On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival in France, journalist and former television personality Ronan Farrow penned a blistering critique of his father, Woody Allen, in which he compares the behavior of the filmmaker to another alleged serial sexual abuser, comedian Bill Cosby.
Allen’s latest film, Café Society, opens the Cannes festival on Wednesday.
Farrow’s essay comes two years after his sister, Dylan Farrow, published an explosive account in the New York Times of the alleged sexual abuse she was subjected to as a seven-year-old child. In that essay, Dylan Farrow called Allen “a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.
Read Farrow’s essay in the Hollywood Reporter below:
“They’re accusations. They’re not in the headlines. There’s no obligation to mention them.” These were the objections from a producer at my network. It was September 2014 and I was preparing to interview a respected journalist about his new biography of Bill Cosby. The book omitted allegations of rape and sexual abuse against the entertainer, and I intended to focus on that omission. That producer was one of several industry veterans to warn me against it. At the time, there was little more than a stalled lawsuit and several women with stories, all publicly discredited by Cosby’s PR team. There was no criminal conviction. It was old news. It wasn’tnews.
So we compromised: I would raise the allegations, but only in a single question late in the interview. And I called the author, reporter to reporter, to let him know what was coming. He seemed startled when I brought it up. I was the first to ask about it, he said. He paused for a long time, then asked if it was really necessary. On air, he said he’d looked into the allegations and they didn’t check out.
Today, the number of accusers has risen to 60. The author has apologized. And reporters covering Cosby have been forced to examine decades of omissions, of questions unasked, stories untold. I am one of those reporters — I’m ashamed of that interview.
Some reporters have drawn connections between the press’ grudging evolution on Cosby and a painful chapter in my own family’s history. It was shortly before the Cosby story exploded anew that my sister Dylan Farrow wrote about her own experiences — alleging that our father, Woody Allen, had “groomed” her with inappropriate touching as a young girl and sexually assaulted her when she was 7 years old.
Being in the media as my sister’s story made headlines, and Woody Allen’s PR engine revved into action, gave me a window into just how potent the pressure can be to take the easy way out. Every day, colleagues at news organizations forwarded me the emails blasted out by Allen’s powerful publicist, who had years earlier orchestrated a robust publicity campaign to validate my father’s sexual relationship with another one of my siblings. Those emails featured talking points ready-made to be converted into stories, complete with validators on offer — therapists, lawyers, friends, anyone willing to label a young woman confronting a powerful man as crazy, coached, vindictive. At first, they linked to blogs, then to high-profile outlets repeating the talking points — a self-perpetuating spin machine.
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Read Farrow’s complete essay in the Hollywood Reporter.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum