7 is really fuzzy. I specifically remember my second grade teacher, who was incredibly sweet and who had a baby that year. I also remember some sort of game in her class in which we could pick a prize at the end. In retrospect, I realize she was probably getting rid of the crap at her house without the bother of a garage sale.
I probably have other memories of age 7, but without really knowing I was 7. How old was I that time my dad took me and my brother for batting practice? What year did I hurt my finger playing 16" softball?
Yeah, fixing dates is hard. But we moved in September when I was 6 3/4 and then I went to one school for two terms and then changed to another (where I stayed for 9 years), so I know that memories of that school must have been around turning 7, and I do have quite a few. Adults are mostly a bit vague and faceless from then though, apart from my family, who were not scary. I remember being upset because I'd thought (perhaps it was suggested) that we might go back to Scotland for Hogmanay, and then my parents saying we definitely wouldn't. I don't remember actually being sad when we left though.
Maybe they're all implanted, but I have tons of vivid memories from about age 5 on. And a decent number of memories from earlier than that.
I have a fair number of memories from 7 -- that was third grade, with a seriously horrific teacher who thought I was the most adorably precocious thing ever, and used to send me around the school to repeat whatever the hell adorably precocious thing I'd just said to her buddies in other classrooms.
But while things are faded now, when I was actually seven I had a memory of things that happened to me in the immediate past pretty much like an adult does -- at least, seven-year-olds I interact with appear to. Childhood amnesia doesn't mean that the kid doesn't have a working memory at the time, just that the memories don't stick reliably into adulthood.
I too had a nightmare teacher at 7, but she was just an ignorant idiot who didn't know how to deal with disabled people. You're right though, it does help to anchor your memories.
4.2 is a good point. I can sort of remember having remembered stuff that I no longer remember, or only remember in disconnected snapshots that don't mean anything.
Not being at all familiar with Scott Pilgrim, when I got to this point: This is said by Scott Pilgrim when he tries to remember things, but it turns out he has an 8-bit memory and thinks he's skipping around , I was thinking, "Wait, shouldn't this be Billy Pilgrim?" (from Slaughterhouse Five). And then came, in the Mario raccoon suit that makes you be able to kinda fly, which I briefly tried to fit into that context, and it was like when you've picked up a glass of orange juice thinking it is milk and it starts tasting like milk until the actual signals from your taste buds take over.
Old.
And banned.
when I was actually seven I had a memory of things that happened to me in the immediate past pretty much like an adult does
Just to be difficult: this isn't really at issue in the Allen case: it's whether she was coached/rewarded to say things that she subsequently came to believe.
That's not to defend Allen. The most damning part of the judge's write-up, I thought, was Allen backing away from the claim he'd never been in the attic. Not dispositive, of course, but not good!
Well, it has something to say to the possibility of unconscious/accidental coaching, as in the McMartin case. For a three or four-year old, accidental coaching seems like the sort of thing that could happen very easily: figuring out what a preschooler is talking about is hard enough that you're really telling them the story based on your guesses about what they're trying to say. For a seven-year-old, on the other hand... I believe that you could coach or bully a seven-year-old into saying almost anything, and if you kept it up for years, they could easily come to believe it, which is why I've been saying that we can't absolutely know what happened. Farrow could have set the whole thing up.
But I don't believe that a story like the one Dylan was telling at the the time is remotely likely to have emerged from an unintentional misunderstanding between a seven-year-old and adults who knew her well about events that had happened that day or a day or so beforehand.
I remember my kindergarten teacher very well, possibly because I saw her just a few years ago. I remember thinking her impossibly old when I was five.
well, I have a 9 and a 12 year-old now, and I was asking them about what they remember from before they were 7, and the answer for both was tons of things. girl y doesn't remember so so many specific events from the apartment we lived in until she was 3 1/2, but she remembers what it looked like and that we lived there and what was on the playground. she remembers how we used to see kingfishers. and then when we moved to a house for 2 years she remembers things from there, how it would flood in the kitchen 3 or 4 times a year in a real storm, who was her best friend in K1 and K2. obviously she remembers things from 2 years ago, that's just silly. she remembers her friends from second grade, sleepovers they had, how to walk to the beach at martha's vineyard from my aunt's house (and she hasn't been there since 2012, actually.)
girl x has a better earliest years memory and remembers tons of things from first grade--she remembers every kid in the class, she remembers what miss nancy had on the board (! this is like in felt-cut letters permanently pinned to a board covered with colored paper), the montessori mathematical place-value abacus they had, how she hated having two period of grammar back to back.
my stepfather had an unbelievably awful memory, to where we just thought he was lying to save everybody--he more or less couldn't remember anything from before he was 12. my sister, likewise, has horrible early memory recall compared to me and my brother, just so many swathes of blank, now that she's an adult. but, again, at 10 she remembered what happened when she was 7. with your children you can see the amnesia eating up behind them to some degree, and if something's really important to you, like your grandparents, you can talk about it off and on so they remember the remembering.
I have excessively good childhood memory recall. well, no, it's good. I really remember a different time, people drifting in and out of our house, flying in from california as local small time people blew up big into drug dealers all of a sudden, weed smoke filling up the place, going hunting for bird-points and arrowheads on the bluffs the cram's owned, catching crabs. living in georgetown in dc next to my grandmothers and doing chores for her all the time. plenty of other shit it would make my life easier to just forget about though.
When I was 15, I had a nasty fight with my father. Lots of yelling. Took place over an extended period of time.
The argument tangentially involved my 14-year-old sister, who was present. Except she doesn't remember it the way I do - not the shouting, not even the content.
To this day, there's no question in my mind how it went down. There's no way that I could confabulate a traumatic memory.
"But do you think someone could convince you that your childhood was happy and awesome when it was actually horrifying?"
I put this the wrong way around, right? this thing is easy to convince children. so easy. the fucking easiest. the question is whether someone could convince you that your childhood was horrifying when it was happy and awesome.
I think the relevant question isn't whether it is possible to brainwash a child into believing what Dylan Farrow believes, but which is more likely: that Mia Farrow successfully orchestrated this campaign of manipulation, or that Woody is just a commonplace child molester.
I thought it was pretty obviously the latter that was more likely and the relevant question was whether it was enough more likely that Woody Allen should stop getting major awards.
6: I made the same mistake. I don't think it's age.
Anyway, I'm already on record agreeing with Alameida here. It's absolutely ludicrous to argue that since you can implant single isolated memories, we can extrapolate that therefore you can implant an ongoing, repetitive memory that spans a long stretch of time.
No one has any evidence that you can implant an ongoing, repetitive memory into someone's narrative of themself.
Then how come Mitt Romney thinks he isn't an asshole?
Mitt knows he's in a dark, twisty tunnel.
There is also a difference between the random changes in memory that over time shape and reshape your understanding of the past and a deliberate attempt to shape memory a specific way.
Random discrepancies like 11 are common enough that over time they can completely change your picture of a period of time. But to systematically reshape someone's memory of a long period of time is a whole nother kettle of fish.
Speaking of reshaped fish, I saw a car today with a fish symbol on the back. Instead of "Jesus" or "Darwin" (with feet), it read "Gefilte".
rob helpy-chalk is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
I can remember isolated fragments from when I was younger than about 11 or so. I have a shit memory generally, but I recall getting beaten savagely by a woman whose baby I had accidentally hurt. That sucked. I recall meeting some naughty older kids who taught me how to make an improvised rifle using random bits of stuff including bicycle spokes and a spoon. I remember sitting in the sun on the front lawn while the neighborhood girls braided my hair. I must have been about seven. That's probably my favorite memory of all. Warm sun, the smell of grass and fertile earth, older girls fussing over me and nattering away in chinyanja (one of the most euphonious languages ever).
to systematically reshape someone's memory of a long period of time is a whole nother kettle of fish.
That's not required in this case. Allen could have been toeing some ridiculous Clintonian line of "this is ok, but no farther" (the head in the lap stuff), Dylan could have eventually answered yes to "Did he touch her vagina," and confabulated that little bit after the fact.
It occurs to me now that I don't even have a good sense of which facts are contested Does Allen concede the creepy cuddling stuff? Is what's at issue the one incident in the attic?
"Children's memories are unreliable" is a little close to "Prostitutes and other poor wretches have notoriously poor eyesight, Your Honor."
Dylan could have eventually answered yes to "Did he touch her vagina," and confabulated that little bit after the fact.
She clearly describes a long stretch (years?) when she was actively avoiding being in the same room as him and plotting life around this anxiety. At that point, it's abuse, regardless of whether or not it's easy to categorize as dry-humping or crotch-sniffing.
23: I think Allen is silent on this. His psychologist (Coates) testified that Allen's relationship with Dylan was "inappropriately intense" but that she didn't see it as sexual.
Isn't 26 also a classic fallback story of molesters who've been incompletely caught out? "It's not a sex thing, we just have a really, really close relationship, okay?!" Again, not probative.
27: "She" being Coates.
28: This is Coates' testimony, not Allen's.
What the fuck does "inappropriately intense" mean? That's a bizarre defense.
30: From what I've read he followed her around, was constantly hugging and touching her, basically being suffocatingly affectionate.
pretty obviously I believe the accuser in this particular case, but ogged you're talking about the wrong thing if you're discussing the details of "did he touch you exactly here instead of on your inner thigh" or some shit. she claims that this was ongoing abuse that was the dominating, horrifying fabric of her life. could you really convince a seven-year-old that that had been happening all along? but let's say woody allen is a child-molesting skeeze or not--do you remember things from the time in your life before you were seven? do you think someone in your family could have been beating the tar out of everyone every day and it would have slipped your mind somehow at 12 and then you never remembered again? or the reverse?
I was sometimes wrong in my judgment at 7 or 8 about who was an asshole in life generally because kids are relatively easy to fool. they want to like people, and be liked. this is why I say I asked it the wrong way--you can convince children bad stuff is hunky dory. but I think it would be hard to have picked someone in my life at 7 and them just turned them pitch black with sin before my eyes, more particularly with crimes against my person, and then me not ever remember that thing happening. the switcheroo. either getting molested or getting coached into a spurious accusation against your beloved dad--I don't see forgetting either of these, if you see what I mean...
I have a good memory for what I saw and experienced at 7. Like others who've said they have, I can visualize places and moments.
I have no idea what to do about Woody Allen. Compared with the people I associate with, of my own age, his movies mean less to me. For lots of people they were important events. Their feelings are necessarily more complicated than mine.
