why mariel hemingway’s new revelation about woody allen doesn’t matter

Es­ti­mated reading time is 20 min­utes.

“WOODY ALLEN IS A PREDATOR.Or so screams out from the Salon web­site posted on March 26, 2015. The sub-title is “Why Mariel Hemingway’s new rev­e­la­tion mat­ters,” and it is meant to grab my attention—and it has. It also send chills up my spine and should yours also, whether you’re in the “I knew it!” camp or the “No way!” camp. It is meant to pull vis­i­tors to the Salon site—and it has.

My im­me­diate re­sponse to this head­line was, “Just gimme some truth!” Then, I took a mo­ment to ponder those six­teen words and I re­al­ized that it wasn’t what I was ex­pecting; it was a bit of a shock.

Why is Mariel Hem­ingway of all people saying that Woody Allen is a sexual predator! A modern mon­ster! Where is this all coming from? And how does she know?

 

Six in ten people ac­knowl­edge that they have done nothing more than read head­lines in the past week.

 

Did she wit­ness something?

Did he take her into his con­fi­dence and confess?

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Well, it ain’t so—those three sen­tences above are just a head­line to at­tract at­ten­tion to an ar­ticle on the In­ternet. But the im­pres­sion that head­line will have on al­most every reader—that Hem­ingway has the goods on Allen—is what every reader who reads the head­line will walk away with, un­less that reader reads on.

 

Screenshot 2015 04 01 10.48.07

Journalism 101

Now, in the rules re­garding normal ed­i­to­rial writing and pub­lishing (you know, like they used to use in the print media), the title Woody Allen is a ge­nius. Woody Allen is a predator”: Why Mariel Hemingway’s new rev­e­la­tion mat­ters can be in­ter­preted only one way: that the state­ment in quo­ta­tion marks fol­lowed by a colon was spoken by the person named after the colon. (And the use of the colon is suspect—a dash mark would have been more ap­pro­priate.) 1

As written, the im­pres­sion that this head­line leaves is that Ms. Hem­ingway, an ac­tress who made two movies with Mr. Allen (Man­hattan in 1979 and De­con­structing Harry in 1997), has re­cently ut­tered or written rev­e­la­tory words that in­clude ac­cusing Allen of being a “predator.” 

I have not read Hemingway’s book, nor do I in­tend to. I rarely find bi­ogra­phies or au­to­bi­ogra­phies of en­ter­tain­ment fig­ures in­ter­esting. Nor do I have to read it to ad­dress Ms. Keane’s ar­ticle: I am writing this merely to call at­ten­tion to that part of the book that Keane cites as ev­i­dence that Allen is a predator.

Using Ms. Keane’s ex­ample, I did not find Allen’s be­havior preda­tory. In fact, I found it es­sen­tially the op­po­site of preda­tory. By con­tem­po­rary stan­dards, his be­havior is pos­i­tively gentlemanly.

 

PandorasBox1

I sup­pose Pan­do­ra’s box could have looked some­thing like this, al­though it could just as easily have had a more fem­i­nine finish.

A qualifying statement

Now, due to the hos­tility that cer­tain sub­jects broached in both Ms. Keane’s ar­ticle and my re­sponse en­gender in many people, I must, per­force, make this qual­i­fier: nothing I write here is in­tended to sanc­tion rape or any form of non-consensual sex or any form of sexual abuse of children.

That said, any­body with an aware­ness of the vast dif­fer­ences in cul­tural mores right here in this country—right now, this day—should re­alize that there are sev­eral words in my qual­i­fier that re­quire ad­dressing as their mean­ings are fluid—primarily rape and chil­dren.

Hell’s Bells! Throw a little al­cohol, pot, or coke into the mix and we can even have dis­cus­sions on the meaning of con­sen­sual! But that’s a whole other can of Pandora’s boxes that I am not going to tackle in this life­time. Now back to the Allen/Hemingway article . . .

So that we are all on the same page, let’s parse the three sen­tences in the head­line. First, to parse a sentence—and the use of the word parse is rather re­cent; I cer­tainly didn’t hear it used in my Eng­lish or grammar or writing classes in high school or col­lege in the 1960s or ’70s—is “to di­vide a sen­tence into gram­mat­ical parts and iden­tify the parts and their re­la­tions to each other” (Merriam-Webster).

