False Accusations and Mob Rule via Twitter Hurt Women and the Me Too Movement
No, we do not have to believe all women.
The Me Too movement ushed in a much-needed discussion about sexual abuse and sexual harassment. It gave women a public space to talk about allegations of sex crimes, especially at the hands of powerful men. Yes. Most women do not lie about sexual abuse or rape. That isn’t a thing. Many women face the terrible decision to come forward when they know they won’t be believed. They will most likely be shamed, treated like a criminal, have to go through humiliating tests, they are disregarded and dismissed most of the time. The Me Too movement changed those dated reactions and misperceptions about sexual assault. Misperceptions that women have been battling since time immemorial. We still have a long way to go. However, it doesn’t do the Me Too movement or the women it’s trying to protect any good to believe every single woman or every single story.
Claiming an entire gender is always guilty simply on the basis of sex is sexism.
If every woman is to be believed, that makes every man at the other end of the accusation guilty. A woman cries foul, for whatever reason, whether it is true or not, and we have to believe her because she said so.
No.
That is ridiculous. No feminist would ever say that every single woman tells the truth. Women don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Nor should Twitter be judge and jury. How would you like to be accused of something you didn’t do and be immediately found guilty? Or be accused, found innocent from two investigations (as the case with Woody Allen), and still be found guilty via trial by mob rule on social media — just because people misconstrued a tagline for a movement as literal doctrine.
Do we have to “believe the woman?”
Yes, we do. But that slogan was not a call to believe all women.
Do we have to believe Dylan and Farrow because they are women?
No, we do not.
The “Believe Women” slogan does not mean every single woman, everywhere, has always told the truth, on every occasion, about everything. Author Sady Doyle wrote in Elle in November 2017, “Believe women” meant “don’t assume women as a gender are especially vindictive, and recognize that false allegations are less common than real ones.”
In other words, allow yourself to believe that women are just as trustworthy as men have been believed to be for decades.
I’ve finished the four-part documentary series on HBO “Allen vs. Farrow.” And Allen’s book Apropos of Nothing. I watched the two-part documentary series Woody Allen: A Documentary found on Amazon or Discovery+ about Allen’s life.
I read his book twice and watched both docs twice.
My verdict is I believe Allen.
I do not think Farrow was a stable person when she found out about the affair Allen had with her adult adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. And if any one of the many accusations made by Moses or Soon-Yi about Farrow as a mother is true, the woman is unstable. She hit Soon-Yi with a phone when she found out about her affair with Allen. Soon-Yi was 20 at the time. Farrow and André Previn (Soon-Yi’s father) cut her college tuition off a few days after the revelation of naked polaroids taken by Allen of Soon-Yi.
There’s only one opinion
People fall into one camp. The one camp that is heard anyway. The other camp has no voice because mob mentality makes people afraid to speak up about what they really think, especially about this case, especially online.
Social media doesn’t allow room for any other opinion except the ignorant one regarding this issue. Even though the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital found Allen innocent. Despite the lame attempts at the documentary to poo-poo these findings.
The one camp believes Dylan Farrow. Their evidence is, “I watched the documentary,” and “always believe the woman,” or a seven-year-old in this case. The HBO documentary is one-sided and manipulative. The series’s very title, Allen vs. Farrow, suggests it is some fair and balanced film based on a trial. It is not.
A more appropriate title for the HBO doc is “Mia’s Story.” Because that’s what it is. It is Mia Farrow’s story.
People who think they know the story don’t know the whole story. Now, because of the HBO doc, they know one side of the story.
The dolts online are the same people that believe Woody Allen was married to Mia Farrow. He was not. They were never married. Their relationship had cooled; they barely went out together and never slept at each other’s houses. These are the same people who think Allen and Farrow lived together, no they did not. He never slept at her house in New York. Farrow usually came to his house alone. Allen occasionally stayed with her and her kids for weekends at Farrow’s summer home in Connecticut. Allen was close to Moses and Dylan. He’d occasionally stayed the weekend. He doesn’t like the country but visited to spend time with Moses in the beginning because he was a father figure to him — the two really hit it off. These are the same people who think Soon-Yi is Allen’s daughter. She is not. Soon-Yi was adopted by Mia Farrow and her second husband, André Previn. These are the same people who think Allen adopted Soon-Yi. No, he never did. He only acted as a father to Dylan and Moses. Mia kept Satchel (Ronan Farrow) away from Allen as soon as he was born for whatever reason.