Tell Woody Allen NMM to Shirley Temple.
you can convince children bad stuff is hunky dory.
Yes to this, but more so for daily life stuff. Whatever is normal will (for the most part) feel normal. I've seen both my bigger girls semi-consciously rewriting their own histories as they watch Baby Selah grow. So the one who's currently mad at her mom for not taking care of her better will say, "When I was a baby, I had to change my own diapers!" which isn't literally true but is her way of explaining that she felt like she got pushed into parental roles, which she did. The one who's insisting that her life would have been happier if she hadn't been adopted has all kind of stories about the food her mom gave her when she was a baby and the things they did together.
And yet they both have very vivid memories of the stuff that was just wrong, something I'm willing to believe was an accident that left Nia with a scar, things Mara remembered very clearly from her preverbal days that turned out to be accurate when she could tell us about them, though I don't know if they're clear to her anymore. It's much harder (IME) for kids to deal with the ongoing bad things that felt normal than the ones that felt obviously wrong at the time.
34. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.
I also really wondered whether Scott Pilgrim was going to have had some trauma or something that made him so blank, but think it's probably a better thing that he didn't seem to.
I have no idea what to do about Woody Allen. Compared with the people I associate with, of my own age, his movies mean less to me. For lots of people they were important events. Their feelings are necessarily more complicated than mine.
I have never seen a single Woody Allen movie, and never really had an interest even before learning about all these stories. So nomoral quandariesthere.
But I will say, after that deal with Alec Baldwin and the terrible awful no good voicemail to his daughter, I did resist watching 30 Rock for a very, very long time. (Then I realized that the awesomeness of Tina Fey was more than enough reason to get past that. And lived happily ever after.)
I also really wondered whether Scott Pilgrim was going to have had some trauma or something that made him so blank, but think it's probably a better thing that he didn't seem to.
Seriously, Michael Cera gets more irritating, the further he gets from Arrested Development.
I think I've actually only ever seen two Woody Allen films. One was "Everyone Says I Love You" which was OK, and one was "Match Point" which was shockingly bad. So I'm with Di, I suppose.
I thought "Love and Death" was canonical here.
His movies never meant that much to me, but the collections of his short humor pieces are a real part of the furniture of my brain. Something maddening about talking about him this much is that bits of his writing or standup keep on floating to the surface, which is terribly inappropriate in context.
ogged you're talking about the wrong thing
This is why I remarked that I don't even know what's at issue. What parts, precisely, is Allen denying? When he says he didn't molest her, is that some Clintonian parsing, or is he denying everything? I was under the impression that only the attic incident was at issue, but I realize I might have been wrong about that.
I don't think there's a clear story from Allen that we have access to -- he might have told one in court, but I haven't seen anything that would clarify the sort of question you're asking.
Unsurprisingly, it's a lot more complicated than " can kids remember things or not." There's a lot of literature on just how kids can testify to and recall abuse, which I knew existed before this discussion but hasn't ever really delved into. Here's a summary, I don't know how good this particular article is. Basically, I think a fair conclusion would be that it's true both that (a) kids' memory of events can be good, and absent intentional or unintentional coaching can be about as reliable as adult memory (which is good news for child sex abuse investigators, because it shows that done properly their job can be done and kids' testimony can be introduced as reliable) and also (b) kids, including older kids, are also susceptible to coaching (intentional or not) and if interviews and testimony gathering is improperly done, can indeed have false memories "implanted" that they then believe are true.
The interesting thing about the Allen case is that it was investigated by a team that, as far as one can tell from the outside, was pretty skilled at these kinds of investigations and perfectly willing to (appropriately) credit child testimony in other cases (see the linknto Leventhal talking about his work at the Yale clinic I linked to in the other thread). That's of course not evidence that there wasn't abuse there, but you have to ignore the fact that it happened or have strong reason to doubt the investigators, a good basis for which I haven't really seen anywhere, to get to "I can tell from this distance that there was more likely than not abuse."
have strong reason to doubt the investigators
Strong reason to doubt, for me (beyond the obvious testimony of the kid), comes down to the judicial opinion not crediting it. As far as I can tell, the investigation only consisted of repeatedly interviewing Dylan, rather than looking at the corroborating evidence from other adult witnesses as well; the social workers who actually interviewed her didn't testify, only the psychiatrist who never spoke to her testified; and the interview notes were destroyed.
None of that proves the investigators were wrong -- judges make mistakes and weight evidence incorrectly all the time. But it does mean that a neutral party looked at the investigatory report and didn't think much of it.
крановщица
Finally, 24 years later, that vocabulary list from Руский Язык Для Всех comes in handy.
47:
Nice. I was trying to read Hadji Murad in my last Russian class. Didn't get far.
The NY family court judge didn't refuse to credit the report; he just didn't accept it as decisive evidence that Allen was completely exonerated, as opposed to there just not being enough information to know. And if you read his opinion, which is pretty clearly (a) the Yale-NH team did more than just interview Dylan and (b) Mia Farrow's own expert's attack on the report were extremely weak.
(Incidentally, one thing I learned in reading up on this is that the "destroy the notes" thing is done in these kinds of investigations to help the prosecution -- if not destroyed defense counsel will get access to the notes, which inevitably (since the questions involve children) will involve some minor weirdness or inconsistencies that a skilled defense attorney can play with. So specialists in abuse investigation like the Yale-NH team stopped keeping their notes to help prosecutors).
"Which is pretty clearly" s/b "it is pretty clear that"
And were s/b was. Bad grammar, destroyer of credibility.
From the judge's opinion:
I have also considered the report of the Yale-New Haven team and the deposition testimony of Dr. John M. Leventhal. The Yale-New Haven investigation was conducted over a six-month period by Dr. Leventhal, a pediatrician: Dr. Julia Hamilton, who has a Ph.D. in social work: and Ms. Jennifer Sawyer, who has a master's degree in social work. Responsibility for different aspects of the investigation was divided among the team. The notes of the team members were destroyed prior to the issuance of the report, which, presumably, is an amalgamation of their independent impressions and observations. The unavailability of the notes, together with their unwillingness to testify at this trial except through the deposition of Dr. Leventhal, compromised my ability to scrutinize their findings and resulted in a report which was sanitized and, therefore, less credible.
Dr. Stephen Herman, a clinical psychiatrist who has extensive familiarity with child abuse cases, was called as a witness by Ms. Farrow to comment on the Yale-New Haven report. I share his reservations about the reliability of the report.
Dr. Herman faulted the Yale-New Haven team (1) for making visitation recommendations. without seeing the parent interact with the child: (2) for failing to support adequately their conclusion that Dylan has a thought disorder; (3) for drawing any conclusions about Satchel, whom they never saw; (4) for finding that there was no abuse when the supporting data was inconclusive; and (5) for recommending that Ms. Farrow enter into therapy. In addition, I do not think that it was appropriate for Yale-New Haven, without notice to the parties or their counsel, to exceed its mandate and make observations and recommendations which might have an impact on existing litigation in another jurisdiction.
Unlike Yale-New Haven, I am not persuaded that the videotape of Dylan is the product of leading questions or of the child's fantasy.
Richard Marcus, a retired New York City police officer, called by Mr. Allen, testified that he worked with the police sex crimes unit for six years. He claimed to have an intuitive ability to know if a person, is truthful or not. He concluded, "based on my experience," that Dylan lacked credibility. I did not find his testimony to be insightful.
I agree with Dr. Herman and Dr. Brodzinsky that we will probably never know what occurred on August 4, 1992. The credible testimony of Ms. Farrow, Dr. Coates, Dr. Leventhal and Mr. Allen does, however, prove that Mr. Allen's behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.
That sounds to me like a pretty strong statement that he does not find the Yale-New Haven report credible. He explicitly credits Dr. Herman's reservations.
Again, judges make mistakes all the time, I'm not saying that a judicial opinion is the unquestionable last word. But it's a contemporaneous neutral party with a full chance to evaluate the report, giving a number of reasons not to credit its conclusions.
That's exactly the passage I was thinking of. Don't you find the Dr. Hermann criticisms incredibly weak? And even this judge, who is obviously super angry at Allen, says that he finds that "we will probably never know" what happened.
I mean, if you do just a little reading into the Yale/NH team, it looks like they are about as experienced and sophisticated child abuse investigators as you'd find anywhere, who were retained by the prosecution. I don't think it's reasonable to conclude from the fact that they did the report that Allen "probably didn't" do it but given a report that hasn't been seriously attacked by actual experts in this sort of thing it's pretty hard to get to "I can tell from a distance that he probably did do it."
From one doctor to another in public, I don't find those criticisms weak at all. He's explicitly calling them out for not doing their job and therefore making the claims of expertise beside the point.
From a paid expert witness? No. If the best you can come up with, as a paid expert witness for the other side, for a conclusion that "your report that says that Allen didnt commit abuse was wrong and actually he did" was "you made improper visitation recommendations" and "the data was inconclusive" that's about as weak as you could possibly get. He never says that the report was just wrong.
You guys may not be familiar with the world of paid expert witnesses. They say a lot of stuff.
I'm sure they do. But in my world, saying somebody did have the data from which to draw the conclusions they made is about as brutal as it gets.
saying somebody did have the data from which to draw the conclusions they made is about as brutal as it gets.
That is a fabulous typo.
True story: The last paper I was involved with had a copy editor. That doesn't happen often.
Dr Herman also said they failed to support their conclusion that Dylan had a thought disorder, which in context appears to have been their only basis for failing to credit her account.
We're looking at the same passage, and seeing it very differently. That looks to me like a scathing rejection of the Yale-New Haven report as worthless.
appears to have been their only basis for failing to credit her account
Where are you getting that? There's no evidence for that at all, and the excerpts from the report that are quoted don't support that conclusion. I agree that the NY family court judge is a scathing attack on Allen but there's nothing much of an attack on the report at all.
You guys may not be familiar with the world of paid expert witnesses. They say a lot of stuff.
Judges are also pretty familiar with them -- when a judge credits an expert, it means something. I'm going to keep repeating that judges can get things wrong, just because it's a judicial opinion doesn't make it the truth. But it's something, and it's something from a neutral party who knows how expert testimony works.
I mean, even on Mia Farrow's own paid expert witnesses theory -- and the theory of the judge that clearly hates Allen -- the best you can get to is that the evidence from the investigation is "inconclusive." How you get from there to "the abuse probably happened" is beyond me.
