What’s my favourite Woody Allen movie? He has directed fifty, churning out one a year since 1982, maintaining a consistently high standard leavened by only occasional dross, so it can be difficult to choose. Another common phenomenon to be taken into consideration in this discussion is how fans of any artist who becomes ‘problematic’ are reluctant to believe anything derogatory about those whose work they admire, and are quick to leap to his or her defence, or at least to give them the benefit of any doubt which exists, in particular if the artist in question has been foundational and influential for them. This process always puts me in mind of the epigraph Nabokov chose for another of his novels, Pale Fire (1962), taken from James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791):
This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave of Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. “Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.” And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, “But, Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.”
Like many who first encountered Woody Allen’s work at a formative period in our lives and sensibilities, I tend to make a similarly mono-obsessional exception for him. According to sociologists’ shorthand, the standard demarcation dates for the Baby Boomer generation are those born between 1946 and 1964, while Gen X stretches from 1965 to 1979. But eighteen years is a long time, in which much social change occurred, and being born in 1961 (like Douglas Coupland, author of the novel Generation X (1991)) I have always considered myself on the cusp, partaking of stereotypical characteristics of both groupings, and disavowing others – an analysis which in any case is based on trends in the U.S. rather than the Ireland in which I grew up. Thus, I can relate more to the financial precarity of the Gen Xers than the monetary security and confidence associated with Boomers. This accident of birth placed me at what I now regard as a happy conflux, in which I am not defined by preferring The Eagles or Nirvana (the latter, obviously), but can isolate a point in 1976/77 when my musical tastes moved from prog rock and Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, via The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Pere Ubu, Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith, to taking in the punk explosion of The Clash, The Sex Pistols and The Ramones, and on to the subsequent New Wave post-punk of Joy Division, Echo and The Bunnymen, Magazine, Wire, etc. Besides, when if comes to film, I detest Boomer touchstone The Big Chill (1983), and prefer anything from Blade Runner (1982) to Le Haine (1995) to Trainspotting (1996).
Us late B(l)oomers/Early Gen Xers cut our sophisticated comedic teeth on Woody Allen’s ‘early, funny ones’ (to quote from his thinly-veiled self-critique in the Felliniesque Stardust Memories (1980)) such as: Take the Money and Run (1969): Bananas (1971); Play It Again, Sam and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) (both 1972); Sleeper (1973); and Love and Death (1975); which were screened late night on the newly formed Channel 4 in the early-to-mid-’80s. In the cinema we would have seen Annie Hall and Manhattan and Stardust Memories while still in secondary school, or starting to do whatever it was we did after leaving it, probably with our first girlfriends or boyfriends. Also on the big screen we would have caught A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (‘I don’t mean to be didactic or facetious’), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), the latter-day Chekhovian Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), and Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989). Into the ’90s there was Husbands and Wives (1992) (the last film of thirteen he made with Mia Farrow as lead actress), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994), followed by the incredible run of Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). Then there are the overlooked gems like Celebrity (1998) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) (overlooked only because they are surrounded by such unfailing brilliance). Into the new millennium there was a perceptible dip in quality, but there were still fine movies like Match Point (2005), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Midnight in Paris (2011), and Blue Jasmine (2013). Most of us would still find these celluloid treats as comforting and reassuring as the sparse white Windsor Light Condensed font over a black background title sequences and credits that Allen’s films have consistently used since the mid-seventies. Along the way we laughed ourselves silly at recordings of his standup comedy routines (I would particularly recommend his tale of mistaken identity at a costume party involving the Berkowitzes, ‘The Moose’, a model of quintessentially Jewish humour). We would notice that in Annie Hall Rob’s off-colour joke about the sixteen-year-old twins is perhaps tempered by Alvy’s counterweighting zinger, ‘Lyndon Johnson is a politician, you know the ethics those guys have. It’s like a notch underneath child molester.’
Surely the guy who made those classics which contained these quips could not be a child molester himself?
Everyone from Caravaggio (murder) to George Berkeley (slave ownership) to Alice Munro (returning to her second husband after his abuse of one of her daughters by her previous marriage – aged nine at the time of the assault – was revealed), via Picasso, Joyce and Beckett (plain old misogyny and purported domestic abuse), is now in the dock. Only today a headline in The Guardian catches my eye: ‘Cormac McCarthy had 16-year-old ‘muse’ when he was 42, Vanity Fair reports’, containing the information that, ‘(Augusta) Britt said the pair had sex for the first time when McCarthy was forty-three and she was seventeen.’ However, the same defence offered above of Allen, that the extraordinary work somehow pardons the culpability of the life, can be applied to all of these artistic and philosophical heroes and heroines as well. But then we must ask ourselves: what if the work does not measure up, or if we think it does not, or if we only come to think it does not because of the objectionably horrible life? What if, as is the case for us mere mortals, there is no artistic production or legacy at all to throw into the scales as a counterweight against the misdeeds? What of the accountant’s, the plumber’s, the refuse collector’s abuse?