It is also used to mean the de­con­struc­tion of a sen­tence into its in­di­vidual parts (words) to de­ter­mine what they mean, what is being said.

 

Einstein2

No way could anyone in­tend to in­clude Woody Allen among such true ge­niuses as Al­bert Einstein.

What do these sentences mean?

So, let us parse the first sen­tence, “Woody Allen is a ge­nius.” The use of ge­nius here is not meant to place Mr. Allen among the Ein­stein and Shake­speare crowd. The five-word sen­tence ac­tu­ally means that it is the opinion of the writer of the sen­tence that Woody Allen is an ex­tra­or­di­narily cre­ative artist, an ex­cep­tion­ally gifted filmmaker.

Okay, that’s an opinion that I share and many an ar­gu­ment can be made to back it.

Second sen­tence: “Woody Allen is a predator.” The word predator of course does not refer to its pri­mary de­f­i­n­i­tion, “an an­imal that lives by killing and eating other an­i­mals.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nei­ther does it mean MW’s sec­ondary de­f­i­n­i­tion: “a person who looks for other people in order to use, con­trol, or harm them in some way.”

In the con­text of the ac­cu­sa­tions against Allen, predator is a buzz­word loaded with tacit meaning: it means sexual predator. Given the on­going de­bate about Allen’s rep­u­ta­tion, it means a ma­ture male who seeks out and se­duces or rapes im­ma­ture fe­males2

De­spite what the mil­lions of headline-readers be­lieve, there is no ac­tual ev­i­dence (an ac­cu­sa­tion is not ev­i­dence) that this ap­plies to Allen, but that’s what the third sen­tence and the ar­ticle that fol­lows are sup­pos­edly about. 

That third sen­tence is “Why Mariel Hemingway’s new rev­e­la­tion matters.”

 

In the con­text of the ac­cu­sa­tions against Allen, ‘predator’ is a buzz­word loaded meaning a ma­ture male who seeks out and se­duces or rapes im­ma­ture females.

 

Anyone who has made it through Jour­nalism 101 knows that the head­line of any ar­ticle is often the only part of an ar­ticle that most people read! Ac­cording to The Wash­ington Post, “Roughly six in ten people ac­knowl­edge that they have done nothing more than read news head­lines in the past week.”

That is a higher per­centage than I was taught in Wilkes Col­lege way back in 1970, when func­tional lit­eracy was at a higher rate and at­ten­tion dis­or­ders much lower. In fact, it is so much higher than what I re­member being taught that I would guess that a large per­centage of the small per­centage that claim to have read more than the head­lines did so but once (or are just lying in the survey).

So the head­line will give the over­whelming ma­jority of vis­i­tors to this Salon page the im­pres­sion that Mariel Hem­ingway has ac­cused Woody Allen of being a sexual predator of children.

Reading the ar­ticle that fol­lows leaves an­other im­pres­sion en­tirely as to what the ac­tress ac­tu­ally said—or did not say. 3

 

FarrowBroadway

Mia Farrow in per­haps her most mem­o­rable yet least en­dearing role in an Allen film in which she played a former mob­ster’s girl­friend in Broadway Danny Rose, for which she should have been nom­i­nated for an Academy Award as Best Actress.

Queasy blind spots

The second lede sen­tence in bold print just be­neath the head­line reads, “I love Man­hattan, even though it makes me queasy. Hem­ing­way’s new memoir forces me to con­front my blind spot.” So, the au­thor loves Woody Allen’s movie but ad­mits that it now makes (or al­ways has made) her queasy, and that she now has (or al­ways has had) some prob­lems with the film, her “blind spot.”

“This is my own garbage con­fes­sion: Woody Allen’s Man­hattan used to be one of my fa­vorite movies. If I am con­fessing fully, I have to admit that on some level, I will al­ways feel drawn to it, maybe in the way that dis­il­lu­sioned former church-goers might feel a yearning from some­where deep in­side of them when they pass a door they know on so many levels they can never cross again. Knowing the truth about what you be­lieve and longing for the time be­fore you knew it are not mu­tu­ally ex­clu­sive states of being.”