Also worth noting that the Yale-NH team weren't witnesses for Allen (that's why they didn't testify, it wasn't their job). They were supposedly neutral investigators who in reality are closely aligned with state prosecutors who actually prosecute abuse cases.
I'm not going to convince you of anything. I've said how I read the passage from the court's opinion, and why I put weight on it. I don't think we're getting anywhere with this otherwise.
nattering away in chinyanja (one of the most euphonious languages ever)
Which Woody Allen thread has an especially tasteless mention of the passing of Shirley Temple?
I knew the blog wouldn't let me down.
SP did it earlier in the Parenting thread.
Extra points if you can incorporate tasteless racialist imagery from The Littlest Rebel into a Woody Allen joke.
72 Well done too. I only searched the obvious Woody Allen threads before I posted.
I really read that as the judge saying 'this report was full of shit.' but I mainly believe woody allen molested his daughter because, even if we never do know what happened in that attic on that day, she says it was happening all the time, and always said it did at 7, and said it did when she was 9, and 12, and 17 and now--that's just not the behavior of someone who hasn't been sexually abused, to my mind. she's going to be trying to get her fucked-up head together at some point--is she never going to come to grips with the fact that her mom is a nutcase abusive psycho? people do eventually notice that, in therapy, assuming the thing happened which I think you think happened. just out of curiosity halford, are you a polanski defender too, or do you think he's a rapist sleazebag while woody allen's merely a sleazebag caught up in sleazy divorce allegations? I'm not going to jump down your throat about it, I'm just wondering.
scott pilgrim has nothing to do with michael cera. NOTHING. it should have been an animated movie and the fact that it wasn't is the greatest injustice of all time and is worse than hitler. I have refused to watch the live-action version, along with my kids, though my husband says it's ok in its way. the books are great.
I dunno if it's worse than Hitler. Definitely worse than Pinochet or Somoza. About the same as Tojo?
75: The Scott Pilgrim you loved is dead. Now there is only Michael Cera: twisted, evil, more hipster than man, but at least they didn't make a trilogy of it.
75 -- I think Polanski is almost certainly a (not just statutory, which is basically undisputed, but very "real," ie no consent at all) rapist; I think that because that's clearly what the contemporaneous documents, which are now publicly available, show. When this first came up a few days ago, I assumed the same thing would be true of Woody Allen, but it's not.
For Woody Allen, I have no idea whether or not he's a child molester who molested Dylan -- in my view there's just not enough evidence to come down with a firm view one way or another. There's certainly enough evidence based on te Soon-Yi thing to conclude he's a creep.
I don't think your theory that "because Dylan's consistently asserted it as a memory means it's true" (at least that's how I read what you're saying -- I don't think Dylan or Mia was alleging that Allen was molesting her "all the time," which is the other way to read your comment) is supported at all by the literature or evidence -- implanted memories are a real thing that can become sincerely held and consistently expressed memories over time. Whether or not that happened here I don't know, and neither do you; at least one group of reputable investigators concluded that memory implantation happened; other people crtiticized that investigation.
Also, I don't think that her mom would necessarily need to be a "nutcase abusive psycho" for memory implantation to happen. There's certainly a chance that Mia Farrow sincerely believed there was abuse, and effectively but unintentionally coached Dylan into asserting the same thing, when there wasn't.
I feel like believing W. Allen is definitely guilty makes people feel they have in some magical way warded off the possibility that bad things will happen to children, or made some symbolic gesture of punishment toward those who harm children. It's the only way I can account for the force with which people who definitely do not know what happened any more than I do report that they do, and their conviction in wanting him punished even if they concede they can't really know.
see, that's what I'm saying with the post. I think you would have to make a sincere effort, were it a seven-year-old, to convince them that throughout their daily life in the past they had been living in constant fear of sexual abuse from their dad and were all the time trying to hide from him but heart-breakingly getting caught. a four-year-old, yeah, I think you could talk her into it, but seven? that's like a real little dude in there. you could trick them about something happening a couple of times, like even 5 times, but about it being an ongoing, pervasive nightmare? that I don't think could happen without an active campaign of psychological warfare on mia farrow's part that would make her a psycho nutcase abuser, were it true.
OK, the live-action movie of scott pilgrim is quivalent to tojo, that's fair.
I don't want him to go to jail or anything; the statute of limitations has run out. I want people to say, 'hey, his daughter has made what is really a quite credible-sounding accusation of sexual abuse against him. I think I don't want to be in his movie right now/give him another life-time award for being made of win/touch his damp, clammy hand.'
Huh? I think he's definitely guilty. It's not about warding anything off.
75.last If you ever listened to the Plumtree song "Scott Pilgrim," it's totally worth watching the intro credits, which are kind of adorable, and then those chords come on and it's just great. And then it's the movie, which I can understand wanting to avoid although I'm glad I didn't. (I in fact made Lee go to a midnight showing with me since neither of us had ever done that before or is likely to since.)
81 -- then I honestly don't know what you're talking about. As far as I can tell from what I've read, the allegation has always been that Woody Allen molested Dylan one time; that's what she claims her memory is. There's some supporting evidence (from that side of the case) that Allen acted in ways that seem creepy if we think of him as a molester, but no allegation of actual molestation other than the one time, after which Dylan was exclusively in Mia Farrow's care.
To me, Dylan's accusations ring credible, but I also think that if you're going to have a hard-line rule about not supporting sex abusers, you basically can't watch any men's sports and probably can't watch any movies or tv shows, and so you have to decide what your particular line might be.
87: From Dylan Farrow's open letter:
For as long as I could remember, my father had been doing things to me that I didn't like. I didn't like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn't like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn't like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn't like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me. These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters. But what he did to me in the attic felt different. I couldn't keep the secret anymore.
I believe Alameida is defining the entire course of conduct Dylan describes here as sexual abuse, rather than saying that only the incident where Dylan alleges Allen touched her genitals constitutes sexual abuse. And I do think that's a reasonable way to describe the allegations.
Well, but pretty much everything other than the "this felt different" in 89 is stuff that's also consistent with non-abuse. It's pretty easy to see how once you've made the decision that your Dad molested you (and that this is your story) to have the other parts fall into place.
Really? You have a strange notion of non-abuse.
If you don't find it credible, you don't, memory is unreliable and all that. But she says that the way Allen treated her before the attic incident was frightening and unpleasant. It could all be a false memory (the publicly agreed-on-by-all-sides fact that he was in therapy for an inappropriately intense relationship with her long before the attic incident suggests that there might be something in it). But if it's not a false memory, inappropriate fondling that makes the victim frightened and unhappy is a form of sexual abuse, even if the victim's genitals aren't being touched.
You don't have to believe the allegations -- I'm just trying to remind you of what the allegations are.
89: Thanks for quoting that entire portion of the open letter, actually: I haven't read any of this.
What's described makes me ask whether it's really important that there be a sharp line between sexual abuse and plain abuse. I mean: an older friend of mine had a mother (now deceased) who was rather psycho in her way: extremely controlling, emotionally and physically, including binding her daughters' arms or hands and force-feeding them; threatening to punish them such that they felt the need to hide in the secret hidey-space under the stairs from time to time. It .. was her way. Apparently her own mother was even worse.
Abuse is abuse; it's not necessarily important if it wasn't consistently sexual.
I was expecting Halford's response to be that those allegations of prior abuse (and at least some of the things described there are over the line, even if others wouldn't be in a vacuum) were recent and not made at the time. This tack didn't occur to me.
agreed parsimon, people can be really scarred by other types of abuse than sexual abuse, some that aren't even physical at all, just constant emotional battery. really, if my step-father would have stuck to being physically horrible every once in a while but not saying awful, cruel, evil, belittling, tyrannical things to you every single second of every single day I know my brother and I would have been volunteering for some shit. "throw my ass down the stairs!" "yeah, me too! fuck my shit up! well, don't make me eat out of the trash again, that was nasty. the stairs, fuck it! fuck some stairs! they're just a bunch of wooden bullshit!"
halford I...dude, I like you a lot and I have no inclination at all to think you're less than right-on in any regard, except insofar as my husband has persuaded me to switch sides in the think/thing coming dispute, but would you really be cool with an adult male behaving in the ways dylan describes with your daughter, when she was 4, 5, 6, and 7? would you feel like it only crystallized into abuse afterwards, propagating backwards in time like terrifying ice9 or whatever, but before that it was appropriate? I really can't believe you're about to come out here and say either, "I do/did those things with my daughter when she was 6 and it was fine" or "I would have let my brother do those things to my daughter when she was 6, no problem. not unless something bad happened at the end." are you going to say either of those things? those seem like hella weird things to say, dude.
I think that because that's clearly what the contemporaneous documents, which are now publicly available, show. When this first came up a few days ago, I assumed the same thing would be true of Woody Allen, but it's not.
But why would you expect to find the same sort of documentation, when Allen, unlike Polanski, was not charged with a crime, was not indicted by a grand jury, did not plead guilty to a lesser charge? I mean, the judge's report that we're talking about here (in the case of Allen) has to do with a custody suit, not with a criminal trial for sexual molestation.
Here's Mia's Valentine's card to Woody. The part of Wilk's decision that made me guffaw is when he said the card was evidence that Farrow could communicate in words and symbols, not words alone. It would be difficult to be more on Farrow's side than that, and yet, even with access to all the reports and testimony, he says we'll never know what happened. Certainty decades later based on stuff on the internet seems misplaced. What's interesting is how to proceed without certainty. It's an easy call to say you don't want to see his movies; there's plenty here to creep someone out, and enough for serious suspicion, and it's a personal decision. Is that enough to say that he shouldn't get any awards?
Well, 94 is true as well. But the specific actions described (putting aside that she claims she was fearful of the actions, just focusing on the descriptions) are things that are certainly consistent with a totally non-abusive household. To get to Alameida's "constant fear of sexual abuse" you have to pretty much just have a prior sense that his actions are abusive and therefore the actions are those of an abuser and he was being scary. Which maybe he was, but it's not like there's ever been an allegation that she was constantly being sexually abused -- just that he acted in ways that she found creepy or scary at the time and then manifested in a single, open act of sexual abuse. It's pretty clear that the belief in the open act then also makes all of the prior acts seem horrible in a way they might not otherwise.