In his book Apropos of Nothing, Allen writes that Mia Farrow had cooled from him and distanced herself as soon as he gave her what she wanted — a biological child with him. Farrow asked Allen to impregnate her as soon as the two started dating, which Allen found strange because they barely knew each other at that time. These are the same people who probably think Obama is not from America.
There was never any trial. Allen was never charged with anything as soon as it was clear to the investigators nothing had ever occurred.
Lack of critical thinking skills
We have a huge dumb problem in America. People don’t have critical thinking skills. They look at one side to confirm their bias.
Thanks to the internet and the poor quality of education in this country, largely due to income inequality (one has to be wealthy to get a decent education where they teach critical thinking skills in school), the masses think they are “right” no matter how ignorant or ill-informed their knowledge is on any given subject. Because of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they can put that uneducated, ill-informed opinion on those platforms and get reactions, confirmation, empowering them to believe said ignorant opinion is correct, making them even more cocksure.
No, just because you have a ton of likes doesn’t confirm you are some sort of deep thinker who takes the time to read different angles before forming an opinion.
Here is what the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital, whom the police hired, wrote after the investigation:
“It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4, 1992…In developing our opinion, we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statement. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow.
While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we cannot be definitive about whether the second or third is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”
Moses’s account of his mother’s treatment of only the adopted children was corroborated by two people, Judy Hollister and Sandy Boluch. Two women who worked in the Farrow house at the time.
From Moses’s essay, “I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside. She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for minor transgressions.”
Not a stable person. Three people went on record to say they witnessed what Moses describes.
New York State Child Welfare investigators, who also investigated the case for fourteen months, came to the following conclusion: “No credible evidence was found that the child named in this report has been abused or maltreated. This report has, therefore, been considered unfounded.”
NY Daily News, (click the links in this quote, it is very interesting)
“Allen v. Farrow” dismisses as misogynistic, gaslighting Allen’s claim that the abuse charge stemmed from longtime partner Mia Farrow’s anger at his affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (now Allen’s wife). Yet it erases evidence supporting this claim — such as Farrow’s behavior shortly before the alleged August 4, 1992, sexual assault.
In mid-July, when Allen visited Farrow’s Connecticut house for Dylan’s seventh birthday, Farrow put up a note calling him a “child molester” who had “abused” Soon-Yi and was after Dylan. In an August 1 call to Dr. Susan Coates, the psychologist working with the couple’s children (who later testified at the custody trial), Mia Farrow denounced Allen as “satanic” and “evil” and begged her to “find a way to stop him.”
According to people living in the house, Ronan Farrow walked around at age four (again *before* the alleged incident), saying, “my daddy fucked my sister.” Because that is what Mia had told all 14 of her children.
That is messed up.
Mia can be mad at Allen for sleeping with her *adult* adopted daughter in college at the time (rightfully so) but not drag a four and seven-year-old into her drama and vengeance.
Another employee of Mia’s, Sandy Boluch, testified she saw Dylan crying, and when she asked her what was wrong, she replied, “Mommy wants me to lie.”
The wonderkid, Ronan Farrow, and biological son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who is an excellent journalist known for his investigative reporting of allegations of sexual abuse against film producer Harvey Weinstein, used his clout to try to kill a story featuring Soon-Yi for New York magazine.
Ronan Farrow’s book is literally about NBC trying to kill his story on Harvey Weinstein after he had attempted to silence Soon-Yi’s side of the story of living in the Farrow household.
Here is the story Farrow tried to kill using his connections in an attempt to protect his mother.
According to Allen’s book: “Daphne Merkin, who wrote the story on Soon-Yi for New York magazine, relates how Ronan phoned the magazine prior to the story coming out and pressed them to drop it. They wouldn’t, but he pressured them, and so they softened it in a number of places in ways that might not offend the Farrows. Example: Daphne and I saw each other for a lunch perhaps once a year if that, but the magazine made up that we were close friends, so it appeared she could be prejudiced in my favor… The magazine, not looking for trouble, watered-down Soon-Yi’s account and wrote Mia slapped her. But she hit her with a phone. They also had planned to put the story on the cover but dropped it after the phone call from Ronan.”
It doesn’t help women who have survived sexual assault and trauma to believe all women. It makes a mockery of the movement and does a disservice to women’s equality. In this case, it makes a sham of the investigations that cleared Allen’s name. He was investigated, and they did not bring charges. People are innocent until proven guilty, and no amount of slime by mob rule should be allowed to ruin an innocent person’s reputation, name, career, and life.
I don’t believe Dylan’s account. I believe she believes it. Who wouldn’t believe their own mother telling everyone in the household who would listen that Allen is a “child molester,” even before the alleged incident took place?
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
