John Maier

Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?

Woody Allen turns the tables on Mia Farrow, accusing her of abusing her adopted children — whom she collected ‘like new toys’

Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and children in New York in 1989. Credit: Getty Images

It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached his four-film contract, preferring to settle out of court. Actors have lodged their public regret at working with him. He is one of Hollywood’s notable sinking stars. In March, following a demonstration by staff, Hachette pulped this book. ‘Everybody should take responsibility for their actions,’ one protesting employee told the Guardian — anonymously, and apparently without irony. The New York Times called him ‘a monster’. And if you think that’s social rock bottom, in 2016 the Clinton campaign refused his donation. Imagine that: money so tainted that not even the Clintons will bank it. That’s the basement level below rock bottom.

What is curious about Allen’s partial blacklisting is that it isn’t a response to some recent unanswerable development in the case against him. Rather it seems to express the more summary verdict of a culture impatient with moral uncertainty and suspicious of the formal procedure of the law. The publicly available evidence remains much the same as in 1992 when, in the crossfire of a bitter child-custody suit, Mia Farrow accused Allen of molesting their seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan. No charges were brought against Allen; he submitted to a lie-detector test (Farrow did not) and a six-month criminal investigation found no evidence of abuse by Allen and that Dylan’s testimony had a ‘rehearsed quality’. To date, two of Farrow’s children support the argument which Allen develops in this book, that the allegations were a fabrication, part of Farrow’s ‘Ahab-like quest for revenge’. He writes:

Off the record, I had envisioned a little more peer support, nothing overwhelming, perhaps a few organised protests, maybe some irate colleagues marching arms linked, a little rioting, perhaps a few burned cars.

In Apropos of Nothing, the reader senses that even Woody Allen – who always had such a vivid appreciation of his own persecution at the hands of the universe, such well-exercised imaginative paranoia and capacity for cynicism — is a little dizzied by fortune’s extreme turns.

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