported. The response to Dylan Farrow's open letter gives a good indication why. Her credibility is being impugned in comment and blog, by whatever means necessary.

The Daily Beast, nearly a week before the open letter, published a piece written by one of Allen's professional collaborators (in response to an earlier Vanity Fair article) whose take on the matter is to disprove Farrow's accusation of sexual abuse by framing it as purposeful brainwashing. 

This is not a new technique in discrediting allegations of abuse, in fact, it is a classic. Marshaling disbelief is handy, since none of us want to believe sexual abuse of children happens, we're all too ready to look for a reason to say it didn't. For a time it was counsellors and therapists who were made suspect, ostensibly "seeding" memories of abuse in their clients. More recently, especially in the prosecution of clergy abusers, the victim has been discredited by focusing on drug abuse and mental health issues (regardless of whether these were prompted by the abuse itself) or by painting family members as leading the charge for prosecution from a need to blame someone for their own parental failings.

Seeding disbelief is a political act. Only those in positions of power have the means to do it. 

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Allen's defenders and apologists (Robert Weide of the Daily Beast among them) have done it rather well for him, casting Mia Farrow as a harpy deranged by the movie-making genius's love for her young adoptive daughter, Soon Yi Previn, and therefore vindictively planting the idea of abuse in Dylan Farrow's mind. 

The Daily Beast story, for example, invests itself in removing the taint of statutory from the Allen/Previn story, knowing that its specifics lend credence to Dylan Farrow's claims of Allen's inappropriate interest in his young adoptive daughters. The article does this by pointing to the fact that Previn was 19 when they married, and that as distasteful as the age difference between Allen and Previn is, it is hardly illegal. The article handily ignores any questions about the 12 years before the actual marriage, when Allen was presumably falling in love with the underage child even as he was in a romantic relationship with Mia Farrow and serving as Previn's (and all of Farrow's children's) surrogate father.  

Even the Catholic Church, as much as it disavows much of the abuse its priests enacted and bishops enabled, admits that there is a recognizable process of grooming that abusers engage in, and it is hard not to see it in both the prelude to pedophilia outlined by Dylan Farrow in her open letter, or the ephebophilia in the facts of Allen's relationship with Soon Yi Previn.

Besides being a sexual violation, childhood sexual abuse is a crime of power. Look to who has the power in each of the Allen situations — in the accusation levied by Dylan, in the relationship and marriage to Soon Yi — and who has the means to most effectively shape the narrative around it. It isn't either of the young women, and never was. Allen's got a whole movie-making industry to deploy in his version of the story, and he has done so. From the Daily Beast article by his documentarian to the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award in which Diane Keaton and other Hollywood cronies extolled him for, among other things, his focus on women. 

But let's look at some of the actual narratives Allen has written: the nauseating storyline of Manhattan with its love affair between the 42-year-old character portrayed by Allen and the 17-year-old character portrayed by Mariel Hemingway; or, his recent Blue Jasmine, with Cate Blanchett portraying a brittle, bitter woman undone by her husband's affair with a young au pair.  It is only the powerful who can carry off having their pathologies lovingly rendered in black-and-white, backed by a jazz soundtrack, and praised for genius and art.

We can't anticipate what ugly stories will emerge involving Allen in future, but the ugly storylines of his past aren't going away. And strangely, they do what Allen's movies purport to do: they shine a light on how deeply divided from one another we are. Many believe the innocent storyline written by the witty predator and his sycophantic entourage, but an equal number do not (evidenced by the fact that the hashtag #IBelieveDylanFarrow is trending on Twitter). And both sets know there is no happy ending in the offing.  

Updated at 1:29 to correct misspelling of Soon Yi Previn's name.