Creatives we like can and do say and do terrible things. The awful things they have said or done impinge on how we approach and appreciate their work. Or not, as the case may be: maybe we choose to go down the ‘separate the art from the artist’ route, in order to continue enjoying the work; or else take the opposite tack, deciding that no amount of stupendous cultural production and influence can justify vile actions. Personally, I am more exercised by Radiohead’s and Nick Cave’s flying in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against apartheid Israel in the midst of the genocide it is perpetrating against the Palestinian people than I am about the unproven sexual proclivities of Woody Allen – to the point of removing their music from my life and not supporting them by buying tickets to attend their concerts. Which, of course, says more about me than it does about the bad things, and how I grade them. Tellingly, I grant Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen a little more leeway: they may have played concerts in Israel, but they come out of a Jewish heritage, which makes it slightly more understandable and so forgivable that they would hold an allegiance to that settler state – not that they need my forgiveness. Plus, I am not about to give up listening to the songs of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, because they mean more to me personally, and I am more invested in them, than in the work of Radiohead or Cave. The ratio on the dial of your ethical/aesthetic framework may vary. If you possess different taste, or are of a younger age, or think that domestic violence is just as bad or worse than mass killing of innocent civilians, then the reverse might well be true for you.
And, while we are at it, what about the sins of omission? Where is world saviour Bono when we need him? While espousing a multitude of worthwhile causes worldwide, he is roaringly silent on Israel’s war crimes. Perhaps he is checking his investments, or worrying about his audience figures in the United States? At least artists do not run for election on platforms of moral rectitude, and then get caught with their pants down, as many politicians do, so there is less hypocrisy involved. But they may, in common with politicians, talk out of one side of their mouths in public, while acting in an entirely different way in private. It helps if artists are nice people. It helps if people are nice people. But nowhere is it stipulated that artists, much less other people, have to be nice. In addition, should artists be held to a higher moral standard than the average Joe or Jane Doe, as priests and nuns once were, because their work is considered more important than that of non-artistic labourers? Only if art is your religion.
Let us focus for a moment on some artists whose critical and popular stock remains relatively high, despite the fact that their personal lives should not – all things being equal – get a pass by today’s more stringent, or more enlightened, moral standards. The highly revered Oscar Wilde paid for and fucked underage rent boys (or at least had some form of sexual relations with them), predicated on a class privilege of which he was probably only dimly aware (notwithstanding his great egalitarian essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’), or else did not mind exploiting for sexual gain – yet he is remembered by posterity as a persecuted icon of the gay rights movement. Elvis Presley fucked a plethora of underage girls – indeed to be favoured with his favours, you pretty much had to be fourteen, and there were a lot of fourteen-year-olds available to him and receptive to his attentions – but his position is unimpeachable as an icon of popular culture. John Lennon beat his first wife. Bob Dylan, whose record in terms of toxic masculinity with women is chequered to say the least, is reputed to have punched his first wife in the face during a row, after she came down to breakfast one morning in February 1977 to find him already at table with another woman and their children. The much loved David Bowie allegedly fucked an underage girl, the then fifteen-year-old groupie Lori Mattix, but this indiscretion is passed over in relative silence by those who deify him, both personally and professionally, in their posthumous hagiographic appraisals of his life and work. Indeed, Mattix herself does not seem to have been unduly traumatised by her defloration, stating in an 2015 interview, ‘Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?’ While there are some holes in her story (the same women who say ‘believe all women’ will simultaneously dismiss Maddix’s claim that Bowie slept with her as a minor, simply to defend Bowie’s legacy by slandering Maddix), Bowie himself admitted later in life that he was so perpetually coked up in his heyday that he was not overly punctilious about checking the birth certs of his casual lovers. So he may very well have slept with underage girls, even if he did not do so with Lori. This behaviour was something he deeply regretted and was remorseful for in his maturity, as is evidenced by his donating to several charities for victims of sexual abuse. Or maybe he just did that, entirely altruistically, because it was a good cause? Incidentally, Maddix also had a two year affair with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, starting when she was fourteen, which throws into question the chronology of her starfucking, and the true identity of her deflowerer.
Thus, there are far too many inconsistencies in the post-#MeToo revisionist world for the attendant blacklisting and cancel culture to stick, or make sense. It is lynch mob mentality, and it is unfair and unjust. ‘I Believe Her’, while empowering genuine victims, can also be potentially dangerous. Apart from the fact that unscrupulous and conniving men can use feminist sympathies as a means of seduction in espousing it, it is a slogan and belief easily pivoted into a liar’s charter for unscrupulous and conniving women. Part of what makes it so fraught is that no one would want to be seen as condoning rape, or as an apologist for rapists (as Woody has said in interview, ‘Who in the world is not against child molestation?’), and any criticism of the movement can be construed as such, as can any questioning of the veracity of an accusation of rape.
Also take into consideration that cancelation really only hurts the objects of its ire, and is an effective tool against them, if they are not as monolithically huge as Picasso or Elvis or Dylan or Lennon or Bowie. They are, as they saying goes, ‘too big to fail’, and can weather any storm. It is the little guys, usually living precariously rather than safely and securely dead – the debut artists, the non-tenured professors, the writers with only one or two publications – who stand to lose most. Woody Allen has suffered career setbacks and reputational damage, but he has survived and continued to work, mostly because of his previous track record of artistic achievement. His troubles stem, in part, from the annoying fact that, at age eighty-nine, he is still alive, rather than beyond the reach of scandal in death. It is the ones you have never heard of who are bearing the brunt of cancel culture, with the result that as of now you may never hear of them.
