What about paedopholes who haven’t molested anyone?
I definitely thought that’s what you meant when you said:
As for the case at hand, I absolutely don’t know what to think. I’m not willing to watch the documentary, so I’m also not really willing to have a strong opinion on the subject.
Could you tell us the ways (starting before this event with Dylan is said to have happened) in which Allen has been an offbeat character whose interactions with societal norms in general is viewed as inappropriate by many people? Could you tell us why these ways are relevant to this event with Dylan? After all, someone who frequently dresses inappropriately for a formal occasion might be said to be acting in an offbeat fashion. Is that evidence that he would be likely to engage in this thing with Dylan?
More substantial and better proven? Well, yes. He pled guilty, then jumped bail. There is no question whatsoever that he did what he was accused of (and what he pled guilty to). I mean, he even took pictures.
The cases are just not comparable at all.
I, too.
I dunno. It may be that outright fabrication absent any prodding from an adult is rare, but children have told some real whoppers with just a little direction from adults. Remember the McMartin preschool scandal? when a guy named Ray Buckey spent 5 years in prison, charged but not convicted, simply awaiting trial, because a judge would not give him bail?
2 things
- Testimony is evidence
- Some of us are infuriated instead that wealth, fame and artistic skill has long acted as a shield for the predatory. A “stellar career” is meaningless, or should be. But clearly isn’t.
What, when all the other adults were, you know, partying? I know one of my rapes happened when all the other adults were drinking and playing Klaberjas.
I was very clearly referring to recurrence behaviour of paedophiles vs non-paedophiles. The behaviour in question could only be contrasted if it was the same behaviour. The sexual context was obvious. Many of you missed the context, but it was clearly there. Especially to anyone who’s actually read anything about paedophiles. Even the Wiki article on paedophilia mentions non-paedophilic molesters.
I actually assumed this was common knowledge, and my question to Larry_Borgia was intended as rhetorical.
Yes, I could have phrased it as “molesters” rather than “abusers”. Well, I know not to leave you the leeway to wedge your own issues into other people’s points, next time.
It’s worth noting that Woody Allen and Soon-Yi adopted two baby daughters, who are now 22 and 21. Bechet is a final-year student majoring in art history at Bard College. Manzie is a junior at Whittier College in California.
The adoptions were vetted by the normal process well after the Farrow accusations. There have never been any accusations regarding these two girls, and all their social media posts about both their parents are highly positive.
“I am proud of my parents,” Bechet posted on Instagram last month. “I consider myself one of the luckiest people on Earth to be adopted by these two wonderful people.”
Bechet hit back at commenters who called her father a “predator” and a “sexual abuser” on a since-deleted post.
“Before you start saying things like this, you should think about whether or not you can back your claims,” she wrote. “If you’ve read at all about the investigation that happened years ago, you will realise that you don’t have any reason to be commenting on things like this on my Instagram posts … “But this is my family and my life and the fact that you think you have any right to express your uninformed opinions on my Instagram, for whatever reason I don’t know, is ridiculous. We should live in a world where we question the validity of the information that is constantly being thrown at us on the internet and in the media. We need to do better.”
In 2018, Manzie posted a photo of herself with Woody and Bechet. “Happy Father’s Day to the best best best dad. You are my hero and I love you more than anything in the world.”
In December she posted a photo of herself with Woody on his birthday, calling him “my favourite person ever. I love you so so so so so so much.”
I suggest that anyone posting on the abuse allegation without knowing the details, or only having watched the one-sided documentary, should at least read through the basic facts in the wikipedia article:
Allen’s side of the story is given pretty fully in his latest book.
I just thought I’d point out that the summary that currently appears in the “one-box” that Discourse created from that Wikipedia link is from a previous, biased version of the article, and is outright false. It begins “In August 1992, American filmmaker and actor Woody Allen is believed to have sexually abused his adoptive daughter Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow, then aged seven. Dylan’s story has been deemed credible by numerous professionals and experts in child sexual abuse …”.
It has since been restored to read: “In August 1992, American filmmaker and actor Woody Allen was accused by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, then aged seven, of having sexually molested her in the home of her adoptive mother, actress Mia Farrow, in Bridgewater, Connecticut. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegation.”
It appears that someone has been sabotaging the article to make it sound like Allen is indisputably guilty, which just underscores my point about the pervasiveness of our cancel culture.
I’m a big fan of Woody and hope it turns out that he somehow did not molest Dylan. Here are my takeaways from the HBO special:
–Dylan Farrow is VERY credible. Moreso than either of her famous parents.
–It’s completely in character for Woody to do something very inappropriate with a child. Whether that something rises to the level of sexual abuse remains to be determined, but he sure as hell did something.
–The mini-series Allen v. Farrow is exploitive garbage. It made one good point (Dylan is credible and should be taken seriously) and dozens of bad, poorly reasoned ones. (Among them: Allen’s attraction to teenage girls is not evidence of attraction to seven-year-olds; lumping Allen in with Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein would only be meaningful if numerous other accusations of sexually abusing pre-schoolers had popped up or seemed imminent, and this does not appear to be the case; New York City’s cozy business relationship with Woody Allen’s filmmaking enterprise would be a lot more relevant if the investigation at hand had taken place in New York City instead of Litchfield, Connecticut, or if he’d made more than a handful of movies there since 1990; the shock and disdain of Mia Farrow’s paid employees is not compelling; playing Woody Allen’s Park Hotel press conference over and over again yields no illuminating details; destroying paperwork from closed child abuse cases is standard procedure and may actually be legally required, and anyway, it’s not like Woody shredded them; etc.).