It's also possible (actually, on this one, I'd be willing to go all the way to "likely") that Allen was a creepy or weird father who made his kid feel uncomfortable but without sexually abusing her. That's certainly consistent with what else we know about Allen's life and would explain the therapy he was apparently in, which the therapists at the time described as "non-sexual."
Argh, I've stayed out of these threads because it feels like they lead nowhere good, but I see it's still ticking away.
I feel like believing W. Allen is definitely guilty makes people feel they have in some magical way warded off the possibility that bad things will happen to children...
I only 95% believe he is guilty (of molesting Dylan; I 100% believe he is guilty of being a brutally self-centered creep).
But for me, the reason this "belief" matters as anything more than an passing opinion on current events is the way I weigh the difference between a false positive and false negative.
Here is the downside of a false positive: A creepy person is unfairly characterized in the press as an actually criminally bad person.
Not good for him, and especially not nice for his two children with Soon-Yi, who cannot in any way be held responsible for being connected to him.
Still, not resulting in jail time or a conviction, and probably not in financial penalties for him. Highly unlikely to result in any other innocent defendant being prosecuted (or even accused) under similar circumstances.
And here are the downsides of a false negative: One known victim is publicly shamed and openly disbelieved.
Countless other victims of sexual abuse, some committed by adults of significant fame and public stature, have another piece of evidence to convince them that they won't be believed, that they will suffer for going public and their accuser will not.
Allen deserves every protection of the law that we extend to criminal defendants. But I'm not willing to grant him benefit of the doubt in the court of public opinion, because the costs of the false negative seem way too high to me.
I'm pretty sure that everyone's agreed that Allen was an unconventional parent. I do hear Halford's point that what makes the unconventional actually inappropriate or downright abusive needs to be taken very carefully. I have a few too many hippie friends who have been accused of child abuse just for unconventional behavior.
That said, the way the child receives the unconventional behavior is critical (and really, it's too bad she didn't feel able to relate her discomfort with anyone).
In celebrity rape threads, the traditional 100th comment is supposed to be Kobe!
97: Is that enough to say that he shouldn't get any awards?
Awards, Schmawards. Is it enough to say that noone should ever work with him again? Here I don't care either: Woody Allen can make more movies, or he can not. I don't think the world suffers without them.
It's not about whether he makes more movies or people refuse to work with him or he gets an award: it's whether public shaming, shunning altogether, is in order for anyone in this circumstance. And I'd rather leave such a thing in the private realm, where those privy to all the evidence that's available can make an assessment.
Look, part of my response (and you are now all about to call child protective services making this the most ill-advised comment ever) is almost certainly based on the following: a huge portion of my life as a (now only kind of) single dad would be deemed off limits if the standard we're going to apply to fathers is "would this seem incredibly creepy if you knew in advance that the guy doing it was a child molester"?" I mean that standard pretty much makes being a father impossible, let alone a single father. I usually sleep in an undershirt and boxers, sometimes the kid has gotten under the covers for a snuggle. I've had to bathe my kid on my own for years, since she was a baby. I'm sure that if you wanted to describe any of those things in the most evil possible way on the theory that I'm a child molester, you could do so in a way that made it all sound like super scary pre-abuse.
Now obviously these things really do become horrible when they really are done in abusive ways by dads who really are abusive, and no one doubts that there are tons of those kinds of dads and men out there. I'm just saying that you need to be pretty careful.
For Allen the "naked lap" and "thumb in mouth" thing do seem super weird, but even there it's so hard to know about the details, and I don't know if it's abuse, unless it really is scary and frightening and horrible and sexual, in which case it is, but then you're back down the rabbit hole of knowing what memory is real and what's credible and what's not. Which is why these things are so incredibly difficult.
(To 96, the documentation we have that's most like a serious grand-jury style investigation, the Yale-NH report, affirmatively exonerated Allen, although it's not public and Mia Farrow's expert witness had a (IMO very weak but whatever) criticism of it. That's why I think the best we can do in the relitigate this thing 20 years later game is say that we don't know what happened.)
You know, if the Motion Picture Academy or whoever it is still wants to give him an award, they should feel free to go ahead, but provide a speech addressing this issue straight on: that they are acknowledging the artistic work of Woody Allen, without commentary on his personal circumstances, that they've thought long and hard about this [put this more decorously] and are of the firm view that an artist's work can and may be considered distinctly, discretely.
Halford, have you seen A Door in the Floor? There's some good single naked dad schtick in there. Elle Fanning and Jeff Bridges: "Your penis looks funny." "My penis is funny."
The movie turns out to be about Jeff Bridges being aggressively naked with other people in interesting ways.
I haven't seen it. Based on comment 103, I probably need to avoid watching anything with anyone naked in it ever.
And back to Allen, since let's avoid talking about me at all costs, it's not like people are calling for no consequences whatsoever to apply to him. They're calling for him to be blacklisted, so that actors can't work with him, producers can't finance him, etc. It's already sunk Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins' Oscar chances just by affiliation, and presumably other people may think in the same way. Now, maybe that's all justified just on the Soon-Yi thing alone, or maybe that plus the mere fact of being accused by Dylan is enough (despite the deep uncertainty there), and certainly the dude is about 80 and his recent movies suck so it's not that big an injustice. But those are the stakes that are being raised by all the "court of public opinion" stuff, and they're not nothing.
That s/b "injustice if he's innocent."
If they hadn't given him a lifetime achievement awards at the golden globes, then presumably none of this would have hurt Blanchett's Oscar chances, right? It was the jump from honoring his movies to honoring his life that brought all this back into the public eye.
How many Oscars does Cate Blanchett need?
One. For playing Galadriel even though those movies weren't very good.
I'm in sympathy with 103. For a lot of the findings of fact in the judge's decision, I was going down the list, "Yeah, I've done that, that too, that too." It's too bad Will hasn't been around for this, because he must know well how easy and common it is for contentious custody hearings to devolve into competing portrayals of Satan.
I almost bought a 2-LP set of WA's standup at a thrift store today because I am a child-hating monster.
Cate Blanchett should've gotten an Oscar for The Talented Mister Ripley. That was a weird, detailed, uncomfortable performance.
again, as the kid of hippie parents, and someone who walks around naked all the time, I don't think all those actions constitute abuse necessarily. my daughters snuggle in bed with their dad when his in the clothrs he sleeps in (t-shirt and boxers), though not as much as when they were little. gotta say he was never sniffing their crotches all the time. is that an ok thing now? I didn't get the memo. the abuse part is where she feels terrified and hides from him and dislikes snuggling with him. why think she's lying there, particarly if some third part thought their relationship was excessively intense, what the fuck ever that means. implanted memories seem like they could be a certain sort of thing, but could they be the sudden conviction you had spent all your young life cowering in terror? it's really terrifying to be abused as a child. so unimaginably scary.
also, smearcase, that seems really quite an uncharitable thing to say. obviously as someone who was sexually abused as a child I'm sympathetic to dylan and predisposed to believe her story, but I'm being perfectly reasonable. if my step-father were out there being lauded every day and held up as a cultural lodestone all well-educated people are directed by, it would eat me up inside, and I would want to speak up. when speaking up would come with this incredible, hateful barrage (not from you, but from the world in general) I would be afraid, and I think you have to recognize she's brave even if you don't think it's a thing anyone can know the truth of. also, the thing that witt said. the message to victims (whether dylan really is one or not) is shut the fuck up. the soon-yi stuff is bad enough that if his reputation takes an unjust ding at 80 (and that's the worst that will happen) I'm not crying a river.
I think two of my above comments were unmarked due to phone commenting. did you guys all actually just run away like a bunch of pussies? ha ha. punk-ass bitchez. I'm not currently having a nervous breakdown, so you can disagree with me about whether woody allen is a big ol' pervert or a huge, typhoon-like raging pervert and I promise not to threaten to commit suicide. seriously, come at me with something better than this weaksauce "all dads lay their heads in their baby daughters laps and sniff their votes in a way that other adults notice is weird and the child herself loathes and fears" bullshit.
autocorrect "crotches" to "votes"? Thanks Obama.
Now that's a clever way to corner the youth vote.
Wait. You are having an argument that is not with me. If you want an actual opinion offered by actual me, I do not think (Jesus, obviously, I would have hoped) it is unreasonable to want victims to speak out or to find DF brave for doing so if, in fact, she is a victim. I guess the latter probably sounds insincere because it is so purely hypothetical to me. I don't know her and I don't know what happened to her, and my interest in applauding a brave hypothetical victim is diluted by my distaste for the "agree with me without reservations or you hate me/children/the truth" tone of the entire conversation about this.
I do not believe people reading about the case, even those who were sexually abused, somehow know for sure that Dylan Farrow was abused. I don't. That is the thing I find unreasonable. If that's horribly uncharitable, then ok, I am that.
If you're offended about my guesses as to why people are being unreasonable, then maybe they are offensive, but my failure to say "your (plural, collective) feelings are really strong, so you're definitely right about the factual matter" is not a thing I can find it in me to feel bad about.
Halford, you seem to think that the only objectionable event took place in the attic and that it is reasonable to think that Dylan might have had that memory implanted, and then in light of that has rewritten the memory of all of the creepy behaviors in 89 to be dreadful.
And is it possible that all of those behaviors (snuggling under covers in underwear, sticking his thumb in her mouth, head in naked lap breathing in and out(!)) are innocent? As you point out, yes--and lots of dads would be in serious trouble otherwise.
But! That's not how I read 89 at all! Dylan's reactions to the behaviors in 89 was fear. And, critically, she says she was scared and didn't like those behaviors *at the time of those events*, not only after the attic incident in hindsight. She describes hiding under the stairs and locking herself in the bathroom on a regular basis to avoid him. That it all happened for years, and she was routinely scared.
Can I see snuggling under the covers in undies as innocent? Yes. Can I see being made "to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear" and she "didn't like it" as innocent? Not so much. Can I see head in naked lap breathing in and out as potentially innocent? Maybe...if it were described as a fun game somehow requested by the child, or some sort of weird necessary medical exam...maybe. Can I see "I didn't like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out." as potentially innocent when done routinely? No, I don't see how I can.
She finishes that section with " I couldn't keep the secret anymore." Which I take to mean that Allen told her to keep all of those behaviors secret. And she did, thinking that this was how daddys dote on their daughters, until the attic incident when she realized that it couldn't be right.