The righteous anger and good intentions of #MeToo are also denigrated by its somewhat scattergun approach, and gross exaggeration. Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby may be some people’s idea of fun, with a ton of relatable personal trauma and resentment to catharise, but when it comes to her assessment of ‘men’, they are just as wrongheadedly chauvinistic as anyone who has wronged them. To quote from their one-woman show, Nanette: ‘They’re all cut from the same cloth. Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski. These men are not exceptions, they are the rule.’ #NotAllMen, Hannah. Moreover, despite possessing an undergraduate degree in Art History, when it comes to art criticism they are a hectoring philistine. Gadsby may not be aware of songwriter Jonathan Richman’s humorous contention, in his eponymous tribute song, that, ‘Some people try to pick up girls and get called assholes/This never happened to Pablo Picasso/He could walk down your street and girls could not resist to stare, and so/Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole’, but if they were, they would give the sentiment short shrift. The It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby exhibition they co-curated at The Brooklyn Museum last year, was an evisceration of Pablo Picasso based around the fact that he was not a very nice man to some of the women in his life. As an example of the insights to be gleaned, this is their commentary on the 1937 painting The Crying Woman: ‘The weeping woman appears in heaps and heaps of Picasso’s works in the 1930s, like, heaps and heaps and heaps. Heaps. I am not kidding, heaps. This is far from the best one.’ You may have been Mansplained, but have you ever been Gadsplained? The exhibition may have contributed to ‘the conversation’, but the curatorial commentary is little better than scrolling through some bot’s X (formerly Twitter) feed. Of course, you are free to throw all of Picasso’s work out of the western canon of visual art, or use it as an example of ‘degenerate art’ (as the Nazis did), based solely on the fact that he was a bit of a bastard love rat, if you wish. But why stop at him? Clearly, Gadsby does not. But their generalised assault of tarring all the men they list with the same brush is what weakens their partially justified argument: it is lazy, vacuous and wrong to compare Woody Allen to Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, or even to the much loathed Pablo Picasso. His is not a pattern of compulsive behaviour and abuse. As Allen said of himself in 2016, with no tongue visible in either cheek, ‘I should be a poster boy for #MeToo’ – a reference to the fact that, in all his years of working with famous female actors, he has never been accused of sexual impropriety by any of them. Even after the raked embers of Dylan’s reheated publicity, no further accusations have retrospectively been added to hers.
It is argued by some that the ‘those were different times’ argument is no excuse, and by others that we should not apply today’s revised standards to the past. In the 1970s it was virtually de rigueur for famous rock stars to fuck teenage girls, and no one batted an eyelid, least of all the girls themselves. That does not make it right, just as the whole colonial project is now recognised for what it actually was: a giant, exploitative land grab under the auspices of spreading the benefits of civilisation and Christianity to backward peoples. But then why stop in the 1970s, or ’60s, or ’50s? Or, for that matter, the 1890s, or 1750s? Why not apply our newly-minted strictures to the entirety of recorded history, in the manner of Mao’s Year Zero, and dismantle once and for all the crumbling edifice of this vaunted western civilisation?
The Berkeley Library in Trinity College, Dublin was recently renamed as the Boland Library, in a clear concession to contemporary fashion. What would happen if, in the coming years, Eavan Boland is called out, because she is discovered not to have been above reproach in some regard? And again, why stop at poor old slave-owning, eighteenth century idealist philosopher George Berkeley? Let us also cancel ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and remove their busts from the Long Room Library, each of whom probably owned slaves, with the latter a positive defender of the practice (see his Politics 1254a).
These philosophers lived in societies where slavery was a common, unquestioned, and accepted custom, the argument in their defence goes, and so their views must be understood within the historical and cultural context of their time. Which does not excuse their positions, but helps to explain them. (Interestingly, they also lived in societies which tacitly tolerated the practice of consensual pederasty, or paiderastia, usually between a teacher and student (see Plato’s Symposium, pretty much all of which is an extended bacchanalian seminar on the latent or active homoeroticism involved in pedagogy, even if Plato’s stated views on homosexuality changed noticeably from The Symposium to The Laws, and even if it is anachronistic to project modern ideas of sexual classification onto these ancient peoples, who would not have understood the concept of ‘orientation’ anyway, only situational ‘preference’; and who, equally, would have had no understanding of the concept of the ‘teenager’) – referenced, however inaccurately, by the character of Mickey (played by Allen) in Hannah and Her Sisters: ‘Jesus, I read Socrates. You know, this guy used to knock off little Greek boys. What the hell’s he got to teach me?’ – and which was chief among Oscar Wilde’s defences of his activities with underage boys, during his trials for ‘gross indecency’, as ‘that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.’) But then why should ‘those were different times’ apply to them, but not to Berkeley? Because they are much further in the past? Because the abolitionist movement was gaining momentum in Berkeley’s time, and he should have known better, and is therefore on the wrong side of history? This argument takes no cognisance of the fact that although it may seem like a no-brainer today, the abolition of slavery was still very much a live debate in George’s time, with ostensibly sensible people to be found on either side of it – much like abortion, euthanasia or genetic engineering remain today, however much you may take one side in these arguments and demonise the proponents of the other. Indeed, as an Anglican bishop, were Berkeley alive today he would be obliged to take a strong stand against these practices. Besides, if the mighty mind of Aristotle could not conceive that there might be something fishy about slavery, even in the fifth century B.C., where would that place the relevance of his Ethics today? It seems to me to be a supreme show of colossal arrogance on the part of the present to expect the past to live up to today’s standards, especially when the cut-off point for what constitutes an acceptable aberration and what does not is often subjectively arbitrary.
