Open Letter From Dylan Farrow on Abuse by Woody Allan

[Nordic]

Nordic you are missing the point.

The mother recanted, that's the important part of Smiths anecdote. The question it raises is, 'what happens if she never recanted?'. Do the children grow up thinking thinking their father abused them?

I don't know, you tell me. Do children commonly put fake memories in their own heads on the instructions of their parents?

In my somewhat limited studies of these situations, the only time what you are describing happens is when adults are hypnotized and the hypnotist plants suggestions in their minds that makes them, upon snapping out of the hypnosis, falsely remember being abused.

Nothing remotely similar to this is what happened here.

Also, even that, as I understand it, is highly controversial and contentious.

It's so bizarre to me that a 28 year old grown woman can describe in concrete and compelling detail how her male patent molested her, and the argument over who is guilty centers around the MOTHER!

WTF.

Why do people continue to talk about Mia, and acting like it's a "guilty until proven innocent" situation with her, when what is the subject is the man??

There's some weird psychological transference taking place here.

"Woman accuses father of sexual abuse when guilty. Obviously the mother is the guilty party".

Fucking weird ass bullshit!

[Iamwhomiam]

Insane or reprehensible actions often have insane or reprehensible consequences, smiths.

So tell me, what was it at age 45, that drove you into the arms of a 19 year old? She remind you of your mum?

[dada]

You may want to go back and re-read that post, Iamwhomiam. And maybe use this misunderstanding on your part as the catalyst for a moment for self-reflection?

[Fresno_Layshaft]

Nordic you are missing the point.

The mother recanted, that's the important part of Smiths anecdote. The question it raises is, 'what happens if she never recanted?'. Do the children grow up thinking thinking their father abused them?

I don't know, you tell me. Do children commonly put fake memories in their own heads on the instructions of their parents?

In my somewhat limited studies of these situations, the only time what you are describing happens is when adults are hypnotized and the hypnotist plants suggestions in their minds that makes them, upon snapping out of the hypnosis, falsely remember being abused.

Nothing remotely similar to this is what happened here.

Also, even that, as I understand it, is highly controversial and contentious.

It's so bizarre to me that a 28 year old grown woman can describe in concrete and compelling detail how her male patent molested her, and the argument over who is guilty centers around the MOTHER!

WTF.

Why do people continue to talk about Mia, and acting like it's a "guilty until proven innocent" situation with her, when what is the subject is the man??

There's some weird psychological transference taking place here.

"Woman accuses father of sexual abuse when guilty. Obviously the mother is the guilty party".

Fucking weird ass bullshit!

Most people realize that children rarely "put fake memories in their own heads on the instructions of their parents..." But I think that's deceptive phrasing. False memory implants seem like the stuff of science fiction, what we are really talking about are false beliefs. Children can come out of traumatic environments like cults, with sincere non-sense beliefs. Indeed, Moses used the phrase "brainwashing" to describe the Farrow household post Soon Yi scandal. If you are told by your mother at a young age to say something that you don't really understand about your father, or else authorities will come and take you away from your family etc... I do believe that a child could internalize that and over time believe it to be true. I don't think it's too far fetched.

Also no one here, or anywhere for that matter, just decided to make up a 'blame the mother first' scenario. It's no ones pet theory, it's the argument of the accused! Has been from the very beginning. We are evaluating it here. Buy it or not, it doesn't really matter, but it's the crux of the case. To argue the case you have to argue that point. No one is crazed misogynist for discussing it.

[Project Willow]

^It's not the crux of the case, it's the first and last defense of just about every accused parent. A "false belief" or however you want to label it, does not account for the plethora of other signs and symptoms of trauma *outside of the solitary process of memory* that Dylan describes. The false memory baloney has always been just that, exculpatory political nonsense that's got nothing whatsoever to do with the indelible fingerprints that trauma leaves on the brain and body.

........................................

I hate to bury this in this thread, I was so surprised and moved I think I actually screamed at one point. The following is a beautifully written, powerful, and incredibly insightful assessment of where we are now with the sexual abuse epidemic.

Woody Allen Is Not a Monster. He Is a Person. Like My Father.

Last week, an impassioned letter from a sexual abuse survivor surfaced online. Its author had been at the center a scandal that attracted national media attention. The letter's vulnerability, and its bravery, gave me chills.

Dylan Farrow didn't write it. It was the suicide note of Jesse Ryan Loskarn, a Republican congressional aide arrested last year on charges of distributing child pornography. Loskarn wrote it before hanging himself in his parents' basement while awaiting trial. It made no excuses for his decision to view and distribute child pornography, and told his own history of sexual abuse.

Loskarn's letter is a painful account of life within the hermetically sealed world of a child sexual abuse survivor, as well as a shocking illustration of how most pedophiles reproduce in our culture. In his alienation, Loskarn discovered images that externalized the very memories that he had worked for decades to push out of his consciousness. And then he got hooked, as if the images were some sort of talisman of his fractured self made whole again.

I understand this. I have never viewed child pornography in my life, but I recall telling my therapist several years ago that part of me desperately wanted to see it, not out of any prurience or titillation, but a deep desire to see a world into which I had been forced at a young age.

I have extremely disturbing drawings I made as a kindergartner, a story I wrote when I was six years old carefully trying to tell my mother I had been molested, and a clinical history that could have easily been extracted from a child psychology textbook. But the sort of forensic evidence that some strident folks are demanding of Dylan Farrow eludes me, too.

On a clear blue Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2006, I confronted my father for sexually abusing me, and for the years of quiet emotional abuse that followed. I had been staying in my parents' home for several months after breaking up with a girlfriend in New Haven, Connecticut. I like to think that, in the days leading up to my attack, he knew what was about to happen. That he was almost proud of me for having the balls to finally stand up for myself. I pictured him like a man on the lam, peeking through filthy venetian blinds, half-hoping the cops will just hurry up and break down the door.

The confrontation is a blur now. But I remember saying, "If you hurt my mother, I will have you prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." And then his tone grows more rapid, more furtive – trying to contain all of this, as it happens in the front yard of his house, before it spills over into the neighborhood, risking witnesses. He spits: "This is what you do, you blame other people for your problems." In my dissociated state, he may as well be a serpent, and I a wounded mouse. I am fighting for my life.