I think you are reading her statements as "I didn't like that he used to [insert creepy behavior here]" and that it was all made worse by the attic incident in hindsight. And therefore, one implanted memory could color all of the previous experiences.
I read it as "I didn't like it (at the time) when he did [creepy behavior]" and it scared her so much *at the time* that she routinely hid from him before the attic incident. And I (and Heebie, and LB, and alameda) don't think that there is any way to implant years worth of memories of being scared at the time and needing to hide routinely and having to keep it all secret.
al, I think everyone fell asleep. I'm still up though. I am about to taken an Ambien, but that doesn't mean I won't be awake...I'll just become a lot less coherent. And not remember what I'm doing/saying.
Wink -- I'm totally with you that *if you accept it as completely true* "my Dad put his head in my crotch and it scared me and I tried to go into the bathroom and hide but was still scared" is most definitely a horrible form of abuse. The question here isn't whether, assuming that Dylan's current story is correct, Woody Allen is or is not a monster (if she is correct and you're in the "is not" camp there's something seriously wrong with you.)
It's whether, given that we know the facts of the case were all very seriously investigated at the time and the conclusion was basically that Dylan's story was either not true (Allen camp) or that at best the evidence of Woody Allen as a young child sexual predator (as opposed to general creep) was "inconclusive" (family law judge, Farrow expert) we have good reason now, 20 years later, good reason to move from "I don't know what happened" to "Woody definitely did it" based solely on the fact that Dylan continues to assert the story. Based on what I've read and on what people who know more about these things seem to say, yes, memory can totally be implanted, intentionally or unintentionally, in a number of situations of which this was plausibly one. Also, there's no rule (I think this is the Alameida caveat) that says that having a bunch of additional (sincerely held, but inaccurate) supporting stories that generate around the one big implanted memory are good evidence that there was no implanted memory in the first place. The little reading I've done on this, mostly in the past two days, seems suggest that the wrong kind of interrogation and support system around a belief can create a whole host of false beliefs to confirm the memory. At the same time the good news is that the right kind of interrogation doesn't have to run into these problems, so it's not like no kid ever can tell a truthful story about abuse. But that doesn't resolve the Dylan Farrow situation where there's at least decent reason to think that there were good conditions for memory implanting and the only team of (we think) reasonably neutral experts to examine the situation in close to real time concluded that's what happened. Which leaves us, I think, with a final answer at "we just don't know" even if it would be nice to cheer for Dylan Farrow to support victims coming forward more generally, or for whatever other reason you want.
Also worth noting that the Yale-NH team weren't witnesses for Allen (that's why they didn't testify, it wasn't their job). They were supposedly neutral investigators who in reality are closely aligned with state prosecutors who actually prosecute abuse cases.
Actually, Leventhal testified by deposition ,as a witness called by Allen, based on the report of the non-testifying social workers who actually interviewed Dylan but destroyed their notes and were unwilling to testify. Just because they may generally be experts in their field does not mean that they had a sufficient basis for their opinions in this case. Leventhal testified, but the judge found the bases for his opinions lacking.
118: I don't believe that you, personally, think sexual abuse victims shouldn't speak out or anything like that. I only meant it seemed uncharitable to attribute belief in dylan's story to some irrational desire to ward off the evil eye--to say that it was a way for people to convince themselves this could never happen to their child, or other children or whatever. as if by hoisting straw-molester woody allen on a pole you could pacify real molesters. that's not why I believe her, and I doubt that's why most people do. he appears to be super-guilty, is all.
I freely admit I'm biased in favor of people who claim to have been victims, because there are so SO many more silent victims than victims who speak out (I feel like it's an order of magnitude, sadly). and there are so fucking SO many more victims who speak up and are not believed, or told to shut up, or told to stop making trouble in their family, than there are victims who speak up and are believed and have someone support them. and even there (supposing this is such a case) this woman now has every damn person in the world explaining how 'her mom's a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty, and that kinda rubbed off on her, if you know what I mean?'
so I do have to try to discount my own feelings slightly. but there are simply many, many people who (like me) didn't know about this whole thing until recently when we read her account, contemporaneous accounts, and his response. then we were like, 'wtf? I knew woody allen was a bad person, but this is some next-level shit here that seems completely legitimate. and wow does he ever sound guilty as fuck.' that's not born out of some talismanic desire to protect my children from molesters or to express generalized disapproval of sexual abuse; it's a rational opinion based on evidence, and it's uncharitable to call it something else, something lesser or stupid minds have fallen prey to, while you remain sensibly above the fray in the arena of uncertainty. at some level yes, sure, none of us knows any of this stuff. at another level, we're perfectly intelligent people who are not sworn into jury duty and have no obligation to presume allen innocent.
none of you knows I'm not lying to you about having been sexually abused. my step-dad can't defend himself from the accusation because he committed suicide. because of the stroke he had from his alcoholism, even when he was in his late 40s he claimed not to know why any of us hated him. why wouldn't we come see him in the nursing home place he was living at, after the drunk driving accident paralyzed the other side of his body so bad. he had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, they told us. if you'd gone and asked him he would have said no. I never talked to the police. I was to ashamed even to talk to my beloved brother. at some point, you're either going to take my word for it, or not. this woman has consistently, all her life, told the same story, in which her early childhood was wonder and beauty mixed with terror. the things she says sound true to me. the defenses he offers sound...not to be on-point. to be tone-deaf in the way a narcissistic person can be tone-deaf to the feelings and bare existence of others not in his good graces. ('those children...')
saying I only believe dylan farrow because I am stupid enough to be deluded by a kind of magical thinking in which, if I hate woody allen enough, child sexual abuse will go away is an unfair thing to say--really, kind of an unpleasant one, no?
but halford, interrogation...this is my point; do you think there is any form of interrogation you could have performed on your child at age seven that would have convinced her not only that someone she loved and trusted had done something bad to her (I grant this) but that she had felt sick with fear when she saw this person, always, for as long as she could remember, because of the things he did to her? that's not a few supporting memories; I'm talking about re-writing the entire narrative of your life, from a basically happy if chaotic one into one in which you looked up at adults with a lead weight in your stomach, always watching them with minute care and attention to see how they were going to act next.
I really do sympathize with the reaction that normal physical affection can sound bad if described in a context of sexual abuse, so there shouldn't be an overreaction to ambiguous affectionate conduct -- we're physically cuddly with our kids and always have been, and sure, that could be described to sound wrong, and overreaction about that sort of thing can be very damaging.
Forcing your kid to suck your fingers and nuzzling her crotch, on the other hand, seem to me to be beyond that zone of affectionate ambiguity, even if you leave the emotional valence out of it entirely. If you're not doing that sort of thing to your kid, then what Dylan says Woody did to her is really distinctly different from your ordinary parental affection.
And leaving the emotional valence out of it isn't a neutral thing to do. While I find this absolutely implausible as an accidentally confabulated story (Dylan's age, the number of people who questioned her about it contemporaneously), it seems possible as the result of deliberate bullying and coaching. But if it's not, and the story Dylan told then and has continued to tell is accurate, the emotional valence is a real part of what happened to her. You'd know if you were frightening your kid by being affectionate, and you'd stop. A given physical action -- cuddling on a bed in whatever you were sleeping in, say -- can be harmless, healthy affection, but if it's part of a course of conduct that's terrifying the kid and making her miserable, it's part of the abuse even if a decent parent might have done the same thing physically.
124 was even a bit overstated, sorry mr. smearcase.
but yes, 126--there are physical actions it could be ok to perform with your child if she were totally happy (cuddling in bed! sleeping together when she's sick!) that would not be ok if they were always causing her misery and anxiety and fear (because they were accompanied by crotch-nuzzling and finger-sucking) but you would know this by how she was hiding from you all the time. also, the crotch thing, just no.
I'm not even sure what the points of contention are anymore. I'd say I think something like this:
It's perfectly reasonable to think Allen is guilty enough that you want nothing to do with his movies or works, and to advocate publicly for why you think so. But given that the procedures we have in place for establishing public truth about charges like this either broke down, or failed to reach a consensus, it's not reasonable to claim certainty about what happened, or to impugn people who point out that uncertainty is a reasonable reaction.
Of course "emotional valence" is part of the story. No one would deny that. But the "emotional valence" of a memory is also going to be affected pretty much automatically by having that memory implanted. The McMartin case (again, to go back there, and for an instance where I know someone involved) also involved kids having real, emotionally-felt memories that bad things had happened to them that they felt bad about, when they hadn't. And of course tree kinds of things require you to rewrite the narrative of your whole life. Just grant for a second that your mother really does unintentionally or intentionally convince you that your father (a) sexually abused you (b) slept with your sister (c) is a monster who destroyed your family (b and c are true here, by the way). Wouldn't this be sufficient to be a life-narrative altering event sufficient to make the emotional valence of a ton of other supporting memories shift? Yes, of course it would be. Which, again, is why this is so hard and why actually competent investigations of child abuse are so important (and, again, are also totally possible).
123 -- he was apparently subpoenaed as a third-party witness in the custody case, but none of the other members of the multi-person team who conducted the six month investigation where one judge, who was ruling on a different issue, the custody of the kids, found that the report should have been "inconclusive" as to whether or not there was abuse as opposed to affirmatively exonerating Allen. How you get from there to we definitely know there was abuse seems to me to require a pretty big leap of faith, unless you know of any independent substantive reasons to dismiss the report, of which almost nothing (nothing other than Farrow's paid expert, who found it "inconclusive") has surfaced. Again, the key in these situations seems to be a good investigation, which can reveal the truth; a bad investigation can implant memories. Here I don't know that the investigation was "good" but the team involved has certainly been super reputable in exactly this area for a long time, and the report was subject to only not very strong criticisms by Farrow's paid expert. I mean if the sides were switched and the report had found abuse and 20 years after the fact people were going on about how Allen's paid expert found the report bad because it improperly made recommendations about visitation or treatment for Allen or because the investigators did the (apparently routine) practice of not keeping all their notes would that seem like a really good basis for dismissing the report? No it would not.
