If this article is accurate, Woody Allen is most likely innocent (of the child molestation charges):
'The report by the highly regarded Yale-New Haven Sexual Abuse Clinic, which concluded that Dylan was not sexually abused, is dismissed [by the new documentary] as the product of a "runaway investigation" [...] and pro-Allen favoritism. The outcome of the New York investigation is blamed on pressure from a city government anxious to protect a famous filmmaker who generated both revenue and prestige.
[...] All of this would seem quite incriminating to anyone who came to this subject without any background information. But those of us who've done our homework will know that Williams's allegations of top-down pro-Allen pressure prompted an official inquiry by the New York City Human Resources Commissioner, which presumably found no wrongdoing. You'd think the filmmakers might have mentioned this. But they didn't.
Later, [...] the New York State Department of Social Services closed its own investigation, finding "no credible evidence" of abuse. Is all this supposed to be part of the conspiracy—or[...] "cover-up again, and again, and again"?
[...] What we see of these records also seems to support the Yale-New Haven team's conclusion that Dylan's story was undermined by serious inconsistencies.
[...] Very few of us are qualified to evaluate a child's account of sexual abuse. As a layperson, I can only say I got the same sense of "rehearsed" quality or performance that was mentioned by experts in the Yale-New Haven report. Indeed, Dylan Farrow's statements in the film as an adult feel much more "real" and gut-punching.
There is also the issue of Farrow's behavior in recording this tape, in which she can be heard off-camera badgering Dylan to "tell me again what happens." Even [...], a reviewer so sympathetic to the Farrow side that she feels "a little guilty" about remembering the omitted details favoring Allen, admits that she finds this troubling—especially since, elsewhere, the film stresses how harmful it is to repeatedly question a child about sexual abuse.
[...] The film sidesteps, among other things, a particularly memorable detail of the Allen/Farrow drama: In February 1992, she sent him a grisly valentine card with a photo of herself and the children, with skewers driven through the children's chests and a knife, its handle wrapped in a photo of Soon-Yi, driven through her own.
[...]
Dr. Coates believed, like members of the Yale-New Haven team—and Dylan's own therapist, Dr. Nancy Schultz[...]—that Dylan lived in her own fantasy world and was an unreliable witness. [...]
Dr. Coates testified that Farrow's volatile state made the psychologist fear for both Farrow's and Allen's safety[...] Farrow raged about Allen's continuing involvement with Soon-Yi, called him "satanic and evil," and begged Dr. Coates to "find a way to stop him"—but also brought up the possibility of marrying him. A few days later, Farrow called again, this time to report that Dylan was complaining about sexual abuse by Allen. Dr. Coates said she was "puzzled" by Farrow's calm demeanor in that latter conversation.
[...] nanny Monica Thompson, who testified that Farrow pressured her to support the child-molestation charge, coached Dylan while filming, and seemed "happy and excited" when Dylan repeated her accusations to her doctor. [...]
[...] before the claimed abuse supposedly took place, when Allen attended Dylan's seventh birthday party in Connecticut and stayed overnight. In the morning, he found a note from Farrow—who was still distraught over the recent discovery that Allen had resumed the affair with Soon-Yi and annoyed at his "hovering" over Dylan at the party, e.g., helping her blow out the birthday cake candles—pinned to the door of the guest bathroom near his room. It read:
Child Molestor (sic) at Birthday Party!
Molded then abused one sister
now focused on youngest sister
Family disgusted
This episode [...] shows that Farrow called Allen a "child molester"
prior to the alleged sexual assault, projecting his sexual relationship with Soon-Yi onto his paternal relationship with Dylan. It suggests that others around them were probably predisposed to do the same: "The view of Mr. Allen as an evil and awful and terrible man [who] had molested Soon-Yi and was a potential molester of Dylan permeated the household," [...] the head of the Yale-New Haven clinic team, testified at the custody trial.
[...] the note strongly bolsters Allen's argument that it would have been suicidally reckless for him to commit the assault imputed to him at that particular time and place—in a house full of people already primed to consider him a suspect in that very crime.
[...] Allen’s other teenage girlfriend from the 1970s[...] claimed that during the 1992–93 custody battle, “someone from Mia Farrow’s camp” had tried to persuade her to testify, falsely, that Allen had sex with her when she was 15.”
[...] a large Canadian study showing that more than half of child sexual abuse reports linked to parental separation are unfounded and nearly one in five are maliciously fabricated. [...]
I believe that Dylan Farrow is in genuine pain. I also believe [...] she is genuinely convinced that Allen molested her. But while she is outraged by the suggestion that her memories may not be trustworthy, false memories do exist: virtually all the children conscripted into the day-care sexual abuse witch-hunts of the 1990s still believe, as adults, that the abuse was real. Dylan Farrow deserves sympathy. She does not deserve unconditional belief.'
https://quillette.co...onal-blackmail/
Whether he deserves to be 'cancelled' for 'grooming' Soon-Yi in her late teens and then marrying her in her early twenties seems like a very different question. But there's a tremendous difference between women in their late teens/early twenties and 7 year olds. While (as the documentary argues) Allen's films do present older man/woman in late teens romances, they don't present any support for (prepubescent) pedophilia.
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 28 March 2021 - 06:29 PM