–The series glossed over some very unsavory stuff about Mia Farrow. Here’s a big one: Three of her adopted children died, one clearly by suicide and another possibly also suicide. When one of your children dies, it’s a tragedy, my condolences. When it’s two, you’re kind of on the police’s radar, justly or not, because that’s a hell of a coincidence. With her, it was three. And celebrities adopting lots and lots of children isn’t saintly, it’s a red flag. Poaching married men (as she did twice) is not the sort of thing that should make adoption officials roll over for you.
I’m open to the argument that Woody Allen is a disgusting creep. If the evidence clearly shows that he’s a sexual predator/child abuser/pedophile, well, that’s it for my defending him or his work ever again. But Mia Farrow is a nightmare. I understand that a lot of women hate Woody because they’ve known men like him or that remind them of him, I totally get that. For my part, I’ve known a Mia or two.
Tell us what you know about Allen’s character and how this implies that he would do something inappropriate with a child.
Tell us what you know about Allen’s character and how this implies that he would do something inappropriate with a child.
I don’t know the man personally, but I read Apropos of Nothing, watched Wild Man Blues, and have read or watched as many interviews with him as are easily available. If those don’t reveal anything about his character, what does?
And there are many degrees of “inappropriate.”
At the risk of appearing to hijack the thread, what the heck is up with adopting 14 children? (Bear with me-- I get back on topic eventually.)
I know Farrow is not the only person who has done this, and I know there are people who have has huge broods of biological children-- I even know a few (mostly Orthodox Jews); I also know people who have had crazy numbers of pets. I had a crazy number of pets once (not close to 14, mind you), because I lived in an area where college students were fond of dumping their ill-advised pets once the semester ended. But I reached my limit, even, and the limit of my house, and started rehoming them.
Farrow is not, as far as I know, a religious nut, and she didn’t take in kids who were abandoned on her doorstep.
I can’t help wondering if she didn’t get off on the flush of a new relationship with a child, but eventually got bored with it, and wanted another new one to be excited about.
I have known people who were like this with babies-- I knew a woman, and she had diagnosed mental health issues, in addition to some developmental issues, who loved having babies, and having a little baby in the house, and actually took pretty good care of them, but got bored with them when they were older, and seriously neglected them. She’d lost several kids to the system, and wasn’t terribly broken up about it. In fact, she’s not actually said so, but I kinda got the impression that she liked making room for the next baby.
Now, I don’t know that Farrow has any mental health issues, but I can’t help thinking of these oddball things I’ve encountered in my life when I hear bit of Farrow’s story.
Is it relevant to the topic of the thread?
Well, yeah, in the sense that, if Farrow’s mental stability is questionable, it doesn’t lend credence to her story.
It also makes you wonder what lengths she might go to if anyone challenged her for custody of any of the kids.
Seriously. It’s “inappropriate” to read Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly to a four-year-old, or to try to teach them to play Clue, especially if they can’t read yet.
RivkahChaya wrote:
At the risk of appearing to hijack the thread, what the heck is up with adopting 14 children?
[nitpick] She adopted ten children. She had three boys with Andre Previn and a fourth with Woody Allen the old fashioned way. [/nitpick]
I meant non-paedophilic child sexual abuser, as context made bleedingly obvious. Please don’t misuse my posts to score cheap rhetorical tricks.
[quote=“MrDibble, post:151, topic:927877”]
I, too.
When three people all react to a post the same way, it’s you, not them.
I stand corrected, and I should have been more careful, because I knew she had Ronan the “old-fashioned” way-- I didn’t know she had three children with Andre Previn that way, though.
However, 14 children however is still a lot, and 10 children is a lot to adopt. If she’s a “child hoarder” (not my term; I read it somewhere), it doesn’t really matter whether 4 of them are or are not adopted.
What do you think is offbeat about Allen’s character and what evidence do you have that it tends to lead to inappropriate actions with a child?
Wendell_Wagner wrote:
What do you think is offbeat about Allen’s character and what evidence do you have that it tends to lead to inappropriate actions with a child?
“Offbeat” is a good word for it. In one TV interview (I don’t have a citation on hand), he talked about how much he improved Soon-Yi’s life by elevating her from a street urchin to the highest level of New York society (That wasn’t his exact wording, but it was pretty close to that). She was sitting right next to him.
In Wild Man Blues, he sprung for a much more expensive hotel suite in Venice with two bathrooms because he didn’t want to share one with his wife. He just showed a lot of casual contempt for a lot of other people in that film, like he forgot there was a camera and live mic right next to him.
In Apropos of Nothing, he related a charming anecdote about banging Diane Keaton’s sister while maintaining a sophisticated Noel Coward play milieu with Keaton herself, revealing kind of a tone deafness for what I would call “normal people morality.” In the same book, he mentioned many times his utter lack of interest in having or being around children, making his siring or adopting three with Mia Farrow, with the stated intention of not living with them or participating in their upbringing, unfathomable.
This isn’t some unfair depiction that the Allen v. Farrow directors foisted on him. These are all depictions of himself that he deliberately made and put out for public consumption. I don’t think he’s a sexual predator, I think he’s just freakishly out of touch with normal parent/child interaction. While that’s not as bad, it isn’t good.
Very fathomable to me. Mia Farrow was obviously the driving force behind all that, and she seems to have considerable driving force.
That said, he did subsequently adopt a couple of kids with Soon Yi, so it’s possible that he may have changed in this regard and was speaking of an earlier period when he said he had no interest (I did not read the book).