When I was seventeen, my mother sent me on a service retreat to Costa Rica. Myself and some of the other boys on the trip brought home machetes as souvenirs. My parents confiscated mine immediately. On this day with the perfect blue sky, some fifteen years later, having confronted my father, I run to his closet to retrieve that machete from the place where it has been perched, at eye level, staring him in the face for nearly fifteen years. It is the first thing he sees each morning and the last thing he sees at night. It is in the same closet where he hides his pornography, tucked behind a heavy corded L.L. Bean sweater.

Earlier that week, I had disclosed my abuse, for the first time in my life, to my therapist. The world didn't end, as I genuinely feared it might. "It's like reality is right where I left it," I told him, intoxicated with the vivid feeling of finally being alive again. I left his office to walk back to my parents' house, and the full vibrancy of the world rushed back to me, like a time lapse of the twenty five years I had largely missed.

Not long after I confronted my father, I left the house. Forever. The machete came with me. It was eventually offered to the gods of rust, thrown into a river in rural Vermont.

There are a number of popular tropes around child sexual abuse inour culture. Two are preeminent: One calls us liars when we come forward, another calls us crazy. There is a notion that we should be skeptical when an adult comes forward and names their abuser, that we should carefully question their motivations lest we be duped by someone who is manufacturing, or at least strategically re-crafting, a story of abuse to shirk responsibility for their own transgressions. There is also the popular notion that "false memories" of child abuse are common.

When an abuse survivor's memories are fragmentary, as they so often are, they will often turn to Google for help—perhaps fearing that they're going mad, or at risk of wrongly accusing someone of child abuse. When they do, they are likely to stumble upon the website of a little group called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which has been operating since the early 1990s. In fairness, they're a pretty ridiculous bunch.

Their story begins something like this: A young woman suffering from deep depression spontaneously remembers that her father sexually molested her. She withdraws from her parents, who ask her partner what is going on. He tells them what she recalls. All of this happens privately in the family home. Her father is an admitted alcoholic who reports that he quit drinking because he was having memory problems and is, himself, a self-described survivor of sexual abuse.

So the mother then does what any honorable, clear-seeing mother would: She writes an anonymous letter to her daughter's colleagues telling them that the daughter, a Ph.D. candidate at the time, is deluded and suffering from a neurological disorder. She goes on to found an organization offering camaraderie and community to anyone claiming to have been wrongly accused of sexual abuse.

So, what screening process do they use to ensure that those who come to them are not simply pedophiles who doth protest too much, you ask? Why, none, of course.

Early on in the group's history, an odd bird of a guy named Ralph Underwager is appointed to the board. A short time later, he is asked to resign after giving an interview to a Scandinavian magazine for pedophiles in which he encourages its readers to boldly proclaim that man-boy love, as it were, is a reflection of God's will.

A few days after confronting my father, I asked my still-stunned mother what he said when I left. She told me: "I knew it, I knew someone planted those memories in his head." This is a predictable dime-store script of a defense these days, and it's available to all.

In America, we are prone to theatrics. Fox News loves a good sociopathic pedophile story. Nancy Grace goes rabid Bride of Frankenstein for it, snarling updates every five minutes until some ghastly fucking shell of a man lays dead in a hailstorm of Amber Alerts and SWAT team bullets. The kids survive, and I imagine Nancy sighing with relief, stroking her ego to sleep, reassuring it there will be follow-up stories and voyeuristic interviews for years to come.

This works on television because it reinforces the notion that the sociopath pedophile is not like you or me. We watch and wonder who would be so obtuse as to let him anywhere near so much as a pet rock, let alone a child. Without fail, there is a curious aspect of elitism in the spectacle. I can't say Rupert Murdoch calls in the script himself, but I've noticed how effectively these tabloid abuse stories often provoke the smug pity of the educated urban intelligentsia as they watch the catastrophically bad judgment of their poor under-educated brethren.

The problem is, this has next to nothing to do with the sexual abuse that happens in homes.

Those of us who were abused by a family member, or a family friend, have shared banal time and space with the sort of people who molest kids. We have sat in their cars in traffic and gone to diners with them, watched them scarf cheeseburgers or try to quit smoking, need an aspirin. And mostly, they are not utter sociopaths or sadists.

We are in the paradoxical situation of being subject to pure evil and knowing from experience that its representatives are rarely pure evil themselves. No one is. We have almost certainly seen at least a flicker of innocent joy or generosity in their face. We have puzzled over this person who hurt us, and considered the fact that they too were children once. And we know that many of them were also sexually abused as children. At some point in healing, we just know that there will never be, could never be enough jails to contain this – that it would never work anyway.

We are left with a problem: The greater the tenor of condemnation against these perps, the higher the stakes in telling our own stories, and the higher their own stakes in defending themselves.

If Woody Allen is now written into history as a monstrous child molester, child abuse is more likely to continue. Because if we are unable to stomach the fact that Woody is not a monster but a human being who did something monstrous, we will continue to stoke the fires of archetype, perpetuating the notion of the picture-perfect pedophile, the one whose evil shines through like a 100-watt black lightbulb.

I admire Woody for rejecting Hollywood awards culture and consistently churning out reasonably watchable films. (Though I didn't care much for Blue Jasmine; I prefer Match Point, which I suspect is closer to a darkness of which Woody is a part.)

Yet I know too that Dylan Farrow is telling the truth. And it makes me sick to witness the vile double standard by which our society measures abuse survivors – questioning their credibility based on their behavior, when that behavior is likely the result of the trauma they have endured. Who in the world finds it plausible that Dylan was an emotionally disturbed kid who concocted a false memory from her inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, rather than a kid who had been systematically traumatized within the sanctity of an otherwise reasonably stable home and so could not fully integrate the experience?

We don't really just condemn the sexualization of children. Instead, we condemn the very existence of child abuse altogether. It's as if the crime includes being victimized by it, or responsible for bringing it into the light. We take an ontological roach spray to the whole event, either denying its status in reality altogether, or competing with one another to proclaim the most exquisite forms of torture for the perpetrators. I can't count how many times I've seen the most strident liberal break character to loudly call for the prison rape of perpetrators.