For those un­fa­miliar with the Farrow/Allen case, most of what fol­lows in Keane’s ar­ticle will be mean­ing­less. Suf­fice to say that more than twenty years ago Allen was ac­cused of sex­u­ally mo­lesting his 7-year old adopted daughter. The child was thor­oughly (phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, in­tel­lec­tu­ally) ex­am­ined at the time by two state agen­cies at the be­hest of the pros­e­cutor. Both agen­cies ar­rived at the same con­clu­sion: there was no ev­i­dence that she had been abused.

The judge in the case re­fused to ac­cept the ex­pert tes­ti­mony: he con­sid­ered his own opinion of greater worth than those of the ex­perts, as is his right as a judge. (There was still no ev­i­dence against Allen and the pros­e­cutor dropped the case. But that’s an­other story.)

So, if med­ically and legally the child was not abused, then there was no abuser. That has not stopped the anti-Allen horde. (There are some who be­lieve that Mia Farrow, who had been jilted by Allen, fu­eled the child’s ac­cu­sa­tions or was the ac­tual abuser.) 4

So com­bine the article’s two head­lines with its opening para­graph and we know we are in for an un­pleasant reading ex­pe­ri­ence if we happen to be among those who re­main ut­terly un­con­vinced by the ar­gu­ments for Woody Allen’s guilt.

 

HemingwayManhattan 

Mariel Hem­ingway in the fa­mous vanilla malt slurp-race scene in 1979’s Man­hattan with Woody Allen pro­viding mu­sical sup­port for her on his jew’s-harp, an in­stru­ment he learned from John Se­bas­tian in 1966 while making the in­sane movie What’s Up, Tiger Lilly?

And then there is the actual movie

Since I want my readers to click on over to Salon and read the ar­ticle in its entirety—never take anyone’s opinion at face value when a few min­utes re­search can verify or con­tra­dict that opinion—I will just present a few facts about the plot of Man­hattan the movie:

 Isaac (Woody Allen) is a 42-year-old tele­vi­sion writer who quits his un­ful­filling job to be a se­rious writer.

 Isaac is having an af­fair with Tracy (Mariel Hem­ingway), a very bright 17-year-old girl.

 Isaac’s best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is mar­ried but is having an af­fair with Mary (Diane Keaton).

 Isaac’s friends try to get him to see women his own age and he dumps Tracy, breaking her heart, and be­comes in­volved with Mary.

 After a tangle of plot and sub-plot el­e­ments, Isaac re­al­izes that his heart be­longs to Tracy and tries to get her back. 5

That’s the out­line of the plot. Yes, it’s an older man/younger woman story, in this case the woman being a teenager—even if she is of the age of legal con­sent (which varies from state to state). My in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the film’s theme has al­ways been that the older man’s feel­ings for the younger woman are con­fused and com­pro­mised by the fact that by our society’s de­f­i­n­i­tion, at 17 she is too damn young.

There­fore she cannot pos­sibly be ma­ture enough for the re­la­tion­ship that he and es­pe­cially she en­vi­sion together.

 

At 17, Tracy is too damn young—therefore she cannot pos­sibly be ma­ture enough for the re­la­tion­ship that he and es­pe­cially she en­vi­sion together.

 

Be­cause of our so­cial mores and the tacit taboo on anyone deemed “adult” having sex with anyone under the age of 18, this must be so—even though Tracy does not act like in any way im­ma­ture. In fact, she is the most emo­tion­ally and in­tel­lec­tu­ally stable char­acter in the movie. Nonethe­less, Isaac con­vinces him­self that he cannot take the re­la­tion­ship seriously.

In the early part of the film, when he is con­tent with Tracy, Isaac does look some­what pa­thetic or even mildly lech­erous, if only in the kind of buf­foonish manner we lov­ingly as­so­ciate with many of Allen’s film roles. Nowhere in the film does he look par­tic­u­larly dan­gerous or evil or, you know . . . predatory.