Secretly, I look forward to the Californian college town of Berkeley – also named after the eminent philosopher – also being renamed; and what more (in)appropriate soubriquet than Boland, since Eavan taught for many years down the road at Stanford? I wonder which rival Bay Area Big Game participant, the Golden Bears of public, liberal activist Berkeley or the Cardinals of private, traditionally conservative Stanford, will object more vociferously?
Finally, spare a thought for the fate of the falsely accused, charged or convicted – embracing the acquitted over whom a pall of suspicion still hangs, because they could not be convicted ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. ‘Those were different times’ is matched only in the Catechism of Cliché by ‘There is no smoke without fire.’ Sometimes, even literally, there is lots of smoke without any fire. It goes by other names: gossip, hearsay, tittle-tattle; rumour, innuendo, insinuation; or, worse: calumny, defamation, backbiting. For the pedantic, Chemistry 101: many materials will smoke before reaching their ignition temperature. If oxygen is low or absent, fuels will smoke heavily without igniting. Just try lighting a stove or open fire, to observe this phenomenon empirically. Thus, the adjective ‘smouldering’, which frequently precedes the noun ‘hot’, as applied to things, or sometimes people. These days, the required oxygen is publicity, and is amply supplied by social media much more than by the traditional or legacy variety, thus greatly increasing its potency and unregulated spread, with the result that wild fires break out far more often, and can prove impossible to extinguish, or subdue.
Cases of the use of ‘raped a white woman’ as a pretext for the torture and lynching of black men by racist white men in the southern U.S. states during the near century of the Jim Crow laws, where charges of sexual transgression were routinely fabricated, are both too common and too random to enumerate in detail here. This noxious nexus has been famously fictionalised in Harper Lee’s bestselling novel To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), set in Alabama in the 1930s. However, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of this kind occurred in Canada in 1959, long before the ascent of social media. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging for the rape and murder of his twelve-year-old classmate Lynne Harper, in Clinton, Ontario, entirely on circumstantial evidence. Luckily, he was reprieved, and instead sentenced to life in prison. Owing to considerable public pressure, his case was reviewed in 1966 by the Supreme Court of Canada, who ruled eight-to-one that the jury ‘were satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the facts, which they found to be established by the evidence which they accepted, were not only consistent with the guilt of Truscott but were inconsistent with any rational conclusion other than that Steven Truscott was the guilty person.’ He was released on parole in 1969. Nearly half a century later, in 2007, his conviction was overturned on the basis that key forensic evidence was weaker than had been presented at trial, and key evidence in favour of Truscott had been concealed from his defending lawyers.
In November 2013, following police interviews which began in February of that year, acclaimed English folk musician Roy Harper, then seventy-two, was charged with ten counts of alleged historical child sexual abuse of an eleven-year-old girl over a period of several years in the 1970s, and indecently assaulting a sixteen-year-old girl in 1980. After a two-week trial in February 2015, he was acquitted of the claims that he sexually abused the eleven-year-old and indecently assaulted the sixteen-year-old, but a jury failed to reach verdicts on other counts relating to the younger complainant, and so he faced a retrial. Then, in November 2015, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the remaining charges, as there was not ‘a realistic prospect of a conviction’. Outside the courthouse, Harper gave the following statement:
I have now been acquitted on all the charges that were brought. This case should never have gone as far as this, or taken so long to resolve. The psychological and personal cost to my wife and myself has been enormous and the financial cost hugely unfair. I lost my livelihood and I spent my savings … and more, on my defence. I realise these are difficult issues at this time in this society, and I thank my lawyers for standing by me and working so hard to show the truth. Despite coming out of this without a blemish on my name, I cannot recoup my costs and that’s left me incredibly angry. I’m now going to restart my working life where I left off nearly three years ago. I’d like to thank everyone who’s continued to support. Thank you, all of you.
In September 2016 Harper started touring again, to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday.
The case of ex-Manchester City and ex-French international defender Benjamin Mendy is more contentious, given his hard-partying, unprofessional, playboy lifestyle and flouting of Covid lockdown restrictions, which surrounded the rape allegations he faced. (For a detailed report of the footballer’s initial trial and retrial, see this New York Times report, ‘The Benjamin Mendy court case, not guilty verdict and his future explained’, 15/07/2023.) Briefly, in 2021, Mendy was arrested on allegations of sexual offences by six different women – eight rapes, one attempted rape and a sexual assault – and suspended by City. He was acquitted of all charges against him in two separate trials in January and July of 2023. He was subsequently released by his club in June 2023 following the expiry of his contract. After over two years out of professional football, Mendy signed for then Ligue 1 French club Lorient in July 2023 on a free transfer (Lorient have since been relegated to Ligue 2 at the end of the 2023/24 season). As one of his defence lawyers, Eleanor Laws KC, stated in her summing up, ‘His life, as he knew it is over, in football, in the UK – these accusations, he will never escape. Look up Ched Evans, men who have been falsely accused, they never escape them.’ In November 2023, Mendy took Manchester City to an employment tribunal after claiming that he was owed millions of pounds in unauthorised wage deductions. He alleged that the club had stopped paying him in September 2021 after he was initially charged and held in custody. In November 2024 an Employment Tribunal found that Mendy was entitled to receive the majority of his unpaid salary. But his career in the top echelons of his profession had effectively been destroyed – some would say by his own entitled attitude and lack of dedication. Still, as he said himself, in his own defence in court, being a rich, famous footballer made it ‘honestly, so easy’ to pick up women at nightclubs and take them back to his gated mansion. As any wealthy individual with a high public profile will tell you, temptation exists and can be hard to resist. But many do, for the sake of what enabled them to attain such privileged positions in the first place.
BBC broadcaster Paul Gambaccini was arrested in October 2013, following claims of historic sex offences against two teenage boys in the early 1980s. Then aged sixty-four, he was bailed seven times over the next twelve months, until the Criminal Prosecutions Office dropped the case against him in October 2014, due to ‘insufficient evidence’. In March 2015, upon being exonerated, Gambaccini claimed that he had been used as ‘human flypaper’ by prosecutors for almost a year, his arrest publicised in the hope that other people would come forward to make allegations against him and others, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile sex offences scandal, which shook the BBC to its foundations. He said he forfeited more than £200,000 in lost earnings and legal costs, due to being unable to work because of publicity surrounding the allegations, during the twelve months prior to police and prosecutors informing him that there was no case against him. He later won an undisclosed amount in a compensation payout from the CPO.
Police raided the home of Sir Cliff Richard in 2014 as part of an investigation into an accusation of having had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy at a rally in Sheffield in 1985, while four other men subsequently also accused him of sexual offences, which they alleged took place between 1958 and 1983. Richard, then aged seventy-three, denied the claims and was never arrested or charged. One of the men who accused him was arrested in 2016, over a plot to blackmail the singer. According to newspaper reports from the time, after seeing the police raid on Richard’s home on television, the alleged victim threatened to spread ‘false stories’ unless he received a sum of money from Richard. In 2018, Richard was awarded £210,000 in damages for invasion of privacy, after suing the BBC for reporting that he was being investigated by police over the claims of historic sexual abuse. Richard spent around £4 million fighting the broadcaster, successfully arguing that the BBC’s right to report the facts of an ongoing investigation did not outweigh his right to privacy. A year later, in 2019, Sir Cliff received in the region of £2 million from the BBC towards his legal costs, in final settlement of the privacy case, although he contended that he was still ‘substantially out of pocket’.
As an upshot of the false allegations against Gambaccini and Richard they launched a campaign, Falsely Accused Individuals for Reform (FAIR), which called for anonymity for suspects under investigation for sex offences, until they are charged. They argued that the time between a suspect being charged and a court case beginning would allow for further victims to come forward. Explaining their motives, Gambaccini said: ‘There are actually two crises – one is a sex abuse crisis and the other is a false allegation crisis. When you solicit more accusations, most of them turn out to be false’, while Richard added: ‘People can be evil enough to tell a lie about an innocent person. Despite no charges being brought against me, and despite winning my privacy case, I’m sure there’s still people who believe in that stupid adage ‘no smoke without fire’.’
The standard Rape Crisis network’s response to such moves is that the ‘women lie about rape’ narrative is the product of a culture of misogyny, portraying women as manipulative. But that does not account for why men would lie about being molested. They argue that a not guilty verdict does not automatically mean there was a false allegation, it merely means that a jury did not believe there was enough evidence to decide ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that a crime had been committed. This line of thinking chimes with Ronan Farrow’s continued pursuit of his father, Woody Allen. In a 2016 article in the Hollywood Reporter, Ronan castigated the media for giving a free pass to Allen, just because he has never been convicted: ‘It is not an excuse for the press to silence victims, to never interrogate allegations.’ They further argue that victims are led to believe that their day in court is their opportunity to be believed, but because the standard is so high it is difficult to impossible to prove an accusation ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Plaintiffs then think that no one believed them, when the actuality is that they were not believed ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. They feel that they themselves have been put on trial, as rape is the only crime where the accuser’s behaviour is questioned as much as that of the accused. The suspicion follows that the forum of the court is not fit for purpose when it comes to trying cases of sexual violence.
This difference between legal truth and true justice is nicely skewered in Susie Miller’s play Prima Facie (2022), in which Jodie Comer starred as Tessa, a ruthlessly competitive, self-confident young barrister from a working class background, who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault. The tables are turned when she is assaulted herself, by a male colleague, and finds herself on the witness stand, face-to-face not only with the vagaries of the legal system, but also with a privileged, upper middleclass old boys’ network.
However, the trouble is, once you start questioning and dismissing a jury’s verdict, or the competency of courts and the legal system in general, you are on a slippery slope into the anarchy of trial by media and mob rule. This is not to say that there have not been many well-publicised miscarriages of justice in the past, and not only in relation to sexual offences. But what is to be done if the rule of law, and the decisions of courts, are not widely respected and accepted, on this issue? Perhaps the burden of proof is set at too high a threshold in cases of rape, and the conviction rate in such trials remains astonishingly low in comparison to other crimes, but changing the law would require treating rape as radically different from every other crime on the statute books that is brought to trial (which is what Gambaccini and Richard also want, but from the defendant’s viewpoint). You cannot ask for special consideration if you are not prepared to see how it might also be granted to your adversary. It is, again, a matter for legislative and even constitutional reform, rather than constantly questioning the character of those who have been subject to the full rigours of the law, and not been charged, much less convicted.
The law is murky. The stain remains, whether you are innocent or guilty, or are found innocent or guilty. In many cases there is almost as much reputational damage in being accused as there is in being found guilty. The law is indeed, in this regard, an ass. For how are we to choose, and should we even bother trying, between manifest misogynistic assholes (as their rampantly sexist WhatsApp private group texts made plain) such as the defendants in what has become known folklorically as the ‘Belfast rugby rape trial’ of 2018 (not guilty), and – ditto the pejorative adjectives – the Conor McGregor rape trial of 2024 (guilty), except to conclude that in both cases the competitive aggression required for their professional sporting activities has carried over into how they conduct their private lives? And how do we distinguish between such obvious reprobates – be they deemed guilty or not guilty by the courts – and the genuinely innocent, non-womanhating, falsely accused, whose reputations lie in tatters, despite never having done anything wrong, in justice or in law?