That this darkness is actually woven into and throughout the fabric of our society—that these abusers are among us—is simply too much to bear. So the darkness is ignored except for the most distilled, theatrical, and viscerally repellent cases.

This is why agnosticism reigns in the land of child abuse allegations. It is why a raging blowhard like Alec Baldwin can respond to Dylan Farrow as though this were simply a private family matter, effectively telling her to shut up and step back into the private family quarters where she was violated.

The loudest voices questioning Dylan's veracity sound uncannily like the same bloodthirsty mobs who seek the sadistic annihilation of confirmed, unambiguously guilty perpetrators. As though, were she able to proffer the forensic evidence they demand, they would swap out their moral subroutines and swarm Woody's doorsteps bearing torches, toting copies of Bananas and the Curse of the Jade Scorpion to fuel the bonfires.

There is an in-between, and it's where life is lived, for better and worse. The appropriate response toward someone who has molested a kid is not violence. And the primary concern when confronted with allegations of abuse shouldn't be to make sure that they justify the sacred level of condemnation we reserve for those we know for certain, without doubt, are wolves in sheep's clothing. Monsters.

Does it make sense to discard an entire oeuvre of work? Or does it simply reflect an inability to live with messiness and ambiguity? To chalk it up as nothing more than the work of a monster, to cast it out of the village, is to senselessly re-affirm the same basic strategy of denial and dehumanization that, ultimately, allows abuse to continue.

My own father is a reasonably distinguished medical researcher. Neither of us is in the public eye, yet even if we were, there would be little risk of his contributions being marred by any of it. I can't picture a terminal cancer patient refusing an experimental therapy on the grounds that its inventor molested a child.

Years later, my father broke down on the phone, crying, and acknowledged what he had done. That, the simplest truth, was all I ever wanted.

Not long after I disclosed my abuse to my now largely estranged sister, she explained her own cold response to me, saying, "I know those memories are real for you but it's a bit like you telling me you lived on a boat for several years as a child." The eye-roll that seizes me as I recall, and repeat, this sentence is lunar in scope. Picture the moon with a pupil, picture it rolling and I will have shared with you some sense of the utter humiliation involved in having your most formative experiences treated as imaginary.

Most of us would sooner discard all parties who have been tainted by this event than we would look at how tenuous the sanctity of children really is, how commonplace abuse is, or see the capacity for the mostly good to do periodic evil. We live in the same universe as those who abuse kids. We walk among them. If we want to end the sexual abuse of children, it will begin with the recognition that we are simply not that different from them.

William Warwick (the name is a pseudonym) is a sculptor and writer in Los Angeles. He believes Dylan Farrow entirely. Stardust Memories is his favorite Woody Allen film.

[FourthBase]

It's not the crux of the case, it's the first and last defense of just about every accused parent

It is the crux of the case. It's just that you refuse to allow for the possibility of there even being such a thing as a remotely debatable case at all here to begin with, because you're apparently way too invested in Dylan's story being representative of an entire type of story which you've been honorably fighting for years to destigmatize, and so it feels way more certain to you than perhaps it should, not that you're alone in that, hardly. What if it's not actually as representative as you think? (Or have you committed to precluding all reasonable bounds of "what if" thinking from your perspective on this particular instance of this general issue, out of principle?)

Quoting this bit from Fresno, for emphasis:

Also no one here, or anywhere for that matter, just decided to make up a 'blame the mother first' scenario. It's no ones pet theory, it's the argument of the accused! Has been from the very beginning. We are evaluating it here. Buy it or not, it doesn't really matter, but it's the crux of the case. To argue the case you have to argue that point. No one is crazed misogynist for discussing it.

[brekin]

I've often wondered if Allen experienced abuse himself when he was young.
This scene in Annie Hall always stuck out for some reason.



This one below was always more than a little troubling.
Now it is pretty ominous. A young schoolgirl confronting an adult Allen on his precocious sexuality.
Maybe Allen was always hiding something from the us in plain sight.



Also of interest, when Allen was filming Annie Hall he was 40ish. Stacey Nelkin, a teenage high school student had a small part in it and she and he started dating. According to Wikipedia:

Her bit part in Annie Hall ended up on the cutting room floor, and their relationship began when she was 17 years old and a student at New York’s Stuyvesant High School.[3] Allen has said that they they dated for a time, but that Nelkin was not underage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacey_Nelkin

Today, Nelkin a relationship expert of sorts defends Allen. Saying:

Stacey Nelkin was a high-schooler when she dated Allen
http://www.thewrap.com/woody-allen-ex-g ... rows-show/

Stacey Nelkin, an actress who dated Woody Allen while he was middle-aged and she was still in high school, is continuing to defend the embattled director, saying sexual assault allegations are being unearthed to generate publicity for Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC program.
“I, myself, was a little bit suspicious about the timing of this, with the article in Vanity Fair and this letter coming out,” Nelkin said during an appearance this week on HuffPost Live. “It just seems like maybe a publicity ploy for Ronan’s new MSNBC TV show.”

Dylan Farrow accused the “Annie Hall” filmmaker of touching her inappropriately when she was seven years old in a blog post excerpted on the New York Times’ website. The ensuing outcry has dredged up memories of the bitter child custody fight between Allen and Mia Farrow, as well as claims he is a pedophile.
Nelkin said she doesn’t think Dylan Farrow is lying, even though she questioned her motivation for breaking her silence.
“I do believe that Dylan believes that this actually happened to her, so she’s clearly in a lot of pain and very troubled about it,” Nelkin said. “But I chose to speak out because I was very disturbed by this and I’ve known Woody for a really long time. Before, during this and after all of these accusations.”
“I do not believe that this happened and I do believe that she made this up,” she added.

Nelkin’s comments echo those of Guardian columnist and media gadfly Michael Wolff, who argued in columns and on talk shows that the Farrow family is trying to profit from the sexual abuse charges. She has defended the director in an earlier appearance on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live.”

Nelkin’s association with Allen involved a romance she had with the director when she was a 17-year old senior at New York’s Stuyvesant High School and he was 42. Their May-December (or earlier on the calendar, depending on your view) relationship is said to have partly inspired the one between Allen and Mariel Hemingway in 1979′s “Manhattan.”
Nelkin noted that sexual mores were different in the 1970s when the two dated and said her mother was “totally cool” with the romance.