In fact, his af­fec­tion for her and she for him is ob­vious to the movie’s viewers all along. Most of us are rooting for the couple to get past the cul­tural mores and commit to a “mean­ingful relationship.”

But Isaac is swayed by his reser­va­tions and by his friends and breaks off the re­la­tion­ship with Tracy and be­gins one with Mary.

These com­pli­ca­tions make up the nar­ra­tive of the story. They in­clude such im­por­tant is­sues as Yale’s wanting Mary (de­spite the damage it will do his mar­riage) and Isaac’s ex-wife writing a tell-all about her mar­riage to Isaac (de­spite the damage it will do to many people, no­tably Isaac).

So it is that all of the other people in Isaac’s life prove to be con­fused and compromised.

Ex­cept the one shining beacon of emo­tional sta­bility and sure­ness in the movie: Tracy, the sup­posed “child” with whom he is in love.

 

AllenSleeper

When Sleeper came out in 1973, I was still under the im­pres­sion that Woody Allen was a co­me­dian who somehow looked avant-garde by playing on old slap­stick routines.

And then there is the movie critic

Okay? Back to Ms. Keane’s ar­ticle. She ac­knowl­edges the fine­ness of Man­hattan as a movie, then digs in: “If you had asked me at 17 if I would ever date a 44-year old, I might have ac­tu­ally barfed.”

If the photo of Erin Keane that ac­com­pa­nies the ar­ticle is cur­rent, she is nowhere near her for­ties, so such a re­la­tion­ship may still be icky. If you had asked me at 17 if I would ever date a 44-year old woman, I might have ac­tu­ally barfed, too. Now I know better and in hind­sight wished that I had found “older women” more attractive.

(And keep in mind: this has ab­solutely nothing to do with the ac­cu­sa­tion of sex­u­ally abusing a 7-year old girl.)

“We all have our blind spots. Woody Allen is a cul­tural blind spot for us, an artist of in­com­pa­rable in­flu­ence whose work has pur­chased him for­give­ness from a public he spent his en­tire artistic ca­reer grooming to for­give men like him.”

First, who is the “us” she is talking about and speaking for?

Second, are we sup­posed to be­lieve that Woody Allen movies like Ba­nanas, Sleeper, Annie Hall, Love And Death, Broadway Danny Rose, Bul­lets Over Broadway, Mid­night In Paris, etc., were re­ally about Allen using some form of sub­lim­inal mes­saging to un­der­mine our morals and prep us, one and all, to for­give him his trespasses—those tres­passes ap­par­ently being his fond­ness for at­trac­tive women be­tween the ages of 17 and 77.

Sev­eral para­graphs are then de­voted to the “rev­e­la­tion” of Hemingway’s book Out Came The Sun: in 1980, Allen had ap­proached her when she was 18-years-old and es­sen­tially propo­si­tioned her by inviting her to ac­com­pany him on a trip to Paris as his lover. The re­sult of this at­tempted wooing: “She shot him down. He left the next day.”

That’s it.

That is the ex­tent of Woody Allen’s “pre­da­tion”: he met a 17-year-old woman and was ap­par­ently in­fat­u­ated with her. He waited until she was an 18-year-old woman and then at­tempted to woo her.

He failed.

He moved on.

He obeyed all the rules.

That is the rev­e­la­tion hinted at in the tabloid-esque headline!

(And keep in mind: this has ab­solutely nothing to do with the ac­cu­sa­tion of sex­u­ally abusing a 7-year old girl.)

Does the ar­ticle end here?

Hell, no!

This “rev­e­la­tion” is fol­lowed by a “de­bate over whether or not we can sep­a­rate a work of art from the flawed human being who cre­ated it,” in which Roman Polanski is used as an ex­ample of pow­erful men get­ting away with rape.

“For those of us who were taught to be drawn to these am­bi­gu­i­ties, to em­brace to them, even, the fic­tional veil of Isaac was just enough of a sep­a­ra­tion be­tween fact and fic­tional truth to allow Man­hattan and, by ex­ten­sion, Allen him­self, a pure artistic life. Hemingway’s memoir de­stroys that sep­a­ra­tion once and for all. Woody Allen was Isaac, and quite pos­sibly still is.”

