Corey Levitan Rethinks Woody Allen, After We Side-eyed His Memoir & Allen v. Farrow

by Corey Levitan, Special Correspondent

UPDATE: I’m not ashamed of having written this [see article below], and have not asked that it be taken down, only that it be amended by this note…

It is my unwavering opinion that convicting an innocent person, even just in the court of public opinion, is one of the only things worse than letting a horrible criminal get away with a horrible crime.

Having said that, “Allen v. Farrow” has changed my mind.

The HBO documentary series allows us to hear for ourselves recorded phone calls between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and to watch videos of 7-year-old Dylan Farrow describing what she endured at the time. In addition, I was not aware when I wrote this that Allen was not exonerated of his crime — that the prosecutor determined that there was probable cause to prosecute, but elected not to because of the irreparable harm it would do to Dylan.

Is the documentary one-sided? Yes. It portrays Mia as the perfect mother and does not mention any allegations of abuse or the deaths of three of her children as adults.

But does it contain evidence of the molestation of a 7-year-old girl by Woody Allen that any reasonable person would believe?

Yes, too.

– Corey Levitan

Original article from April 7, 2020, followed release of Woody Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”

In his 40s, Woody Allen was turned on by attractive 17-year-old-girls. He made a movie, “Manhattan,” about it. That movie and two of his others (“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Stardust Memories”) mention child molestation as joke premises. That evidence seems pretty damning, but does it prove anything? Woody Allen’s choice of his girlfriend’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, as a love interest was abnormal and creepy. But a judge determined that their sexual relationship didn’t begin until December 1991, when she was 21. So that makes the choice neither abusive nor illegal. In fact, the couple has been happily married for 23 years and raised two adopted children together.
Of course, the real question is whether Woody molested 7-year-old Dylan. She has VIVID memories of it. As an adult, she published an open letter to The New York Times, stating: “He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.”
It’s a compelling story. But Dylan’s brother, Moses, refutes it.

“There was no electric train set in that attic,” he wrote on his blogspot site. “It was an unfinished crawl space, under a steeply angled gabled roof, with exposed nails and floorboards, billows of fiberglass insulation, filled with mousetraps and droppings and stinking of mothballs, and crammed with trunks full of hand-me-down clothes and my mother’s old wardrobes.” Moses continued: “When Monica, our long-term nanny who was out that day, returned to work the next day, I confided to her that I thought the story was made up. Monica, who had been with us for six years, would quit her job a few months later, saying that Mia was pressuring her to take her side and support the accusation.” It was Monica who later testified that she saw Mia videotaping Dylan describe how Woody had touched her in the attic, saying it took Mia two or three days to make the recording. In her testimony, she recalled Mia instructing a disinterested Dylan: “Dylan, what did daddy do… and what did he do next?”

A six-month criminal investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale/New Haven Hospital, ordered by the Connecticut state police, concluded that “Dylan was not abused by Mr. Allen,” that her statements had a “rehearsed quality” and that they were “likely coached or influenced by her mother.” (A second, 14-month investigation by the New York State Department of Social Services, reached the same conclusion.)

But even though there was never sufficient evidence to bring charges against Woody Allen in court, Satchel, Dylan’s brother, brought them in the media. As Ronan Farrow, Satchel became a Pulitzer-winning journalist for getting to the bottom of horrid celebrity truths. His work exposing the Harvey Weinstein cover-up was brilliant. He also believes Dylan’s memories 100 percent and says so in his bestselling book, “Catch and Kill.” 

However, Ronan refuses to take a DNA test confirming what everyone with eyes can see — that he is Frank Sinatra’s biological son. And to me, this suggests that he is willing to go absolutely anywhere in search of truth — except against his mother.

Something sick clearly happened in the case of Dylan.

But those allegations were made eight months after Mia found out about Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn’t there, but to me, it makes more sense that the sick thing was how far Mia was willing to go in her quest for vengeance. Moses was there. According to him, the dysfunction in his family began long before Woody entered it and has its roots in the darkness of his mother’s childhood. It was Mia who was the victim of attempted molestation, Moses wrote, not Dylan. (Her brother John is currently imprisoned for multiple child-molestation charges.) Moses went on to recall witnessing siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down stairs, locked in closets and sheds, and beaten with telephone receivers by his mother. Not one but two of them, according to Moses, committed suicide. (His sister Tam, who was blind, overdosed on pills in 2000, after a huge fight with Mia. His brother Thaddeus, shot himself in his car in 2016.)
Moses wrote: “To those who have become convinced of my father’s guilt, I ask you to consider this: In this time of #metoo, when so many movie heavyweights have faced dozens of accusations, my father has been accused of wrongdoing only once, by an enraged ex-partner during contentious custody negotiations. During almost 60 years in the public eye, not one other person has come forward to accuse him of even behaving badly on a date, or acting inappropriately in any professional situation, let alone molesting a child. As a trained professional, I know that child molestation is a compulsive sickness and deviation that demands repetition. Dylan was alone with Woody in his apartment countless times over the years without a hint of impropriety, yet some would have you believe that at the age of 56, he suddenly decided to become a child molester in a house full of hostile people ordered to watch him like a hawk.” Maybe I’m wrong — and it would be a tremendous affront to justice if I were — but to me, it seems more likely that the criminal in all this is Mia Farrow, and that she was the worst thing to ever happen to Woody Allen.

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About Corey Levitan, Staff Writer
A native New Yorker, Levitan currently writes for La Jolla Light, San Diego and social media outlets. Formerly of Sin City, he penned an award-winning humor column “Fear and Loafing” for the Las Vegas Review-Journal that ran a record 176 times between 2006 to 2011. He has also written for Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Gentlemen’s Magazine Playboy, Men’s Health and once served as Hollywood Correspondent for the New York Post. Twitter: @CoreyLevitan

Editor’s Note: In March, Screenmancer ran a skeptical review of the new Woody Allen memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.” Days later, our friend and long-time colleague Corey Levitan came back swinging in support of Woody Allen, the embattled writer/director who touched so many lives with his films, but hopefully not with his hands. This is how Corey went to bat for Woody, and we’re running it because, hey, we need the dregs. 

Epilogue: Corey updated this Op-Ed as of June 22, 2021, upon viewing the HBO documentary “Allen v Farrow” and has requested an update to accompany this longer piece, which included counterpoints from some of the children, Moses. Screenmancer supports his decision to include a new perspective on Woody Allen from the documentary (also as a podcast) work from award-winning filmmakers Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy. The first episode of the podcast is included here for you to make up your own minds, perhaps change some opinions.

We added the Drew Barrymore interview with Dylan Farrow, the Full Episode, to this story as well. @RealDylanFarrow on Twitter for Dylan’s book “Hush.”

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