Allen also began dating his future wife Soon-Yi Previn, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, when she was 19. Despite his unorthodox sexual history, Nelkin argued that Allen’s attraction to younger women does not mean he is a pedophile.
“I think a lot of people, including a lot of my friends and some close family members are failing to make the distinction that a man who likes younger women is not necessarily a man who is going to molest a child,” Nelkin said. “That because he perhaps didn’t have boundaries and went after his girlfriend’s adopted daughter, which, believe me, I think was absolutely horrible … that does not mean he is a child molester.”

[Sounder]

If we want to end the sexual abuse of children, it will begin with the recognition that we are simply not that different from them.

Given that coercion is a central feature of our culture, it cannot be surprising to find the levels of abuse that we see in many forms every day.

The abused becomes the abuser because that is the ocean that we are all swimming in.

[alwyn]

Nelkin defends Woody Allen because she dated him when she was 17 and he was forty what? But that's ok, 'cause hey, her mom was cool with it? wtf?

Sounds like Nelkin was defending herself. And even she doesn't think it was OK for Woody to date sun yi. She was an actress, and she was dating the director of a film she was on, while underage. But hey, woody was not into young girls, and he is OK. does anyone else think this is really odd? 'Cause i have to tell you, as a parent, i don't want my underage child to date someone more than twice their age. And if it was a lift to her career, then that's a form of prostitution, and mom was complicit. Y'all can say what you want about no evidence, and obviously Dylan is lying, because publicity, because Mom had to get revenge on Woody, but i'm calling BS.

WA obviously has a problem because he can't seem to get it up for women his own age. I hope his adopted daughters are safe.

On another note, i notice it's mostly men who are defending WA...because women lie, right? This thing reeks to high heaven.

[FourthBase]

Why not also bold the last part of the Nelkin story, brekin? You bolded the part where the ages were listed, as if that were extra-informative enough to be worth bolding, but not the part where the woman whose story is being cited as striking evidence of Allen's predatory diddlerness says quite explicitly that she doesn't think he was a child molester and she notes that a lot of people are failing to make a distinction. Clearly she doesn't realize that making distinctions is exactly what misogynists want people to do in these cases! She's also clearly an enabler of the victimizers because she suspects the allegations are resurfacing to boost Ronan's profile since he happens to coincidentally be a brand-new national media presence whose future in the biz will rely on ratings right now. Some folks here are pretending like there aren't plausible reasons for lying. Advancing a family's clout isn't a motive to lie? There happen to be quite a few potential motives for either a daughter to lie or for a mother to bully a daughter into believing wrong stuff. I'm not saying I buy any of the motives as an "answer", because I don't have my mind made up at all yet and I refuse to act like it's imperative for me to commit one way or the other. I totally fucking resent that it's treated as some offensive and hostile act to all female child abuse victims for someone here to not automatically believe Dylan. I've seen Dylan only portrayed by some people as a person with unimpeachable credibility because whydoyouhatevictims, as if she couldn't possibly just be, you know, an extremely skilled liar, which sounds worse to say than it really is until you realize that lying and pretending-that-shit-has-happened when it didn't actually happen is precisely what her world-reknowned actress mother and presumably the majority of the other people surrounding her did and do for a career.

"Why would she lie?" Right. Okay. And, also, just as valid a question here: Why wouldn't she lie? I mean, none of us know any of these people except for these reports, the sketchiest of biographical info, some direct quotes but not many. According to Dylan, reliving all this and coming forward has sucked for her, been uncomfortable enough to constitute a disincentive to come forward again. Really, though? How has she suffered since re-emerging with her story, harmed in any way that we can detect apart from her own words? Looks like she's actually gained quite a bit. Which should, truth or not, hearten us as to future whistleblowers. The truth can not only set you free but help boost your upstart brother's new media career, heighten the profile of your mother's charity, etc. So, people theoretically might be less hesitant to come forward, if there are such rewards for truth-telling. But, here, we still cannot really say if she is describing a true thing that actually happened. "But I know she's telling the truth, because it's so similar to what X number of children experience." That's not an actually legitimate reason to believe her individually. We can presume, of course, that she's a decent human being with no reason to be untrue. Fair enough. But we also do know she was raised by professional pretenders. "But no one would ever lie about such a thing." You don't actually know these particular people. You cannot actually say for sure. Regardless, this is another reason why this is an extremely unusual situation, as has been noted again and again. This thread should not have served as just another platform to re-emphasize the general tenets of child abuse survivor advocacy or feminism or whatever. The particulars here matter, and not just the particulars that make your interpretation look better or affirm a general pro-victim stance.

p.s. I'm so fucking sick of people noting the gender of who is supporting who (as if we're all necessarily supporting or rejecting one or the other by the mere act of not-having-a-closed-mind). Quit the fucking shit. It's irrelevant. Oh, wait, wait, let me guess, it's not irrelevant? Gender determines opinion? Great so, uh, now I can be an asshole and discount or demean everything a female member says if it's ever somehow "predictably female", whatever that means? No? But it's cool for people to reduce others to a set of genitals if it's a dude in question whose opinion doesn't perfectly align with yours like you want. It never ceases to amaze me how willing supposed anti-fascists are to confine us all to our respective gender-determined corners. Great progress.

Ultimately nothing about what any of us have personally been through gives us greater standing as objective observers of any given reality, even if it seems to be something in someone's wheelhouse of personal knowledge. I mean, if a person has something substantive and compelling to post, and part of the reason is wisdom gained from personal experience? Great! But just having that experience in one's background does not give any added authority to someone's points if their points happen to be a bunch of circular reasoning, cognitive biases, cheap shots. Truth is truth. A person with a different experience's POV on the same reality I'm examining is interesting, sure, but not necessarily inerrant, to say the least, or especially valuable. Victimhood doesn't magically make you smarter, wiser, righter about anything.

[brekin]

Fourthbase wrote:

Why not also bold the last part of the Nelkin story, brekin? You bolded the part where the ages were listed, as if that were extra-informative enough to be worth bolding, but not the part where the woman whose story is being cited as striking evidence of Allen's predatory diddlerness says quite explicitly that she doesn't think he was a child molester and she notes that a lot of people are failing to make a distinction.