To return to Canada, Margaret Atwood (yes, that Margaret Atwood, the one who wrote such foundational feminist eviscerations of the sexual politics of patriarchy as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin) makes the contradictions around this dilemma clear in ‘Am I A Bad Feminist?’, an op-ed which appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail in January 2018, and which articulates arguments ventilated above in a more authoritative manner than I have, and is essential reading for anyone engaged by the broader ramifications of the debate around rape culture and legislation.
The background to Atwood’s article is that in November 2015 Steven Galloway, author of the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008) among others, and until then Chairman of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing programme, was suspended by the university for what it vaguely called ‘serious allegations’. An internal inquiry followed, conducted by Justice Mary Ellen Boyd, a retired female B.C. Supreme Court judge, which went on for months with multiple witnesses and interviews. On its conclusion, the UBC faculty association issued a statement ‘to clarify that all but one of the allegations, including the most serious allegation … were not substantiated.’ Despite the fact that the report had decided that there had been no sexual assault, Galloway was still dismissed from his post in June 2016, when UBC said there had been ‘a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of trust’. The one substantiated claim was that he had had a two year affair with an ‘of age’ student – which was not technically forbidden by the university’s rules.
In November 2016, Atwood’s name was among a large group of Canadian authors who were signatories to an open letter criticising UBC for carrying out its investigation in secret and denying Galloway the right to due process while also publicly naming him. It called for an independent investigation into his dismissal, as the report on which the decision to sack him was based had never been made public. Inevitably, this letter initiated an online backlash, particularly against Atwood, with the signatories now accused of pressuring abuse victims into silence. In 2018, Galloway was awarded $167,000 by UBC for the damage to his reputation and the violation of his privacy rights. He is now in the process of suing his accuser, along with twenty others who had spread the allegations on Twitter and within UBC, for defamation.
Prior to ‘Am I A Bad Feminist?’, Atwood sent a statement to various Canadian media groups, comparing the process by which Galloway was investigated to the Salem witch trials: ‘Those accused would almost certainly be found guilty because of the way the rules of evidence were set up, and if you objected to the proceedings you would be accused yourself.’ She continued: ‘To take the position that the members of a group called ‘women’ are always right and never lie – demonstrably not true – and that members of a group called ‘accused men’ are always guilty – Steven Truscott, anyone? – would do a great disservice to accusing women and abuse survivors, since it discredits any accusations immediately.’ Her main immediate gripe in the subsequent ‘Am I A Bad Feminist?’ is against the lack of transparency surrounding Galloway’s sacking, and the fact that proceedings were conducted in hugger-mugger, a process she again compared to the Salem witch trials, ‘in which a person was guilty because accused, since the rules of evidence were such that you could not be found innocent.’ In response to her Good Feminist vilifiers, she wrote: ‘My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.’ She elaborated:
The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? … If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. … Why have accountability and transparency been framed as antithetical to women’s rights?
She further draws an analogy between ‘guilty because accused’ and the ‘Terror and Virtue’ phase of revolutions: ‘the French Revolution, Stalin’s purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution.’
Again, the pile-on was predictable. A sample tweet read: ‘‘Unsubstantiated’ does not mean innocent. It means there was not enough evidence to convict.’ Which presumes guilt, just like the Salem witch trials and the other periods of extremist terror to which Atwood referred did. One thinks of rhetorically leading questions such as, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ Or of the Trials by Ordeal, for example Trial by Cold Water: if you sank you were not a witch, but risked drowning; if you floated you were, and could be burned at the stake. While sinking is preferable to being burned to death, is it still not much fun, even if there were ropes available to haul you out of the murky depths.
One of the most appealing aspects of Todd Field’s film Tár (2022) is that at first sight it seems to be a simple tale of exploitative comeuppance, but on repeated viewings reveals itself as a rich, complex narrative which avoids taking sides. Tár refuses to resolve itself into either a parable of #MeToo justice (à la Emerald Fennell’s ‘All men are bastards, even the nice ones’ Promising Young Woman (2020), a slick, rape revenge, morality tale), or a tirade about the excesses of wokery and cancel culture (of which Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (2023) is one of the more creditable manifestations, mainly because of its obliquely surreal framing). Initially, it is easy to dismiss Tár because there is something a bit self-fulfilling about presenting a titular central character so opposed to the extremes of identity politics (as articulated, somewhat reductively – although in many cases quite accurately – by a Julliard student in a masterclass Tár is giving as, ‘Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender-person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously’), and then later having her revealed as a transactional, power-broking predator all along. But are the aspirational flunkies (or ‘millennial robots’ as the embattled Lydia Tár abrasively terms them – ‘snowflakes’ being the more common derogatory denomination) who surround her and plot her downfall any better? Thus, it is suggested that Id Pol functions as a distraction from class politics (Tár’s socioeconomic origins are eventually shown to be solidly suburban lower middle class, so she dragged herself up by her bootstraps, not only through innate talent, but by sheer force of will), which serves the status quo nicely. The third act of the film may even be read as a Gothic depiction of mental breakdown in the face of a brilliant and dedicated career which flounders and lies in ruins.