I not only snuggle with my kids in bed all the time (in just my boxers, and they often just in theirs), I often trap them under the covers in play wrestling matches where, e.g., I'm a monster who pulls them under the covers and tickles them. And there's lots of "stop! stop! let me out!", all while laughing maniacally. (And of course I do stop and let them out, but they are right back for more, begging me to do it again.) My older son LOVES this. Given that, I was doing it to both of them all the time. It took me a long time to realize that my younger son (who isn't nearly as expressive about his preferences as his older brother), while he loves the game generally, and wants to play, he really, truly does NOT like to have the blanket over his head. It terrifies him and makes him feel scared he's going to suffocate. Which is fine--now he gets pulled under to covers all except for his head, and he's thrilled. But it took me quite a while to realize that he really didn't want me to do that, and that it was genuinely frightening him. And I feel bad about that.
That's sort of different than sniffing his crotch, I suppose. But still.
Note to self: Kids need to breath.
Now I'm worried that people are going to say no, that's not actually different than sniffing his crotch at all.
129: To get meta about what's keeping me arguing here. I can completely see wanting to point out that we're not in a position to be certain about anything, there are ways for Dylan to have developed beliefs that aren't true, and so on. Where I am, belief-wise, if I were on a jury in a criminal case, and the evidence I saw didn't move me one way or the other from where I am now, I'd probably have a hard time getting to "beyond a reasonable doubt."
But you've been arguing, inter alia, against the position that it's reasonable based on the evidence we've seen to have a belief one way or the other about whether the abuse happened (which is all "preponderance of the evidence" means -- that there's enough evidence to sway you in one direction). And that seems screwy to me.
I'm not insisting that you believe anything particular, or you're a bad person. But on the one side you have (1) Dylan's contemporaneous and consistent story, told to several adults immediately after the events; (2) the publicly agreed on fact that Allen was in therapy for inappropriate behavior toward her long before the accusation; (3) babysitters who saw him with his face in her crotch.
On the other side you have (1) Allen's denial; (2) two social workers with expertise in child abuse who did not find her story credible, but did not evaluate any corroborating evidence; (3) one babysitter who testified that she didn't see anything wrong and that Farrow pressured her to lie.
You can evaluate that all how you like. Saying that there's something wrong with looking at all that, and thinking that it's enough to have a real opinion about what happened (as is probably pretty clear, I think it happened, but that there's at least some doubt), seems unjustified to me.
LB, how do you account for the recollections of Moses Farrow?
also, 134: PREACH.
halford, if you're not sure what we're arguing about, I don't see why you're not just willing to say, 'well he looks pretty fucking guilty but we have no way of knowing for sure.' like I said, I'm not a juror sworn under oath to presume a motherfucker innocent--I'm just a person with experience in this unfortunate area of life and the total sum of the evidence presented seems to me to very strongly suggest dylan farrow is telling the truth. "it turned out your dad was a bad dude who was fucking your sister" is still different from "it turned out you have been going around all your life till now with a sinking feeling of dread whenever you're in the room with your dad and someone else because you're afraid the other person might leave and you're really really scared of him." that's just...not the same kind of thing at all. so not the same.
I would be very interested for you to provide an example from your own life--I don't know your family specifics so I can't say it perfectly to you. do you think that you might have had a happy, if inappropriately intense [?--ed] relationship with your dad all your young life and that someone would have been able to convince you most of the way through first grade not just that your dad had done something fucked up, but that you had always hated and feared your dad? does that seem likely to you, substituting well-loved parental figures as needed?
136: moses farrow says he was in the house that day and didn't see anything bad happen, but not that he was obsessively monitoring them. it's not at all plausible that a 14-year-old boy would have exact knowledge of his 7-year-old sister's exact whereabouts all day. why would he be paying that much attention? consider actual boys that age.
How you get from there to we definitely know there was abuse seems to me to require a pretty big leap of faith, unless you know of any independent substantive reasons to dismiss the report, of which almost nothing (nothing other than Farrow's paid expert, who found it "inconclusive") has surfaced.
I am pretty sure I never claimed we definitely know there was abuse. I am pushing back against your persistent claim that this report, as to which you correctly note we have very scant information, is strong evidence that it didn't happen. You posted an article suggesting the team has solid credentials in the field. LB posted an article that suggested members of the team had ties to Allen which called their neutrality into question. We have various people's summaries indicating the report concluded there was no abuse, but we have very little detail regarding the basis for that conclusion. We do know that the custody judge, who knew as much as there was to know, wasn't persuaded by it. (You keep insistkng the judge hated Allen, implying he did not evaluate the evidence disinterestedly. If in fact he did hate Allen, perhaps that's based on his disinterested review of the evidence? )
I'm not sure where you get that Leventhal was a third-party witness in the custody case. Who would the third party be? The opinion appears to list him among Allen's witnesses.
136: As not terribly pertinent? You can be a witness to something happening, but unless you're a part of whatever it was or you were present at all relevant times, you can't be a witness to it not having happened.
To 130: (Not about WA at all.) My mother told me a few years ago that when I was about three, I woke her up in the middle of the night shrieking stuff like, " Stop, Daddy! Don't!" I was having nightmares - he was sound asleep in their bed. I'm not sure whether it happened once or more, but she managed to get me to explain what was going on - I was having a dream where he was tickling me (a common occurrence, not creepy), and I was yelling for him to stop. Poor Mom, that must have been gut-wrenching.
Well, first, it's (2) there that's wrong (and basically all moves in this direction have to rely on undermining the state's investigation of the event). It was more than "two social workers" it was a team that was appointed by the state, that routinely and successfully helps prepare kids to testify to abuse that does happen, that investigated for six months, including the corroborating evidence, and that affirmatively found not only insufficient evidence but affirmatively concluded that nothing happened (by the way, we also don't know anything about the other evidence here other than the custody judge's summary of what happened at the custody hearing, and again even that judge only found the evidence of abuse inconclusive).
But, second, -- even conceding that there could have been errors in the state's report about which we're unaware (we don't know!) -- I think years after the fact, to go around saying "it's more likely than not" that he did it, based on evidence that no one personally has actually examined, witnesses that no one has seen testify, etc, is ridiculous. Demanding that he be blacklisted on the basis of that is a stretch. I mean if you want to take Witt's view, which seems to be basically "I don't know what happened but in cases that don't matter much to me and where my view doesnt matter much and I don't really know the facts I'm just gonna go ahead and believe the accuser" I don't really have a problem with that, as long as you admit that's what you're doing. But all the stuff about (this was in Heebie's OP, and elsewhere) about how we "know" he was a molester or pretending that we're somehow capable of making a reasonable "preponderance of the evidence" conclusion, as if we actually have real evidence available to us that we've examined, is silly. We, meaning the public, don't know, and should just admit that we don't know.
142 to 134.
139 -- Leventhal was called by Allen, but he is a third party. He was not a paid expert for Allen's side.
My sister is no longer with her babydaddy. When my older nephew was three, I was there for a nightmare in which my nephew screamed "No Daddy, stop! No!". I was pissed and worried until the next day, when I saw the babydaddy buckling my nephew into his car seat and my nephew screaming "No Daddy, stop! No!"
Moses Farrow isn't just saying 'I didn't see it so I don't think it happened.' He's recalling what he did see about an atmosphere in which coaching was not only possible but likely.
It was more than "two social workers" it was a team that was appointed by the state, that routinely and successfully helps prepare kids to testify to abuse that does happen, that investigated for six months, including the corroborating evidence,
You keep on saying this. I haven't seen anything indicating that the investigation went beyond interviewing Dylan, and I haven't seen you point to the source of your knowledge that it was more extensive than that.
Generally, I'm dubious about the investigation both because of the court's reaction to it, and because I don't understand how you get to a strong affirmative opinion that nothing happened under the circumstances. I can see "The child's story is impossible/wildly implausible (human sacrifice, zeppelins), so it didn't happen." But that's not the case here. I can see "When separated from the coaching parent, the child says that she was only making accusations because she was pressured into it." But that didn't happen here -- the report is reported to have been agnostic between Dylan having been coached and having been spontaneously delusional due to emotional stress.
I can see "The child's affect is disturbed enough, and the story is inconsistent enough, that her testimony isn't reliable enough to take into court." But that gets you to not knowing at all what happened, not to knowledge that the abuse story was false. The fact that the Yale-New Haven report seems to have been couched as an affirmative exoneration of Allen, rather than merely a statement that there was insufficient reliable evidence for prosecution, seems peculiar to me.
145: Of course the emotional atmosphere was poisonous for all sorts of reasons. The fact that Moses Farrow thought so doesn't add anything much, as far as I can tell.
Over the years, going back at least as far as DukeLacrosse, the first storm of this kind I remember riding out atm, I've developed a protocol for thinking about these issues.
I take much, much less pleasure in contention and argument than many people do, especially lawyers; my hatred of it has certainly been a professional limitation for me.
The memory of having been stampeded, of going along with a narrative is humiliating to me and threatens the core of who I am and want to be. Once burned, twice shy.
Beyond an extreme and no-doubt-annoying skepticism, I've developed the habit of following particular media observers, who have again and again been right when most people in my circle, irl and beyond have not. They might be thought of as specialists in media narrative and stampede.
The top of my list, the gold standard, are Bob Somerby, Gene Lyons and Jerrilyn Merritt. I don't always agree with their manner, or priorities or loyalties. But they've been right too many times, against the grain, for me not to always seek out and ponder their judgment.
Gene Lyons has a column this morning
Besides claiming that Mia drummed hatred for Woody into the children, Moses has also specifically claimed that "[Dylan] loved [Woody] and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him."
It's possible that he's mistaken, doesn't have sufficient knowledge, or is even lying, but I think it adds something.
It seems to me that in the more "ordinary" situation, the tide of poison runs strongly in the other direction -- mom refusing to believe what step-dad is doing -- which is why, imo, bending over backwards to facilitate and validate an accuser is ordinarily appropriate.
Since the legal system is done with these people, though, the issue for us ordinary folk is how much value, if any, to assign to this sort of thing, whatever we think happened. I wouldn't walk across the street to shake WA's hand, but I guess I might watch Love and Death again some time. (I wasn't that impressed with Blue Jasmine -- while the human story was OK, I didn't think WA captured any of the cultures in which the thing was taking place, and context is always a big part of what he did.)
I'm not sure that dysfunction is any more common among artistic types than the rest of us, but it's surely not any less common. Don't ask don't tell seems the better rule wrt their personal lives -- from an art consumer's point of view, not the state's (which should treat rich and famous artists no more favorably than it does poor people of color.)
From the Gene Lyons link:
News flash, frigid gentlewomen of the jury: ALL straight men find 19 year-old women desirable. They just don't want to make fools of themselves.