Huh? My lead in to the article was:

brekin wrote:

Today, Nelkin a relationship expert of sorts defends Allen. Saying:

I think that makes it pretty clear that she defends him. Also I bolded the first sentence which again says she is defending the embattled director.

brekin wrote:

Stacey Nelkin, an actress who dated Woody Allen while he was middle-aged and she was still in high school, is continuing to defend the embattled director, saying sexual assault allegations are being unearthed to generate publicity for Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC program.

So, I don't think the average RI reader needs to be beat over the head on a pretty obvious point. Especially when it is the central point to the article. But feel free to bold what you think people may fail to understand the first couple of times.

Fourthbase wrote:

Clearly she doesn't realize that making distinctions is exactly what misogynists want people to do in these cases! She's also clearly an enabler of the victimizers because she suspects the allegations are resurfacing to boost Ronan's profile since he happens to coincidentally be a brand-new national media presence whose future in the biz will rely on ratings right now. Some folks here are pretending like there aren't plausible reasons for lying. Advancing a family's clout isn't a motive to lie? There happen to be quite a few potential motives for either a daughter to lie or for a mother to bully a daughter into believing wrong stuff. I'm not saying I buy any of the motives as an "answer", because I don't have my mind made up at all yet and I refuse to act like it's imperative for me to commit one way or the other. I totally fucking resent that it's treated as some offensive and hostile act to all female child abuse victims for someone here to not automatically believe Dylan. I've seen Dylan only portrayed by some people as a person with unimpeachable credibility because whydoyouhatevictims, as if she couldn't possibly just be, you know, an extremely skilled liar, which sounds worse to say than it really is until you realize that lying and pretending-that-shit-has-happened when it didn't actually happen is precisely what her world-reknowned actress mother and presumably the majority of the other people surrounding her did and do for a career.

Christ almighty man. Out of all the theories to consider for Dylan to lie (or Mia to brainwash her) you think some crap MSNBC gig for Ronan is viable? Why not consider this is all a ploy to attract attention before Mia releases the cookbook for large families she's been working on?

Fourthbase wrote:

"Why would she lie?" Right. Okay. And, also, just as valid a question here: Why wouldn't she lie? I mean, none of us know any of these people except for these reports, the sketchiest of biographical info, some direct quotes but not many. According to Dylan, reliving all this and coming forward has sucked for her, been uncomfortable enough to constitute a disincentive to come forward again. Really, though?

I would think coming forward to the world and accusing the hero to millions that they molested you, and not being believed by many, and only being known for that from now on in history is probably more than a case of "has sucked for her".

Fourthbase wrote:

How has she suffered since re-emerging with her story, harmed in any way that we can detect apart from her own words? Looks like she's actually gained quite a bit. Which should, truth or not, hearten us as to future whistleblowers. The truth can not only set you free but help boost your upstart brother's new media career, heighten the profile of your mother's charity, etc. So, people theoretically might be less hesitant to come forward, if there are such rewards for truth-telling.

This is really unbelievable. Fourthbase think how outraged you have gotten when just one anonymous person on a internet forum, that a handful of people visit, and even less probably have seen the specific post, accuse you another anonymous internet being of being wrong. Now imagine it in front of the world and everyone knows your identity and your much more famous and adored alleged perpetrator and feel qualified to weigh in on your motives, guilt, innocence, etc How has she suffered? God, I don't know maybe because the whole world sees her now permanently as either a victim of molestation, or brainwashing, or both.

Fourthbase wrote:

But, here, we still cannot really say if she is describing a true thing that actually happened. "But I know she's telling the truth, because it's so similar to what X number of children experience." That's not an actually legitimate reason to believe her individually. We can presume, of course, that she's a decent human being with no reason to be untrue. Fair enough. But we also do know she was raised by professional pretenders. "But no one would ever lie about such a thing." You don't actually know these particular people. You cannot actually say for sure. Regardless, this is another reason why this is an extremely unusual situation, as has been noted again and again. This thread should not have served as just another platform to re-emphasize the general tenets of child abuse survivor advocacy or feminism or whatever. The particulars here matter, and not just the particulars that make your interpretation look better or affirm a general pro-victim stance.

I just don't get this. People on this forum are willing to believe lizards masquerade as humans based on zero evidence but an adult woman comes forward with claims that her pervy adopted father did actually molest her during an incident that went to court, even when he has gone on to have other innappropriate relationships with his other adoptive daughter and suddenly "nothing can ever be really known". This shit is just tribal really. I can understand people not wanting to believe it, being skeptical, but if this was Dick Cheney's adult daughter coming forward with the same claims we know this thread be taken a whole nother turn. I mean she was there. She's describing something she experienced. Even going with the brainwashing theory it seems it would take a lot of work to create such a scenario in a childs head (not saying it couldn't be done) but who here would want an incredibly traumatic life altering experience they had at age 7 be assumed to have never happened? In her letter she stated she has suffered life long problems from the incident. If the incident didn't happen then whatever was used to create the memory of the incident would seem to have had to been equally or even more terrifying. That doesn't seem like an easy thing to pull off.

Fourthbase wrote:

p.s. I'm so fucking sick of people noting the gender of who is supporting who (as if we're all necessarily supporting or rejecting one or the other by the mere act of not-having-a-closed-mind). Quit the fucking shit. It's irrelevant. Oh, wait, wait, let me guess, it's not irrelevant? Gender determines opinion? Great so, uh, now I can be an asshole and discount or demean everything a female member says if it's ever somehow "predictably female", whatever that means? No? But it's cool for people to reduce others to a set of genitals if it's a dude in question whose opinion doesn't perfectly align with yours like you want. It never ceases to amaze me how willing supposed anti-fascists are to confine us all to our respective gender-determined corners. Great progress.

Look I've gone to the wall against people playing the misogynist card and the victim card when I thought it was outlandish and have had the labels thrown at me before. I've got my scars. And people have played the gender card flippantly at times on this issue or jumped to victimology stats to prove this particular controversy. But even I have to say (as I have) if Dylan Farrow was a young adult man of 28 coming forward I doubt there would be as much "I think he believes it himself even if it is not true", "his mamma brainwashed him", "we can never know what happened to him" and alice through the looking glass multiple realities and confusions regarding the matter.