Huh? Ac­cording to Ms. Keane, Man­hattan is no longer a work of fic­tion: it is au­to­bi­o­graph­ical! Reading such things into works of art—movies, novels, paint­ings, songs—is a mis­take that far too many movie re­viewers make (I hes­i­tate to credit them with the hon­orific of critic) and should be re­served for rookies.

If the topics of works of cre­ativity were lit­er­ally true—even if only par­tially and then hidden—then Smokey Robinson would have offed him­self decades ago out of the sheer misery of all those tears over how many times his heart had been broken.

(And keep in mind: this has ab­solutely nothing to do with the ac­cu­sa­tion of sex­u­ally abusing a 7-year old girl.)

“There are still many people who don’t be­lieve Dylan Farrow when she says Allen sex­u­ally abused her as a child.”

Wow! I could as easily write, “De­spite the fact that there is no ev­i­dence that any such event oc­curred, there are still many people who don’t be­lieve Woody Allen when he says he didn’t sex­u­ally abuse Dylan Farrow as a child.”

 

WolvertonRevelation 

Hah! I found an op­por­tu­nity to slip some Basil Wolverton art into an ar­ticle on false mem­o­ries, the public pil­lo­rying of cul­tural icons, and any­thing to do with sex. Yet here I have a page from Wolver­ton’s de­pic­tion of the doom and gloom proph­e­sied in the Book of Revelations.

And then there is the promised revelation

She then brings Mr. Allen’s mar­riage to Mrs. Allen into the con­ver­sa­tion, some­thing that has ab­solutely nothing to do with the ac­cu­sa­tion of sex­u­ally abusing a 7-year old girl. Ms. Keane’s final rev­e­la­tion for her readers:

“Hemingway’s rev­e­la­tion de­mands we look un­flinch­ingly at the re­ality that Man­hattan so art­fully dis­guised as art, and see it for what it truly is. Woody Allen is a ge­nius. Woody Allen is a predator. He put those two sides of him­self to­gether, hand in hand, and dared us to ap­plaud. And we did—over and over. We all have our blind spots, but after a while, we also have to admit what we have de­lib­er­ately re­fused to see.” 7

Ah, so here we find the two lines quoted in the head­line and they are in­deed those of the au­thor, not of Mariel Hem­ingway. And they are part of a log­ical con­clu­sion: that Woody Allen’s de­sire for the very de­sir­able 18-year-old Mariel Hem­ingway proves that he de­sired the 17-year-old Hem­ingway. They are also ap­par­ently part of a non-logical con­clu­sion: that his de­sire for the 17-year-old which was al­ways a sub­li­ma­tion of his de­sire for a 7-year-old.

So, fellow fellows—and I know that there are at least two of you reading this—by this fal­lacy of logic, I could warn you that the next time you find your­self ad­miring a par­tic­u­larly fetching young mother walking by you on the street or in the mall with her little girl, you may in fact be re­pressing a de­sire to have your way with her little girl instead!

 

AllenCaricature

 A large-sized car­i­ca­ture of Woody Allen in La Rambla, Barcelona, in a pho­to­graph by Lluis Ripoll for Fine Art America. This has nothing to do with ei­ther Ms. Keane or my ar­ticle but I thought it would pro­vide a tem­po­rary dis­trac­tion from the morbid sub­ject matter of both.

No comment on the comments section

When I found this ar­ticle a few days ago, the over­whelming ma­jority of ini­tial com­menters were as baf­fled by Erin Keane’s ob­ser­va­tions and con­clu­sions as I was. Sev­eral pointed out the lack of logic in the con­clu­sions or the lack of rel­e­vance to the ob­ser­va­tions and sev­eral also called Salon to task for pub­lishing the piece.

Whether or not the more rav­enous anti-Allen el­e­ments (who seem to have a looming pres­ence on the In­ternet and a lot of spare time on their hands) have taken over the com­ments sec­tion is some­thing I am not in­ter­ested in finding out.