Indubitably, women need to feel safe at all times, and to be able to go about their daily business and nightly socialising without unwanted, unwarranted attention and harassment from uncouth male braggarts. On the other hand, what is the future fate of flirting, or seduction, never mind romance, if signals are routinely misinterpreted because of changing standards with regard to what is acceptable attractional etiquette? Are these life-enhancing frissions destined to wither and die? And is it for the greater good if they do? Or are they evolving into something new and barely recognisable to the ‘Ok Boomers’ in the mutual incomprehension that exists between them and the new morality of millennials? Maybe a momentous metamorphosis is slowly taking place in human consciousness, a feminisation of society (or, at any rate, an equalisation), which would be a real dividend of feminism, much more so that the ‘woman in the boardroom’ brand, which tends to hold contemporary sway, and passes for progress. But such a revolution in gender relations will require a fundamental paradigm shift away from long ingrained psychosocial constructs of man as pursuer and woman as the pursued, men as taking or getting something and women as having something that can be taken or given away. Marilyn French may well have been right in the contention aired by one of the characters in her debut novel The Woman’s Room (1977), that rape or its prospect is the crucible in which gendered power relations take place, but the concept of consent remains problematic. Government advertising campaigns now encourage us to ‘Whatever the moment, have the consent conversation’, but the middle-aged husband in one such ad who smarmily inquires of his wife, ‘Fancy an aul early night?’ (which she declines, because, ‘Yeah, but it’s hard to get in the mood since the kids moved back in’) seems just as creepy to me as any ageing dime store Lothario hanging around nightclubs when he should be home by the fireside in his carpet slippers. ‘Consent’ takes little account of the moment when instinct takes over at the expense of rationality, and can constitute the death of a mutually consummated passion which has no need of litigiously binding words. Life may not be like the movies, but ‘having the consent conversation’ would ruin every ardent clinch in film history.
It is impossible not to be moved by Dylan Farrow’s February 1st, 2014 open letter to the New York Times, in which she reiterated her claims of sexual assault by her adoptive father Woody Allen in the attic of the Farrow home in Connecticut, in August 1992. But there is a large lacuna in it that Dylan fails to address. What if her mother, Mia Farrow, is not the ‘well of fortitude that saved us from the chaos a predator brought into our home’, but rather a woman scorned, hellbent on vengeance, using her adopted daughter as a pawn in a greater power struggle? What if Allen was right in accusing ‘my mother of planting the abuse in my head and call her a liar for defending me’? The whole affair is ugly. But if the adult participants were not celebrities, it would have and should have remained a private matter of familial strife, and Dylan would not have been the hapless rope in a treacherous public spotlight tug-of-war between two famous former lovers, her adoptive parents. I have no doubt that Dylan sincerely believes that she was violated. I am still not at all convinced that she actually was. I think there is solid evidence that she was coached by her mother into believing she is a victim of child molestation. I think it is regrettable that Dylan Farrow’s entire life and career has been defined by the fact that she is convinced (or has been convinced) that she was molested by her famous adoptive father. Furthermore, I think the four-part HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow (2021), directed by the documentarian duo of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, in which Dylan is interviewed extensively, was incredibly one-sided, presented as it is entirely from the perspective of Dylan and Mia Farrow and their family, friends, and expert witnesses. Its partisanship partakes of tabloid sensationalism, and Dylan’s case is ill-served by it. Woody Allen did not participate, although he defends himself in disembodied voiceover culled from the audiobook of his 2020 memoir Apropos of Nothing. Following the premiere of the first episode, Allen and Soon-Yi Previn released a statement denouncing the docuseries as a ‘hatchet job’.
What is the current utility of ‘I Believe Her’ as a slogan? In the case under consideration it has mutated into an oppositional microcosm of ‘I Believe Woody’ (and Soon-Yi and Moses) or ‘I Believe Dylan’ (and Mia and Ronan). It has, as Atwood contends, morphed into a rallying cry for the witch hunting, bandwagon jumping element of the #MeToo movement. Besides, what people choose to believe has never seemed to me to be of very much import when it comes to evaluating the truth or falsity of said beliefs, dependent as belief is on faith, which has nothing to do with factual evidence, and is in many ways irrelevant and even antithetical to it. People believe all sorts of crazy things. People used to believe that the earth was flat and that the sun went around it. They were wrong, even if they were acting on the best available evidence at the time. If something can be proven it requires no faith, and belief is redundant. What people choose to believe is of interest only to themselves, or for what it reveals about them to others.
Why does the mob hate Woody Allen? Is it because he had an affair with and married a woman thirty-five-years his junior, who was his then-girlfriend’s adopted stepdaughter? Is it because they believe he sexually assaulted his own adopted seven-year-old daughter? Or both, because they think there is some connection between the two? As I hope the foregoing might conclusively demonstrate, the first supposed reason is neither here nor there, as this relationship was legal and, besides, he is hardly the only one – man or woman – to do it. The second supposed reason has never been proven, so it remains in the realms of conjecture, and amounts to his word against that of his accuser – his accuser being as much his acrimoniously estranged ex-girlfriend as the vaunted victim. As for the third, there is no demonstrable connection between these two acts (except that the child molestation accusation may have been initiated as a vengeful response to the humiliation caused to the senior accuser by the new relationship coming to light), so why are they conflated in the mind of the mob?