Fourthbase wrote:

Ultimately nothing about what any of us have personally been through gives us greater standing as objective observers of any given reality, even if it seems to be something in someone's wheelhouse of personal knowledge.

Fourthbase, would you want to go to a virgin sex therapist? Would you want to have an AA mentor who has been abstinent their whole life? You want a sky jump instructor who never has jumped. etc ad infinitum

Fourthbase wrote:

I mean, if a person has something substantive and compelling to post, and part of the reason is wisdom gained from personal experience? Great! But just having that experience in one's background does not give any added authority to someone's points if their points happen to be a bunch of circular reasoning, cognitive biases, cheap shots. Truth is truth. A person with a different experience's POV on the same reality I'm examining is interesting, sure, but not necessarily inerrant, to say the least, or especially valuable. Victimhood doesn't magically make you smarter, wiser, righter about anything.

Just because you suffer doesn't mean you can gain anything greater from it. But when you have suffered an experience it does give you an authority that no one else can have. A professor can write tomes and tomes about slavery and lay out in amazing detail how it works, what its effects are, the legacy, etc. But he's never going to have the authority that someone who has suffered slavery has. Even if the slave can't articulate it and was even destroyed in the process by it, and is even factually wrong about many of the aspects of it, even believing that they were never a slave. But here we have an instance where someone is saying they were abused during an incident that was documented. I just don't understand how automatically people discount her story. I mean, fuck, I even give wealthy male celebrities initially the benefit of the doubt that they maybe the victim of extortion when I learn of an allegation until I learn more about it. I just don't understand why initially her story isn't accepted as even - being - possible. It's like peoples brains turn off when they run Mia Farrow and Woody Allen through them. If you replace their names with Mother X and Father X and read everything on the record and even in the online magazines Father X in my analysis comes out on the worse end.

[sunny]

Stacey Nelkin, an actress who dated Woody Allen while he was middle-aged and she was still in high school, is continuing to defend the embattled director, saying sexual assault allegations are being unearthed to generate publicity for Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC program.

She's not the first person to say this of late.* So Dylan is discussing something incredibly personal, painful, and traumatic so her brother gains publicity for a tv show? Nelkin knows this how? It's an attack, and why? Why such a particularly vile and vicious attack, that mirrors what others are saying, towards a person she doesn't know about matters she can't possibly know anything about?

Nelkin may in fact be the only person saying this but I've heard it several times in the course of this 'debate' over whether Dylan is crazy or lying, or whether Mia is crazy or a jealous brainwasher.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

In my initial post on this thread, about 7 pages back, I stated that this whole case gave me a "McMartin preschool vibe." Then I went on to state my opinion that in the Farrow/Allen case the possibility of memory alteration could be at play. Now since nobody here really knows what my opinion of the McMartin preschool case is, and since many comments in articles on the Farrow/Allen case compared it to McMartin as a means of supporting FMSF, I want to apologize if my post gave the impresssion that I endorse FMSF. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here's my opinion of McMartin: the mainstream has sold the public a sack of bullshit, painting the whole episode in a false McCarthyist light to absolve the middlemen perpetrators, vilify the parents and their supporters, and cast the real victims, the children, aside as irrelevant. And the cherry on top of the sundae: they turned cult mind control techniques perfected by the intelligence community on it's head with the inverted concept of False Memory Syndrome, the Orwellian equivalent of Jack Torrance logic - "he did it to himself."

While some children did recant their testimony as adults, the vast majority have not. The majority of jurors reached the conclusion that the children were in fact molested, they just didn't have enough evidence to convict the teachers of perpetrating the molestation. But I think the reality is much darker than we've been lead to believe. I think this is part of some Monarch mind control/splitting operation that's moved beyond the confines of the CIA into a privatized realm for profit that probably is connected with Franklingate. Full disclosure: I am not an expert on the subject of McMartin. If anyone can recommend a book on the subject so that I can have a more informed opinion, I'd appreciate it. But from what I've been able to pick up here and there, that's what I surmise.

Getting back to the thread subject, I would like to amend my earlier questions:

Keeping in mind the historical relationship between the MIC mind control and charity organizations (World Vision being the most egregious example), I'm curious to know of the many charity organizations Mia Farrow and Woody Allen are or have been involved with, who had access to Frog Hollow during the early 90's?

Are they an NGO with intelligence links?

I'm adding Woody because of the links brekin put in earlier on this thread regarding adoption not being an obsession restricted to Mia Farrow, Allen has continued doing so while with Soon-Yi. This proclivity in and of itself is not suggestive of sinister intent. But like I said before, I'm not letting him off the hook just yet.

But why continue to explore the possibility that this was anything more than just a textbook case of evil predator dad violating the children while innocent oblivious mom is in denial until confronted? Because in addition to believing Dylan's account that she was sexually abused, I believe Moses' account that he was physically abused. I don't believe the details of Moses' account have been posted here yet:

Dylan Farrow's Brother Moses Defends Woody Allen

By Alicia Dennis

UPDATED 02/05/2014 at 11:00 AM EST • Originally published 02/05/2014 at 08:30 AM EST

Dylan Farrow's Feb. 1 open letter to The New York Times detailing sexual molestation she says she suffered at the hands of her father Woody Allen reignited a controversy that has divided their family bitterly for more than 20 years.

Now her brother Moses Farrow is speaking out to defend Allen – and accuse their mother, Mia Farrow, of poisoning the children against their father.

"My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister," Moses, 36, tells PEOPLE in the magazine's new issue. "And I hated him for her for years. I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi."

A Family Divided

Moses and Dylan, 28, both adopted by Allen and Farrow, and their brother Ronan, 26, were in the center of a 1993 custody battle in which both sides testified about Allen's affair with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen went on to marry in 1997. Farrow was awarded custody of the couple's three children. (In total, she has 14 kids from her marriages and solo adoptions.) Allen, 78, who was investigated but not charged with molestation, has for decades denied abusing Dylan, maintaining that Farrow, 69, coached Dylan, an accusation Farrow has always denied.

