Hollywood Dearest: Seared Souls and the Silver Screen
Whatever you believe about the pedophilia allegations leveled against actor and director Woody Allen by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, one thing is plainly true. It’s not the detail of the abuse Farrow says she suffered at Allen’s hands, outlined in an open letter published in the New York Times February 1, though I find it convincing. It’s not just that Allen lost four court battles relating to the case and that a judge determined his behavior toward his daughter to have been “grossly inappropriate.” It’s that, regardless, Hollywood will honor Allen till the day he dies — and likely beyond.
Writing at the Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Kilday has a piece bearing the title “Woody Allen: Why Hollywood Is Shrugging Off the Latest Sex Abuse Claims.” Why? The short answer is simple: because Hollywood has always shrugged off sex abuse.
Farrow herself alluded to this in her letter, writing, “That torment [of the abuse] was made worse by Hollywood. All but a precious few (my heroes) turned a blind eye. Most found it easier to accept the ambiguity, to say, ‘who can say what happened,’ to pretend that nothing was wrong. Actors praised him at awards shows. Networks put him on TV. Critics put him in magazines.” And we’d seen this blind eye before. Reacting to the case of director Roman Polanski — who, according to court records, in 1977 plied 13-year-old Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer) with drink and drugs and molested her — Whoopi Goldberg went full-Hollywood and minimized the crime, saying it wasn’t “rape-rape.” No, I suppose sophisticated men, practiced in subtlety and symbolism, don’t do rape-rape; perhaps, in the same vein as Hollywood would say about another fashionable crime, Polanski was just an “undocumented lover.”
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