The ultimate question here is: even if Woody Allen was guilty of one act of child molestation with his adopted daughter (and it should be clear by now that, taking all the angles outlined above into consideration, while there is still room for doubt, I think he was not), would that be enough for me to boycott him and his work? The answer here is: ‘No’. As Anne Enright wrote in ‘Alice Munro’s Retreat’ (New York Review of Books, 05/12/2024):
I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given. Jenny Munro described her mother as “a dedicated, cold-eyed storyteller” and said: “Whether people love her fiction or hate it doesn’t matter. Andrea’s truth is here to stay.
As is Dylan Farrow’s. As is Woody Allen’s. Just as devotees of Cormac McCarthy’s portentously homespun novels will overlook his grooming and seduction of a vulnerable teenager, just as fans of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry will turn a blind eye to his membership of NAMBLA (The North American Man/Boy Love Association), just as those who cannot countenance a world without the art of flawed human beings like Wilde, Picasso, Elvis, Dylan, Lennon or Bowie as mentioned above, my admiration for the films of Woody Allen is too immense, his worldview so influential on the development of my own sensibility, for me to renounce them now, whatever he may or may not have done.
We have all done things of which we are less than proud (even if that does not encompass child abuse or rape), and not done things of which we would be proud (like calling out toxic behaviour). The well-chosen title of Philip Roth’s novel of campus accusation and fall from grace is The Human Stain (2000) (just as the well-chosen title of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of campus accusation and fall from grace is Disgrace (1999)): we are all guilty – of something, even if we do not subscribe to the Christian doctrine of original sin, because we are human. Maybe it is time to cancel the whole world, and all of human history, Terror and Virtue style, and start all over again. Allen has borne the hysteria and dogmatism that obscures real debate, the equal inanity of ‘All men are potential rapists’ and ‘#NotAllMen’, what Roth called ‘the ecstasy of sanctimony’, what Coetzee challenges with the question, ‘Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’, in this new puritan age of extremes. The least that can be hoped for is that the cancellers have enjoyed themselves; the most is that it will lead to the eradication of the grosser conduct which inspired their militancy. Unquestionably, one cannot read about the appalling crimes perpetrated by Dominique Pelicot on his wife Gisèle in the Provencal village of Mazan, France, over a nine year period, in complicity with upwards of fifty other men, without feeling utter revulsion, and despairing for how one half of humanity can behave towards the other. But maybe such evil will always exist, however much we strive to eliminate it. After all, murder – mass or otherwise – has never gone out of circulation. I doubt it ever will.
As for Woody’s large age gap marriage with Soon-Yi and its origins, essentially I think large age-gap relationships, if the younger party is ‘of age’ in a given jurisdiction, and no matter the gender of the older and younger parties, are no one else’s business except that of the two people involved in them. After all, young women are not little girls (although some would argue that young men are still little boys). In the case of Woody and Soon-Yi, at least he claims to love his much younger lover – unlike Annie Ernaux. If you believe him. Vile, execrable, family man Woody Allen. Marvellous, candid, promiscuous Annie Ernaux. Allen gets a vilifying bad press. Ernaux gets a laudatory free pass. Go figure. One of the coarser ironies of the whole sorry situation is that the longevity of their relationship, instead of vouchsafing its validity, has rather acted for many as a constant reminder of Allen’s supposed original transgression, which reminds them in turn of his supposed subsequent one, and served to keep both in the public eye.
Here is the clincher: when Mia Farrow married Frank Sinatra, she was twenty-one, and Frank was fifty. That short marriage was followed by one to composer and conductor Andre Previn, when she was twenty-five and he was forty-one (and married to singer/songwriter Dory Previn, who famously wrote a song, ‘Beware of Young Girls’, about Mia breaking up her marriage). I am not suggesting that Woody and Soon-Yi was karma, but such scenarios were not unprecedented in Mia Farrow’s life.
To offer a completely unblemished example of a positive older man/younger woman coupling, from personal experience: my great friend Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (writer, scholar and folklorist of distinction) was twenty-four when she married her dissertation supervisor, Bo Almquist, who was forty-six, twenty-two years older than her. It was one of the most fruitful and happy unions I know of, a true meeting of minds. Two people in the same place, at the same time, interested in the same things: it is only natural that sparks are going to fly, whatever their respective ages.
Woody Allen, now eighty-nine, knows that the first paragraph of his obituaries will mention the Allen/Farrow conflagration, and the accusation of child molestation. As he has said in interview, ‘I assume that for the rest of my life a large number of people will think I was a predator’, continuing, ‘Anything I say sounds self-serving and defensive, so it’s best if I just go my way and work.’ Yet he is no Jimmy Savile, so why should he be treated as though he were a serial abuser hiding in plain sight, and accorded the same pariah status? Nor is he a Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, or Jeffrey Epstein, and he does not deserve to be pilloried as such, and thrown in prison. Allen has endured because he made his work and family his priority. Farrow concentrated on vendetta and revenge. I will still remember him as the incredibly witty, wisecracking, klutzy, neurotic nebbish, mischievously poking fun at ludicrous authority figures and highly qualified ‘experts’, who first graced our screens in the ’70s and ’80s, and whose comic genius remains undimmed, whatever calumnies he has suffered, even if they were not calumnies, or whatever crimes and misdemeanours he has or has not committed.
Feature Image: G1AWGP Cannes, France. 12th May, 2016. Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn Director And Wife Cafe Society, Premiere. 69 Th Cannes Film Festival Cannes, France 12 May 2016 Diw88737 Credit: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Live News.
