The Yale Report the Yale report was commissioned by Connecticut law-enforcement officials. Dr. Stephen Herman was the expert witness hired by Mia Farrow. These are not equal parties. One is neutral, the other an advocate.
Here are pages from the Yale Report.
They definitely met with Dylan and Farrow, nine times over a period of two months. Yes, the notes were destroyed. Isn’t that the norm for evidence in child molestation investigations?
Dylan’s first session at Yale was on Wednesday, September 22, and every Friday thereafter she would meet with the Yale-New Haven team, who would talk to her for an hour or so. None of us knows what her responses were; not even Mia has seen the records, which were sealed and have since then destroyed. I [Kristi Groteke] was interviewed at Yale for three hours.
You know what really damages the case you’re making? The fact that Dr. Stephen Herman never met with Dylan. (see above link) You’ve got the evidence exactly reversed.
Again, while I have no particular dog in this hunt, the quote from that Vanity Fair article characterizing panel members as “two social workers and a pediatrician” is a wee bit misleading.
The “two social workers” had PhD and Masters’ degrees respectively. The “pediatrician”, Dr. John Leventhal was a professor at Yale and had since 1982 been Medical Director of Child Abuse and Child Abuse Prevention at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital.
That doesn’t sound like people drafted at random for the panel who were in over their heads.
As for the statement that “Wikipedia is not reliable”, all too commonly that’s a blanket claim used by those who are unwilling or unable to refute facts cited in a Wikipedia article which are backed up by citations from sources generally regarded as reliable. If a Wikipedia article’s citations are flawed or its conclusions unwarranted, that’s a legitimate basis on which to question it. Saying in essence “Wikipedia? Har har har” is not.
I can’t find anything but their surnames, so am unable to look up their qualifications, but if the two social workers were Licensed Clinical Social Workers, they were probably better qualified to assess sexual abuse than a psychologist or a psychiatrist. LCSWs are highly trained therapists and counselors whose basic curriculum includes identifying and treating trauma and abuse. In Georgia, they’re the only non-PhD/MD health professionals legally permitted to diagnose mental health disorders.
Living in the same house has nothing to do with being a stepdaughter. You can argue she wasn’t legally his stepdaughter, but her mother had had children with the man, and was living in a romantic, cohabitating relationship with him. By societal standards, such a relationship is generally considered marriage even without the legalities. And that makes her his stepdaughter.
You can argue all you want about whether his horrible actions in one case mean he committed these other horrible actions. But when you downplay the immorality of his actions of having sex with the daughter of the person he was in a relationship with (by calling it just weird, or saying it’s not actually wrong or that you don’t care), then our moral frameworks are so at odds that nothing you say about the other situation is relevant to me.
I don’t contend that I know for sure that he molested Dylan. I thought I made that clear. My issue is whether or not he deserves the benefit of the doubt, and whether it really matters in my own actions that I will take. I already didn’t check out any of Allen’s stuff because of the Soon-Yi situation long before I know about the Dylan situation.
The decision of whether or not Dylan was molested is not an easy one, so I see no reason to make it when my actions will not change either way. What I do however know that Dylan believes it happened, and that. given Allen’s past (the facts of which people do seem to agree on, even if they disagree on the morality), that’s enough for me not to go around denying it happened. Plus, you know, #MeToo, where we don’t start from the position that the alleger is wrong. Plus I actually did some research about child molestation back in the day and know that children very rarely lie about this sort of thing. And I don’t trust any pre-MeToo investigations of famous stars who no one wanted to be a molester.
But, regardless of my personal opinion, the main point of my post remains. I said no one would be convinced by Moses Farrow’s defense, and I appear to be right. Just like in my personal example, all of us have formed or will form our opinions based on things other than what Moses said. This makes sense, as he said nothing new,
We did all just rehash the same arguments once again. At least one person got in trouble for being morally offended and reacting in anger at the others. And opinions have not changed.
I don’t know the rights or wrongs of the various abuse allegations at all, but saying Farrow “had had children” with Allen makes it sound as though they were in some kind of stable quasi-marital co-parenting cohabiting relationship, which is a bit confusing. AFAICT, when they were cohabiting they weren’t co-parenting, and vice versa.
Not that I’m trying to say that co-parenting situations where the parents don’t live together can’t be “real” serious relationships, just that AFAICT it doesn’t appear that Allen and Farrow were sharing committed parental roles and a committed relationship at the same time.
Have you ever heard of the McMartin Preschool debacle? Many children made up total bullshit lies, or it could maybe be said that their parents made up lies and the children repeated them. Anyway, with regard to Allen, I’ve never heard of someone just molesting a child one single time and never doing it again or being accused of doing it again. People who do this typically can’t stop themselves from repeating it. And as we have seen in past years, high profile celebrities CAN get continuous access to underage children if they really want to. Has anyone OTHER than Farrow, ever, at any point, accused Allen of anything inappropriate with children? For that matter, has Allen had a pattern of MeToo behavior towards adult women? As far as I know, he hasn’t. His biggest sin seems to me that he just plays a creep in movies, but isn’t one IRL.
Well quite, The whole “satanic panic” issue of the 80’s was based on fabrications that were spouted by children and adults alike.
Kids will lie about pretty much anything, molestation and abuse included. It wouldn’t be helpfull to any investigation to assume truth or falsehood either way.
You can argue all you want about whether his horrible actions in one case mean he committed these other horrible actions. But when you downplay the immorality of his actions of having sex with the daughter of the person he was in a relationship with (by calling it just weird, or saying it’s not actually wrong or that you don’t care), then our moral frameworks are so at odds that nothing you say about the other situation is relevant to me.