 

HemingwayPlayboy

Was Wholly Grom­mett, oc­ca­sional God of Irony, at work here? Shortly after Al­len’s “pre­da­tion” of the 18-year-old Hem­ingway, the 19-year-old Hem­ingway was star­ring in Per­sonal Best, in which she played a bi­sexual ath­lete. To pro­mote the film, the 20-year-old Hem­ingway posed for Playboy!

I will conclude with three points

1.  After a decade of America living with what is called re­cov­ered memory syn­drome and the damage that it did to so many people (mostly men ac­cused by mostly women di­ag­nosed by mostly fe­male ther­a­pists), we now know that al­most any memory can be im­planted into al­most anyone’s brain. In fact, re­cov­ered memory syn­drome is now often called false memory syn­drome!

2.  In an article/editorial for Slate ti­tled “Did Woody Allen Mo­lest His Adopted Daughter 22 Years Ago?” Jes­sica Winter states, “Allen’s de­fenders have al­ways had one simple fact on their side: He has never been charged with a crime, much less con­victed.” There are glaring prob­lems with that state­ment: Allen’s de­fenders don’t have to have any facts on their side; the ac­cusers have to have some facts on their side to make an ar­gu­ment—here, to make a case.

(Hey, per­haps we should form a loose In­ternet af­fil­i­a­tion: the Woody Allen De­fenders. I think the Allen/men-haters would come to refer to us acronymi­cally as WADs . . .) 

And the factswhich are sep­a­rate from the ac­cu­sa­tions which are based on mem­o­riesdo not sup­port Dylan Farrow: as a child she was ex­am­ined twice and de­ter­mined to have shown no signs of sexual mo­lesta­tion. But again, that’s an­other story.

3.  Fi­nally, there is only one person who cer­tainly knows what hap­pened that day. One person whose memory we might trust, and that is Woody Allen. And there is no reason for anyone to trust his word: of course he could be lying. Who wouldn’t in his place if he is in fact guilty of a heinous crime? But Woody Al­len’s memories/words are backed by the find­ings of the med­ical ex­am­iners. Dylan Farrow’s memories/words are not.

The character assassination of Woody Allen

This ar­ticle is the fourth in a se­ries of ar­ti­cles lumped to­gether as “the char­acter as­sas­si­na­tion of woody allen.” Here are the parts so far:

1.  the char­acter as­sas­si­na­tion of woody allen in the media con­tinues as ig­no­rance and opinion trump facts
2.  if you’re not with me, then you must be against me
3.  mia and dylan and the nev­erending story
4. 
why mariel hem­ing­way’s new rev­e­la­tion doesn’t matter

No prob­lems on- or off-screen be­tween Hem­ingway and Allen have ever been re­ported. Click To Tweet

Allen Manhattan Mariel 1500

HEADER: 17-year-old Mariel Hem­ingway with Woody Allen making the 1979 movie Man­hattan. Eigh­teen years later, the 35-year-old ac­tress would work again with Allen in De­con­structing Harry. No de­tails of any prob­lems on- or off-screen be­tween the two have ever been reported.

 


FOOT­NOTES:

1   Since ti­tles are meant to at­tract our at­ten­tion, they should tit­il­late. No problem, but they can arouse our cu­riosity and still follow cor­rect grammar and punc­tu­a­tion rules. This title should prob­ably prop­erly be, “Woody Allen is a ge­nius. Woody Allen is a predator.” Why Mariel Hemingway’s new rev­e­la­tion matters

2   To the An­drea Dworkins of the male-hating branch of fem­i­nism, all het­ero­sexual in­ter­course is both an act of se­duc­tion (which has nasty con­no­ta­tions to those folk) and a rape, as se­duc­tion and rape are syn­ony­mous to them. One of the cleverest wit­ti­cisms of the rad­ical fem­i­nist era (still with us, folks) was penned by Ms. Dworkin: “Se­duc­tion is often dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish from rape. In se­duc­tion, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” When I was single, I thought of having a tee-shirt made with this printed on it ac­com­pa­nied by a bottle of Chi­anti. It would have made an in­ter­esting conversation-starter . . .

And if you are a reader of this blog and a po­ten­tial nealist, then you do not pro­nounce wit­ti­cism as “widəˌ­sizəm” as Google sug­gest, but as “wit-ti-sizim”: all four vowels are short, as in “it.”

