The #MeToo movement has already taken down some major players in Hollywood.
Big-time exec Harvey Weinstein has been fired and blackballed; James Franco was recently grilled by Stephen Colbert and his upcoming events have been subsequently canceled; Ed Westwick was quickly recast in the new BBC show Ordeal By Innocence; Louis CK has been dropped by his management; Kevin Spacey was fired from House of Cards.
But what about Woody Allen? We’ve all known about the sexual assault allegations made by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow for decades. The case was so strong that the assault did, in fact, take place that Mia Farrow was awarded full custody of Dylan after her split from Woody and Woody was denied visitation rights.
And yet life goes on for Woody. He gets the biggest names in Hollywood to work with him including Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Blake Lively, and Selena Gomez). Blake even stood up for Woody and said,
“My experience with Woody is he’s empowering to women.”
But Dylan is not about to let these women get away with their hypocrisy. These are the some of the same women who are currently championing the Time’s Up movement. Dylan recently told Buzzfeed in a statement,
“I fully support women taking a stand, linking arms with other women (and men), advocating on behalf of one another to effect change not only in the entertainment industry but in the world at large.”
She added,
“That is an admirable and worthwhile objective, I hope these women change the world. That said, the people who join this movement without taking any kind of personal accountability for the ways in which their own words and decisions have helped to perpetuate the culture they are fighting against, that’s hard for me to reconcile.”
Dylan is understandably upset that so many women are seeing repercussions for the men who assaulted them but not her. She wrote in an op-ed for the NYT in December and said,
“Although the culture seems to be shifting rapidly, my allegation is apparently still just too complicated, too difficult, too ‘dangerous,’ to use Lively’s term, to confront. The truth is hard to deny but easy to ignore.”
Dylan has been more than upfront about the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of Woody. Back in 2014, she wrote an open letter published in the NYT that said,
“For as long as I could remember, my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me. These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters.”
So why is Dylan, as a survivor of sexual assault, being denied by the movement?
Dylan’s story is a classic example of women who are not believed when they come forward. At the time of Dylan’s initial testimony at the custody trial, many speculated that her mother and coerced her into saying that Woody assaulted her, but it was not actually true. To this day, Dylan’s brother Moses denies that the assault on his sister ever happened. At the time of the trial, a doctor testified that he believed Dylan was making the whole thing up.
But the truth is that only 2% of sexual assault allegations are made up so the chances of Dylan lying are slim. And Dylan has stood by her story all these years, making sure that everyone knew what Woody had done.
Unless the Time’s Up movement is willing to take on every sexual assaulter, the movement will ultimately be a failure. Confronting just some of these men is not enough. We need to send a message that this behavior is not acceptable in our society. And to do that, we must confront Woody Allen.
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