Fuck that asshole.
Are you disputing the statement, heebie, or just pissed at the condescending "news flash, frigid gentlewomen" bit?
Just pissed at the condescension.
I had the same reaction. To be a little more specific, I'm fine with "Most straight men find at least some 19 year old women attractive." Thinking that's particularly relevant to the question of whether "Most straight men would want to have sex with their children's half-sister who they'd been around since she was seven" seems to me to make you an asshole.
Accepting the former doesn't mean accepting the latter, and finding the latter very disturbing doesn't make you naive or prudish.
Oh, funny, I didn't even focus on "frigid gentlewomen". Yeah, that was pretty assholish too.
Oh hey the 1992 report leaked. So we can all read it now.
151: Yeah, the Lyons piece was pretty much a rehash of the Weide piece, with bonus dickishness. (Also, the Frank Sinatra nonsense is a total non-sequitur, and while Mia Farrow was no doubt being a pill by bringing him up, the "But Woody Allen paid child support for Ronan!" angle that Gene Lyons and Woody Allen seem to think is sympathetic is mostly just MRAish.)
Good find, and for anyone who didn't click through they did interview surrounding adults (Mia, the shrinks, babysitters) -- Halford was right about that.
Their stated reasons for thinking it didn't happen, though, are limited to inconsistencies in Dylan's story, unspecified unusual details, and a 'rehearsed', 'thoughtful' quality to the story. My concerns in 146 stand -- I can see that getting to "We wouldn't take this to court", but getting to "We're sure it didn't happen" on that kind of basis, seems bizarre to me.
Damn it, it's only the first and last pages of the 40 page report that are out. But the report makes clear that they did more than interview Dylan -- they interviewed her 9 times, reviewed the evidence (including the video) collected by the police, interviewed the mother and father, interviewed two babysitters, and interviewed the psychotherapists who had previously treated Dylan.
Yeah, it's not much of a leak because we don't have the meat of the report, to evaluate the basis for their conclusions.
Generally, I'm dubious about the investigation both because of the court's reaction to it, and because I don't understand how you get to a strong affirmative opinion that nothing happened under the circumstances.
It's unfortunate that Leventhal's report and his deposition aren't available online (I could find the first and 40th pages o the report, but that's it). You would think the Internet's assignment desk would have put somebody on the job by now.
So we're stuck evaluating Leventhal's work through various inferences. The level of certainty that Leventhal expressed certainly seems, on its face, to be dubious, partly for the same reasons that Moses' certainty seems dubious. (Wilks's certainty about various elements of the case, on the other hand, is just the way that judges express themselves, and I don't think it has a negative impact on his credibility.)
It's difficult, but not impossible, to reach a solid conclusion that an accusation is baseless. Leventhal's investigators had access to Dylan and Mia, and I believe they also had access to the video. Despite the fact that the video was turned off and on during the Dylan interview, it still could have revealed coaching.
Is that what happened here? There are certainly strong arguments that it did not. But the Internet really has let us down here, and there's lots of available evidence that we aren't privy to.
Well, we've got the Yale-New Haven report being uncertain about coaching. So they at least didn't think that the video was unambiguously coached.
157: I find the "but he paid child support" thing to be pretty much the only sympathetic thing about him. It's not like he couldn't afford it, but still, paying child support for someone else's kid (assuming he is Sinatra's) when the kid is a result of your partner cheating has to hurt. The person who should be paying the child support is IMO the biological father. I suppose that aligns me in part with some nasty MRA types, but I'll take the hit.
162: Right. It is pretty difficult, looking at Leventhal's summary, to figure out where his certainty comes from. I wonder if there's a substantive page 41 to that report. Even as a summary, it looks incomplete.
I do find it troublesome that there is literally nothing Woody Allen could possibly do to refute this claim. In the eyes of a lot of people, he's a child molestor, full stop, despite the fact that he denies it and there was an actual investigation at the time which cleared him of this charge.
Is that more or less troubling than the fact that there is nothing Dylan can do to have her story validated? I don't know. I do think a strong presumption of validity should be given to charges of sexual abuse, because as has been noted there are a hell of a lot more unreported abuses than false accusations of abuse. Was that presumption applied when these charges were initially being investigated? I don't know. I hope it was. I haven't seen anything to suggest it wasn't. There doesn't appear to have been any sort of cover-up to protect Allen. But I haven't seen all of the evidence and am very far removed from the situation.
124: Is there just no difference between believing someone and saying you know that person is definitely telling the truth in this conversation?
"We're sure it didn't happen"
Has anyone, other than Woody Allen, said they're sure it didn't happen?
Has anyone, other than Woody Allen, said they're sure it didn't happen?
Moses Farrow came pretty close.
Moses always has to stop just short.
167: From the (incomplete) linked Yale-New Haven report:
It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.
Doesn't use the word 'sure', but it's pretty close.
The person who should be paying the child support is IMO the biological father.
gswift's argument was, IIRC, if he was going to be legally responsible for the offspring of his wife and her (hypothetical) lover, then his wife could damn well help look after the kids he had with his (hypothetical) mistress. (Unless, presumably, the mistress was already married as well.)
166: Sure, those things are different, but I'm not sure what you're saying. I believe, in a more likely than not kind of way, that Dylan's story is truthful. I don't know it definitely, and I probably wouldn't convict if I were applying a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. But based on everything I've read about it, and my sense of the plausibilities, I think it's not irrational to have a belief about what happened.
Doesn't use the word 'sure', but it's pretty close.
I guess I don't think it's really all that close, actually. I think it's a hedged, professional conclusion, roughly akin to, "To the best of our abilities to figure this out, we think she wasn't abused." But you almost certainly have more experience reading those sorts of reports -- not specifically about abuse -- than I do.
Huh. I can't imagine how the report could have been stated more strongly.
174: yeah, that's why I qualified my statement by noting that I don't have much experience reading those sorts of reports. It really may be very strong. I just don't know. Regardless, I'll continue to admire some of Allen's work while thinking he's a creepy dude. I suppose there's some question about whether I'll introduce my kids to his movies, as my parents once introduced them to me. And maybe that question should be informed by this episode -- the memory fight rather than the alleged episode itself, as I suspect that what happened in that moment/those moments is unknowable.
147: "Get these motherfucking accusations off of my court."
172: I'm saying that the difference between "I believe her" and "I know she is telling the truth" is one of responding rationally to the story and responding emotionally, and I guess that it seems to me that people aren't always clear on which one they're doing.
(And yes, substitute "him" for "her" above as necessary but I haven't heard anyone say they're certain he didn't do it.)
The gender division on this continues to be very striking.
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Von W! I had a fascinating conversation with an environmental CEO recently and recommended your book. It's not directly relevant to his org but he's an omnivorous reader so I hope he picks it up. I sent him an Amazon link afterward.
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179 is certainly true, though it's not 100% either way.
It's kind of weird to think that the (relative) certainty of the Yale-NH report that there was not sexual abuse is evidence that the report isn't credible and that there was sexual abuse. I mean, I see where the argument is going but it's a pretty weird argument, absent a lot of independent reasons to disbelieve the report. I mean maybe the investigators were incompetent or corrupt and the six-month investigation was a sham, I don't know and it's certainly too bad for this conversation that we can't actually read the report. But "group of highly reputable independent state-affiliated investigators who usually assist prosecutors in prosecuting abusers comes to a stronger than usual conclusion that there was no abuse" would usually be considered strong evidence that there was no abuse, not that their report is suspect.
I'm saying that the difference between "I believe her" and "I know she is telling the truth" is one of responding rationally to the story and responding emotionally, and I guess that it seems to me that people aren't always clear on which one they're doing.
In the opposite direction, I get the impression that there are people hearing "I think she's telling the truth, and these are my reasons", and interpreting it at "I have an absolute and irrational emotional commitment to believing people who say they were abused, so I don't care what the facts are."
180: may you and yours always be free of cholera.
It's kind of weird to think that the (relative) certainty of the Yale-NH report that there was not sexual abuse is evidence that the report isn't credible and that there was sexual abuse.
Maybe you're not following the argument I'm making? I find the fact that they're making a strong claim that doesn't seem as if it can possibly be adequately supported by the evidence they have generally damaging to their credibility. A claim that "Her story was erratic/inconsistent, whatever, enough that we don't know what happened, which means that we can't prosecute" seems like something that experts could reliably say. "It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen," on the other hand, looks very likely to be overreaching -- it's a claim that based on an allegedly inconsistent story from a disturbed child, they know what happened, not just to discount her version as not dispositive, but to have certainty about the the truth of the matter.
Also, I'm not super comfortable being on one side or the other of any gender divide regarding Dylan Farrow, about whom I have no feelings other than sadness. I've mostly stayed out of any discussions regarding Woody Allen, because I'm sure I can't know what really happened and because my opinion isn't at all important. That said, the episode -- the recent episode, not the alleged abuse -- interests me as a memory fight, an instance in which people are using the past as a proxy in a fight over some political issue or issues. In this case, I think the fight is actually very complicated: the power of celebrity, the rights and agency of victims/survivors of abuse, the nature of artistic expression, the limits of diversity, etc. Anyway, I don't have worthwhile thoughts about what Woody Allen did or didn't do, so I'll shut up now.
No, I get your argument, it's just that absent other pretty good underlying reasons, it's odd to think that a stronger-than-usual conclusion from an experienced expert is prima facie evidence that the report isn't credible or that the opposite conclusion makes sense. I'd presume that these kinds of teams often reach conclusions that say basically "we can't reach firm conclusions about what happened so there's not enough to prosecute." Here, they go a step further. Maybe that step further is evidence that they are wildly unreliable. But the simpler conclusion -- at least, absent a really good reason to think otherwise -- is that the strong conclusion reflects an unusually strong belief by experts that the story of abuse did not reflect reality.
I guess I also disagree with "strong claim that doesn't seem as if it can possibly be adequately supported by the evidence they have." First, we have no idea what evidence they have. Second, we have no idea precisely what conclusions they're drawing from that evidence and how the evidence links to the conclusion. So we just don't know the real basis for their conclusion. The argument that their conclusion was unsupported comes exclusively from simply repeating (I still think super weak, but we disagree about this) conclusory statements from Mia Farrow's expert, as described in a judicial opinion,, and a family law judge's conclusory statement that he wasn't as sure as the investigators that the evidence conclusively demonstrated no abuse (although that judge also wasn't willing to say that there had been abuse).