"Of course Woody did not molest my sister," says Moses, who is estranged from Farrow and many of his siblings and is close to Allen and Soon-Yi. "She loved him and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him. The day in question, there were six or seven of us in the house. We were all in public rooms and no one, not my father or sister, was off in any private spaces. My mother was conveniently out shopping. I don’t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible."

Dylan's Response
Dylan insists that she is telling the truth.

"This is such a betrayal to me and my whole family," she tells PEOPLE in response to her brother's comments. "My memories are the truth and they are mine and I will live with that for the rest of my life."

"My mother never coached me," Dylan says. "She never planted false memories in my brain. My memories are mine. I remember them. She was distraught when I told her. When I came forward with my story she was hoping against hope that I had made it up. In one of the most heartbreaking conversations I have ever had, she sat me down and asked me if I was telling the truth. She said that Dad said he didn’t do anything. and I said, 'He's lying.' "

Painful Memories

Moses accuses Farrow of bullying him as well. "Our mother has misled the public into believing it was a happy household of both biological and adopted children," he says. "From an early age, my mother demanded obedience and I was often hit as a child. She went into unbridled rages if we angered her, which was intimidating at the very least and often horrifying, leaving us not knowing what she would do."

"I don't know where he gets this about getting beaten," counters Dylan. "We were sent to our rooms sometimes."

"I will not see my family dragged down like this," she adds. "I can't stay silent when my family needs me and I will not abandon them like Soon-Yi and Moses. My brother is dead to me. My mother is so brave and so courageous and taught me what it means to be strong and brave and tell the truth even in the face of these monstrous lies."

Farrow, who declined to respond to Moses's accusations, Tweeted, "I love my daughter. I will always protect her. A lot of ugliness is going to be aimed at me. But this is not about me, it's about her truth."

Moses, a family therapist, says that his own life has been made better by spending time with Allen.

"I think my sister is missing a great deal in life in not reconnecting with her father, who had always adored her," he says. "It’s important that she assert her independence from our mother and not go through life with the false impression that she has been molested by my father. I am very happy I have come into my own power, separating from my mother, which has led to a positive reunion with my father."

'Horrible Tragedy'
Allen's family says that the director is devastated by Dylan's letter.

"This is a horrible, horrible tragedy," Allen's sister Letty Aronson tells PEOPLE. "He feels very badly for Dylan, that she has been so poisoned by her mother."

Dylan, of course, feels very differently.

"I have a wonderful family," she says. "We are brave and we are truthful and anyone who says anything otherwise does not know us."

Now in both stories I think there are circumstances I object to. I don't believe Moses can say with any definitiveness that Dylan wasn't molested and likewise I don't believe Dylan can say Moses wasn't beaten. It's certainly possible Dylan's molestation occurred when Moses wasn't around to witness it (unless he's just repressing the memory) just as it's possible Moses was beaten when Dylan wasn't around (unless she's repressing the memory). Other than that, where it concerns their own experience, I think they're both telling the truth.

[BrandonD]

Consider for a moment if "Woody Allen the celebrity" was removed from this case.

Perhaps it's just one of those TV true crime dramas: There is an anonymous girl named Jane who stated many years ago as a child that she was molested, a testimony which she continues to stand by as an adult.

The accused is a man named Jack, a man with a likeable personality but with a clear disregard of society's sexual norms. This is supported by ample evidence, not the least of which being an affair with his girlfriend's adopted daughter.

This disregard of society's sexual norms doesn't automatically imply he's a child molester of course, but it does strongly imply that he won't allow society to tell him what's ok and not ok sexually, he will do what he likes.

Add to the case the fact that Jack is extremely wealthy and influential, with a lot of friends in high places. This is the number one factor in society that allows people to indulge in whatever depravity they may possess inside.

At this point in the show about Jack and Jane, almost every viewer of the show would be thinking: "Jack is obviously freakin guilty".

Now he may NOT be guilty of course, but the scales seem pretty stacked against him.

[FourthBase]

I think that makes it pretty clear that she defends him. Also I bolded the first sentence which again says she is defending the embattled director.

I wasn't saying you were trying to omit that aspect, I'm saying that you chose to re-emphasize the simple creep-factor math that was already apparent instead of bolding the substance of her defense of Allen.

So, I don't think the average RI reader needs to be beat over the head on a pretty obvious point. Especially when it is the central point to the article. But feel free to bold what you think people may fail to understand the first couple of times.

Really? Because no one else had mentioned this person. So I figured her opinion on whether Woody Allen is a child molester might be way more informed and valuable than any of ours. Since, you know, she knew him. Did you think people had missed her age the first few times? Why bother bolding that but not the words of her pro-Allen opinion? Hmmm, maybe because it didn't conform to your preconceived notion of what is important about the case?

Christ almighty man. Out of all the theories to consider for Dylan to lie (or Mia to brainwash her) you think some crap MSNBC gig for Ronan is viable? Why not consider this is all a ploy to attract attention before Mia releases the cookbook for large families she's been working on?

Are you high? You just fucking bolded it.

"Stacey Nelkin, an actress who dated Woody Allen while he was middle-aged and she was still in high school, is continuing to defend the embattled director, saying sexual assault allegations are being unearthed to generate publicity for Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC program."

Can you please REEEEEEEEEAD MORRRRRRRRRRE CLOOOOOOOOOOSELY, thx.

I would think coming forward to the world and accusing the hero to millions that they molested you, and not being believed by many, and only being known for that from now on in history is probably more than a case of "has sucked for her".

This is really unbelievable. Fourthbase think how outraged you have gotten when just one anonymous person on a internet forum, that a handful of people visit, and even less probably have seen the specific post, accuse you another anonymous internet being of being wrong. Now imagine it in front of the world and everyone knows your identity and your much more famous and adored alleged perpetrator and feel qualified to weigh in on your motives, guilt, innocence, etc How has she suffered? God, I don't know maybe because the whole world sees her now permanently as either a victim of molestation, or brainwashing, or both.

Oh, cut the shit. How has she actually suffered by coming forward? Having a shitload of strangers say mean shit about you on the internet isn't suffering, otherwise the Kardashians are the biggest victims in the world. In terms of that, though, she has had just as much if not more of an outpouring of support. Her family has, yes, benefitted from the attention, professionally. She is now a recognized national figure and a hero herself to many.