I don’t know the case, but I will point out the inconsistency in your argument:
Whatever you consider about the ‘immorality’ of having sex with the mother and the daughter, that is not incest nor illegal.
And your inconsistency is to accuse someone else of ‘downplaying’ a situation with words, but you are doing the opposite: you are escalating the facts. The facts AS YOU SEE THEM are that he has sex with mother and daughter. That is NOT molestation.
While I agree with you that the poster who you are responding to (“BigT”) is inncorrect in claiming that “…children very rarely lie about this sory of thing.”, especially when coached by an adult, (the classic scenario is one parent trying to frame the other parent as a sexual molester in a bitter custody battle or a contentious divorce proceding, very much like in the Allen/Farrow situation) I don’t think it is fair to say that Woody Allen hasn’t been accused of previously being inappropriate with underaged females, as just earlier this year Mariel Hemingway claims that when she was 16, Allen pressured her to travel unaccompanied with him to Paris, even flying to her Idaho home in an attempt to try and convince her parents to allow her to go with him. (This was after she starred with him in 1979’s “Manhattan” so he was doubtless aware of her age at the time)
Of course there is a huge amount of difference between a man accused of molesting his 7 year-old daughter and a 45 year-old man trying to seduce a 16 year-old girl, but it is not factually accurate to say that no other young females have ever accused him of being inappropriate with them.
I may be misremembering, or maybe I was misinformed, but I seem to remember at the time when the accusations first came to light, right after the split, that the timeline appeared very strange; it appeared, assuming that what Farrow claimed was true, that she had known about Allen abusing their daughter for some time, but was coming forward only now.
In other words, she kept the abuse secret when she believed that she and Allen were a couple, but as soon as there was some advantage to her (that is, to Farrow) to make a report, she did. And that was based on the timeline Farrow reported. That had made me suspicious of the story at the time.
But maybe I misinterpreted what she said, and created the timeline incorrectly when this was current news, or maybe I am misremembering.
One aspect that’s been left out of this discussion (unless I missed something) is that while there was little-to-no legitimate evidence that Allen molested Dylan, there were indications that he acted a bit skeevily, aka “boundary issues”.
Personally, I think this came about because Allen was a middle-aged guy with zero parenting experience or skills suddenly trying adopt a parental role with no clue as to how to go about it, which is a ripe situation for “boundary issues” to arise, but not an indication that he was some sort of pedophile. But that did cast a cloud over his relationship with Dylan and was thought to lend some support to the abuse allegations.
The evidence is overwhelming that Allen did not abuse Dylan. Therefore Farrow made up the whole thing to try to destroy him. What kind of person is Farrow. She also accused him of screwing her under-aged retarded daughter. If she was truly under-aged, then he had been doing it for four years, which seems unlikely. If she was truly retarded how did she finish college (eventually paid for by Allen since Farrow stopped paying her fees) and then get a master’s from Columbia. So Farrow was certainly lying about that.
Yes, going off with your girl-friend’s daughter is definitely weird. But neither illegal nor immoral. But she has claimed that Farrow abused her. Now Moses has said the same about himself. Also, now Allen and Soon-Yi have remained married, by all account quite happily, for getting near 30 years. Hard to call it a fling.
FWIW, my generally discerning wife has considered Farrow as a useless pile of shit ever since she broke up Previn’s marriage.
I admit I don’t know much about the situation in general, but didn’t Allen and Previn start their affair while Allen was still ostensibly in a relationship with Farrow? I’d think it’s still immoral for the cheating aspect of it, even if you don’t think it’s incestuous.
Depends on how you define relationship. From Wikipedia:
On December 19, 1987, Farrow gave birth to their son Satchel Farrow (later known as Ronan Farrow). According to Allen, his intimate relationship with Mia Farrow ceased completely after Satchel’s birth and he was asked to return her apartment key; they maintained a working relationship when they filmed a movie, and he regularly visited Moses, Dylan and Satchel, but he and Mia were only “social companions on those occasions where there’d be a dinner, an event, but after the event she’d go home and I’d go home.” …
In January 1992, Farrow found nude photographs of [the 21-year-old] Previn in Allen’s home. Allen, then 56, told Farrow that he had taken the photos the day before, approximately two weeks after he first had sex with Previn.
That’s five years after they became essentially divorced parents working out custody. And only seven months before Mia made her accusations of abuse.
I don’t believe Mia has disputed that she and Woody were no longer in a relationship, that Woody never acted as Soon-Yi’s parent (she considered Andre her father and kept his name of Previn), that Woody never dated or had sex with her daughter as a minor, or that Soon-Yi was an adult when they did start. Plenty of others seem to be glad to spread those alternate facts, though.
I think you are right; Farrow has never disputed any of those facts. What she did do, which I think was really pretty awful, was repeat in interviews that Previn was mentally retarded (and she used that term, so that’s what I’m using, even if it’s no longer considered correct).
If Allen actually had had sex with Previn when she was a minor-- or that is to say, when she was below the age of consent, Farrow would have said that, and not invented something like Previn’s non-existent retardation. But sex with someone unable to consent, even as an adult, is abuse, so basically, by inventing the retardation, Farrow was accusing Allen of abuse. I don’t think she would have invented something like mental retardation if she had low-hanging fruit to pick, like sex with a minor.
To my mind, that suggests that Allen really didn’t sleep with Previn until she was old enough to consent. It also confirms that Farrow is not beyond making things up out of whole cloth. So, if she did it in that case, why not in the case of the abuse of Dylan?