Son of Woody Allen exacts his revenge
UNITED STATES: When Woody Allen’s Cafe Society premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the director’s son issued a challenge to reporters covering Hollywood.
Ronan Farrow claimed that journalists and broadcasters were ignoring the allegations of sexual abuse by ‘‘powerful men’’ like his father, in the same way they had ignored allegations of rape against Bill Cosby, he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter newspaper.
His younger sister, Dylan, had much earlier alleged that Allen sexually assaulted her when she was 7 and Farrow, a lawyer and reporter, found her account credible.
Allen denied it and a prosecutor decided not to press charges at the time, but too often the legal system ‘‘fails the vulnerable’’ and, too often, reporters fail to give victims a voice ‘‘as they face off against the powerful’’, Farrow wrote.
‘‘It’s time to ask some hard questions.’’
Now, an investigative piece by Farrow for The New Yorker has swung like a wrecking ball through the Hollywood establishment.
The target was the man who helped to restore his father to a lofty place in the industry.
A year after the allegations were aired during a bitter divorce and custody battle between Allen and the actress Mia Farrow in 1993, the film-maker found himself shunned in Hollywood. He was rescued by Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob, who were then running Miramax.
‘‘Shunned by Hollywood means nothing to Miramax,’’ Weinstein declared: ‘‘We’re talking about a comic genius. [Charlie] Chaplin was shunned by Hollywood, so were a great many other international film-makers and those are the people who belong with Miramax.’’
Allen made a series of films with Miramax and after the Weinstein brothers left and founded the Weinstein Company, they continued to distribute his work.
Farrow, 29, also a Rhodes scholar and a diplomat, said he had long ‘‘avoided commenting on my sister’s allegations’’ as he sought to distance himself ‘‘from my family history’’.
But watching a tribute to his father, during the Golden Globes ceremony in 2014, he raised the allegations himself, tweeting that he had ‘‘missed the Woody Allen tribute’’ and asked if it mentioned that ‘‘a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age seven?’’
His investigation of Weinstein and his claim that NBC had decided that the story he had gathered was ‘‘unreportable’’, causing him to take it to The New Yorker ,is now raising the hard questions he hoped for. –