Not being believed by many? Except for, what, the stampede of unconditional support from a vast percentage of everyone of note who's made a single remark about it? Is it that you think not being reflexively believed = suffering? Did she lose her job? (Does she even have or need a job?) Did her family rally around her, or distance themselves? The former. Well, one brother had already taken leave from what he depicts as a cultish situation, so resurrecting the story didn't harm her relationship with him. Everyone still on Team Farrow has rallied around Dylan, and wayyy more people have joined Team Farrow recently and bailed on Allen, since the VF article and tweets and NYT column. She has kids of her own, she looks healthy, she's got friends, she's got fame, she's got riches, she has umpteen thousand fans now.

When we here typically look for signs that a whistleblower has risked and suffered harm for telling the truth, we do not usually just mean getting hated on by X percentage of internet strangers. What was really at stake for her? What has she actually lost and gained? For the record, nothing anyone has ever said here has ever made me suffer pain. Getting annoyed is not pain. If people doubted me in a major way that flustered me or hurt my feelings, then I would just keep expressing the truth, tirelessly, fearlessly, until I was believed or bust. If I was still continuously doubted by some people, it wouldn't bother me, let alone traumatize me. Because I am an adult who is confident in my ability to persuasively explain the truth, or to deal with being disbelieved like a grownup if that doesn't work. I definitely wouldn't want people demanding allegiance to me out of some abstract principle of always-siding-with-such-and-such-a-type-of-victim.

I just don't get this. People on this forum are willing to believe lizards masquerade as humans based on zero evidence but an adult woman comes forward with claims that her pervy adopted father did actually molest her during an incident that went to court, even when he has gone on to have other innappropriate relationships with his other adoptive daughter and suddenly "nothing can ever be really known". This shit is just tribal really. I can understand people not wanting to believe it, being skeptical, but if this was Dick Cheney's adult daughter coming forward with the same claims we know this thread be taken a whole nother turn. I mean she was there. She's describing something she experienced. Even going with the brainwashing theory it seems it would take a lot of work to create such a scenario in a childs head (not saying it couldn't be done) but who here would want an incredibly traumatic life altering experience they had at age 7 be assumed to have never happened? In her letter she stated she has suffered life long problems from the incident. If the incident didn't happen then whatever was used to create the memory of the incident would seem to have had to been equally or even more terrifying. That doesn't seem like an easy thing to pull off.

I don't believe in that lizard shit, so be more specific about "people", thanks. Because you are not talking about me. I'm not proposing total-skepticism, either. Just an open, rational mind about something that has compelling dueling narratives with lots of WTFs and major unknowns still. If you don't think the competing narratives are both plausible, then you almost certainly have some kind of horse in this "race" affecting your judgment. That goes for everyone.

Look I've gone to the wall against people playing the misogynist card and the victim card when I thought it was outlandish and have had the labels thrown at me before. I've got my scars. And people have played the gender card flippantly at times on this issue or jumped to victimology stats to prove this particular controversy. But even I have to say (as I have) if Dylan Farrow was a young adult man of 28 coming forward I doubt there would be as much "I think he believes it himself even if it is not true", "his mamma brainwashed him", "we can never know what happened to him" and alice through the looking glass multiple realities and confusions regarding the matter.

And you would be WRONG. I for one would be saying EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS, ASKING THE SAME QUESTIONS, RESISTING WHATEVER REFLEXIVE GROUPTHINK WAS GOING ON ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. I dare someone to doubt me on that. I dare someone to suggest that my gender would have ensured a certain thought process in me. Please, someone, be that hypocritical. It would make my day.

Fourthbase, would you want to go to a virgin sex therapist? Would you want to have an AA mentor who has been abstinent their whole life? You want a sky jump instructor who never has jumped. etc ad infinitum

If a virgin diligently researches and compiles the most sensible sex advice ever written, then yeah, why not. The message counts; the messenger, not as much. You know who I definitely wouldn't want? A sex therapist or skydiving instructor who was so proud of having personal experience that they didn't bother even trying to engage with particular details anymore, instead coasting on that perceived advantage in experience.

Just because you suffer doesn't mean you can gain anything greater from it. But when you have suffered an experience it does give you an authority that no one else can have. A professor can write tomes and tomes about slavery and lay out in amazing detail how it works, what its effects are, the legacy, etc. But he's never going to have the authority that someone who has suffered slavery has. Even if the slave can't articulate it and was even destroyed in the process by it, and is even factually wrong about many of the aspects of it, even believing that they were never a slave. But here we have an instance where someone is saying they were abused during an incident that was documented. I just don't understand how automatically people discount her story. I mean, fuck, I even give wealthy male celebrities initially the benefit of the doubt that they maybe the victim of extortion when I learn of an allegation until I learn more about it. I just don't understand why initially her story isn't accepted as even - being - possible. It's like peoples brains turn off when they run Mia Farrow and Woody Allen through them. If you replace their names with Mother X and Father X and read everything on the record and even in the online magazines Father X in my analysis comes out on the worse end.

So when you suffer childhood sexual abuse then what you say warrants extra attention and respect if the topic is related to that experience? Okay. So, when does my authority start to get its fair share of deference, then? This'll probably be the fourth or fifth time I've had to remind someone of this here: I got repeatedly sexually abused by teenage neighbors as a young child. So, now, does everything I wrote in this thread have to be re-read with 50% or 75% more respect? Or would my "authority" actually still depend on whether people, you know, agreed with me? Would you all be free to interrogate my claim? If someone even asked the simplest question like where it took place, could I then cry foul and accuse people of attacking me and automatically discounting my story? I mean, how dare anyone question a victim, right?

Once again, FOR THE RECORD: I don't know who's lying, if anyone. In this MOST UNUSUAL CASE. Mother and Father X, lol??? But it's NOT THOSE PEOPLE. It's not even close to be a representative situation. It was, it happens to be, and it will continue to be: Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, and all the attendant weirdness involved with two major Hollyweird figures. None of us knows enough to really know about this case, imo. Agnosticism is not the new denialism, folks. It's still just agnosticism.