3   An­other little known se­cret to ar­ticle writing in news­paper is that the article’s lede (the pri­mary and sec­ondary head­lines and the opening para­graph) may re­flect the news­paper or magazine’s pub­lisher or editor’s opinion, not nec­es­sarily the con­clu­sion that the ac­tual writer/journalist ar­rived at. Those facts may be buried in the con­cluding para­graphs of the ar­ticle and my ac­tu­ally con­tra­dict the lede!

Please note that de­spite Ms. Keane’ title as Salon’s Cul­ture Ed­itor, someone higher than her may have made the de­ci­sion to place the con­fusing wording atop her piece . . .

4   Would it be pre­cip­i­tous of me to find some cor­re­la­tion be­tween the anti-Allen people in this never-ending as­sault on Woody’s in­tegrity and being and the anti-men people who seem to make up an in­creasing per­centage of our fellow Amer­i­cans of the op­po­site sex?

5   The mar­velous Judy Davis plays Isaac’s ex-wife turned les­bian who is writing a tell-all book about her years wasted being mar­ried to him. But that is sub-plot ma­te­rial and not ger­mane to this issue but I couldn’t end this piece without men­tioning Ms. Davis.

6   Why don’t men or­ga­nize and tell their tales of being ac­cused of abusing their wives or chil­dren and the horrow show their lives turn into whether guilty or not? A dear friend of mine was ac­cused of the same crime as Allen: sex­u­ally mo­lesting a 7-year-old girl. Even after the mother con­fessed to coaxing the child to ac­cuse my friend (long story in­volving the ex-husband and co­caine) and the po­lice ac­knowl­edged that they knew my friend was com­pletely in­no­cent, falsely ac­cused, he was in­formed that the mere ac­cu­sa­tion placed his name on a com­put­er­ized list of sexual de­viants. He was warned that, should he ever be ac­cused again, the burden of proof would be on him!!!

7   Ain’t it amazing; the ability of so many of these fe­male pun­dits to ex­amine un­flinch­ingly the real or per­ceived ques­tion­able be­havior of men but how easily they go be­yond mere flinching when the real or per­ceived ques­tion­able be­havior of women are in­volved? Re­member, if Woody Allen is telling the truth, then Mia Farrow has been lying and abusing her chil­dren for more than twenty years with vir­tu­ally no scrutiny from anyone!

 

6 thoughts on “why mariel hemingway’s new revelation about woody allen doesn’t matter”

  1. I don’t worry much about Woody Allen one way or the other. but you’re dead right about that headline...I saw it and au­to­mat­i­cally as­sumed some­thing new and sig­nif­i­cant had hap­pened in the on­going saga...and then of course I read the ar­ticle and went “huh?” Just be­cause it’s typ­ical doesn’t mean we should ever get used to it!

    Reply
    • NONDIS­POS­ABLE JOHNNY

      It’s dif­fi­cult to ex­plain to those who “be­lieve” Allen guilty that there is ab­solutely no ev­i­dence to back that up, and faith may be a reason for be­lieving in God (and God made sure that faith is the only reason) but it doesn’t work any­where else in life.

      DIS­POS­ABLE NEAL

      Reply
  2. CHRIS­TIAN

    Heya back at you! Thanks for the kind words. Glad you liked the site.

    This topic is sen­si­tive to many people but it is being dealt with in an in­sen­si­tive manner to­wards a man who is being damned through accusation.

    Please keep reading.

    Best,

    NEAL

    Reply
  3. When I orig­i­nally com­mented I clicked the “No­tify me when new com­ments are added” checkbox and now
    each time a com­ment is added I get sev­eral emails with the same comment.
    Is there any way you can re­move people from that service?
    Cheers!

    Reply
    • Well, if this is a real post and not some sort of spam, then thanks for alerting me to this par­tic­ular issue and I apol­o­gize for the in­con­ve­nience. On­going is­sues with my sub­scrip­tions app here may be at fault. Hope­fully, they were fixed yes­terday. Anyone else having such a problem?

      Reply

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