I'm not super comfortable being on one side or the other of any gender divide regarding Dylan Farrow, about whom I have no feelings other than sadness
I mean, this is true for me as well, though I suppose I'm coming across as being on a "side." There's no possible telling of the story that isn't incredibly sad for her. My only beef is with claims of the sort "in the court of public opinion, we can conclude that he definitely probably molested her" when the basis for coming to that conclusion is so weak.
First, we have no idea what evidence they have.
We have the list of reasons they gave on page 40 of the report -- summary, but it's something. And what they say is that her story had inconsistencies and unusual details, she struggled to tell about the touching, and that she sounded thoughtful, controlling, and rehearsed. They don't mention anything else as a "major reason" for their conclusion.
So everything they rely on is internal to her story and her demeanor. And at that point, I'm not a psychologist or a child abuse expert, but while I can see deciding "This kid's testimony isn't reliable enough to establish anything," I can't see how you can get from there to "We know what did happen."
We have a few sentences of summaries of their conclusions (we actually don't even know if those are all of their conclusions or if that's the last page of the report). Even there, it all depends on what "inconsistencies" were at issue and what evidence of rehearsal they have. For example, they could well have evidence that says (x, y, z) in her story made no sense and was so inconsistent, and the evidence for some kind of fabrication was so great given the other evidence we have, and her demeanor seemed (relative to other cases we've seen) to suggest fabrication, that in this instance we can affirmatively conclude that she is telling a story that does not reflect reality, and that yes we can conclude this as experts with substantial experience in investigating these things.
But precisely what they're talking about or what that evidence is, we just don't know, and that's the kind of thing you'd need to know to actually evaluate their opinion. You can't just say "they came to a strong conclusion so it must have been wrong," based on non-knowledge of the investigation or the procedures they used.
Taken by itself, this stuff is weak, weak, weak:
"She appeared confused about what to relate to interviewers and was very controlling of what she would say."
In a gravely serious situation it seems odd that someone would be thought to lack credibility for being controlling of what they say.
"There were important inconsistencies in Dylan's statements in the videotape and her statements to us."
So what? This is evidence that you're talking to a 7-year-old, and not evidence of anything else.
"She appeared to struggle with how to tell about the touching."
But wait! I thought she was "rehearsed" and "controlling."
"She told the story in a manner that was overly thoughtful and controlling. There was no spontaneity in her statements, and a rehearsed quality was suggested in how she spoke."
Are we talking about the first interview by the Yale team, or the ninth? How many times had she recounted this story to other people?
Deprived of the context as we are, the report seems almost frivolous. Judge Wilks, unfortunately, didn't illuminate the more credible parts of the report - which raises the possibility that there weren't any.
And at that point, I'm not a psychologist or a child abuse expert, but while I can see deciding "This kid's testimony isn't reliable enough to establish anything," I can't see how you can get from there to "We know what did happen."
It seems like the fact that you're not a
psychologist or a child abuse expert, and they are, should count for something here.
Well, yes, if you strip the report of any of its context, underlying details or evidence, its conclusions don't seem well-supported.
I thought this was interesting, by a woman who (says she) was sexually assaulted by a much older cousin: "After I'd spoken with investigators and my parents, I am sure my account sounded just as rehearsed as Dylan Farrow's. The story was mine, but the words were new to me. I had to internalize a context and vocabulary based on the way adults interacted with my story. I had to learn which details were the most important. In short, I was pushed through an intensive course on a daunting topic very, very quickly. If this was also Dylan Farrow's experience-- if her mother also had to teach her what all of this meant and why it was serious--then that was a very different thing from being "coached."
182: that seems likely true.
194: Right. There's a pretty big difference between being coached to talk to adult strangers about a scary and foreign topic and being implanted with false memories. Most children who are sexual assaulted are coached in some way by the time they are relaying their story to authorities.
I worked in child protection for a time and almost none of our sexual assault of a minor cases, for children under 10 at least, arose due to a straightforward story from the child or because of the existence of physical evidence. In almost every case, the child is acting strangely (inappropriately sexual, fearful or avoidant, uncontrollably angry) in a way that is noticeable to other adults. This, along with strange behavior on the part of the offending adult, is usually what leads to an investigation. Often, it wasn't the abuse that lead to the child being removed from the home it was that the investigation turned up child pornography and that was cause enough for removal.
Children, particularly those under ten, are extremely easy targets and it's quite easy for an adult to do serious harm to them in 5 minutes in a locked bathroom. These children don't have the words to describe what has happened, or is happening, and so it's a rare child sexual abuse case where strong evidence exists. If strong evidence is the standard for establishing abuse conclusively, then overwhelming most instances of child sexual abuse will go unpunished.
OT: I got Mike Logan on the which "Law and Order detective are you" quiz. I was hoping for Lenny, but not bad.
Here's the head of the investigation, Dr. Leventhal's, CV which certainly suggests that he was at least aware of the issues raised in 196 and probably doesn't have a naive belief that any inconsistency or appearance of rehearsal in a child's account of sexual abuse means that the child shouldn't be believed. Maybe one of you with access to one of the journal archives could pull up some of his work before 1993 on the issue, since he seems to have published pretty extensively on it.
For example, all of the following seem particularly relevant:
. Leventhal JM, Bentovim A, Elton A, Tranter M, Reed L: What to ask when sexual abuse is
suspected. Archives of Diseases in Childhood 1987; 62:1188-1195
Leventhal JM, Hamilton J, Rekedal S, Tebano-Micci A, Eyster C: Results of a diagnostic
interview in young children suspected of being sexually abused. Pediatrics 1989; 84:900-906
Wiseman MR, Vizard E, Leventhal JM, Bentovim A: Reliability of videotaped interviews
with children suspected of being sexually abused. Brit Med J 1992; 304: 1089-1091.
Katz SM, Schonfeld DJ, Carter AS, Leventhal JM, Cicchetti DV: The accuracy of children's
reports with anatomically correct dolls. J Devel Behav Pediatr 1995; 16: 71-76
We get it. He's an expert with an impressive CV and a long publication history. Which is certainly not nothing.
Since Ms. Sawyer and Dr. Hamilton interviewed Dylan, wouldn't their CVs be more relevant than Leventhal's?
I'd just like to say how glad I am that this thread is still going on, and that I wish we could have three or nine or twenty-seven more on the same topic.
Late to this thread, but here is my personal theory of the case. No one can know for sure because it's all speculation at this point, but if you think Allen didn't sexually abuse Dylan then you need some reason for thinking that she made and apparently believes the charges. My own is that we know for sure Allen acted in lots of ways that likely made Dylan feel her boundaries (emotional and physical) were violated. His actions also made Mia Farrow hate him with the burning passion of a thousand suns and feel a desparate need to protect her children from him. This is the perfect environment for a false charge of child abuse regardless of anyone's intent to lie. Also, IMO it is rare for successful, confident man with many romantic opportunities to actually be sexually attracted to a 7 year old girl (which as many have pointed out is entirely different than being attracted to an 18 year old).
Think about the full sequence of events here:
1) Allen gets involved with Farrow while refusing to get involved with her foster children at all, who he does not regard as 'really' her children or in any way his family relations. He lives apart from the family in his own apartment.
2) After some years of involvement, Farrow convinces him to become a father for the first time and try to get her pregnant. She does not initially get pregnant, but while they are trying they adopt a child (Dylan) who he views, unlike her other children, as 'his' child. Then she does get pregnant, with Satchel, who he also views as his child. For some reason he also likes Moses.
3) He apparently gets into fatherhood and bonds emotionally to Dylan, engaging in all the physical intimacies of parenthood, which are considerable. Many of the things mentioned in the judge's decision that Mia is concerned about are standard parental things -- e.g. reading to your kid in your underwear, which I have certainly done when my bright-eyed toddler barges into the room at 6 AM with a book. He remains estranged from all of the older kids, even as Mia is teaching Dylan that the rest of the children are her brothers and sisters.
4) Allen adopts Dylan and Moses, with support from Farrow.
5) Allen and Farrow drift apart emotionally. Allen is still living in a separate apartment but still acting as a father to the kids he regards as 'his'.
6) Allen becomes romantically/sexually involved with Sun-Yi, and Mia blows her top. He lies about their continued involvement while he is negotiating the separation. Mia tells all the rest of the kids about this. She calls Allen a child molester.
7) Allen sues for custody of Dylan/Satchel/Moses.
Stop and think about how totally fucked up this all is. Allen bonds to Dylan from a very early age while ignoring most all the rest of her siblings. He bonds intensely and is very physically affectionate -- which IME for a parent is standard if you love your kid, I randomly pick up my son all the time and kiss him on the cheek because he's so darn cute. But he's totally ignoring most everyone else in the house. So right there Dylan probably feels weirdly singled out.
Then he switches from ignoring the siblings to having sex with one of them! And her mother is presumably telling her all about that, at an age when sex is a pretty alien and confusing thing. Then Allen continues to parent Dylan, trying for custody of her and visiting all the time, continuing to act parental and physically affectionate. I mean, how messed up is all that, completely without assuming that Allen has any sexual motivation at all? She's got this guy who most of her family is telling her is a child molester who is having sex with her sister, and he is singling her out for parental affection? That is confusing as hell and would do a total emotional number on a young child. Then Mia is there prepared to interpret any sense that Dylan had of her physical boundaries being crossed as sexual abuse. It's not just any nasty divorce -- it's probably the absolutely optimal nasty divorce situation for a false charge of sexual abuse.
As I said, a supporting hypothesis here is that it's actually pretty rare for a normal adult male who is confident with adult women to actually try to get off sexually with a young prepubescent girl. It's unnatural. I find it much more likely that the bizarre sequence of events above led to a sense of total boundary violation that eventually resulted in a charge of sexual abuse. The charge of sexual abuse is very tempting in a nasty divorce case because it instantly converts all the complex, involved, ways in which adults behave inappropriately to children and violate emotional boundaries into a simple, clear story where one individual is basically flat-out evil and everyone else is a victim. Of course in a sense Mia and Dylan are absolutely right to feel like victims, Allen is enormously at fault for doing all kinds of damage in this situation. But the situation is also in part Mia's fault as well, and you avoid that complexity with the abuse charge.
you avoid that complexity with the abuse charge
As the last dozen or so threads would argue, not so much.
I just want to chime in to say I definitely do not endorse 203. I'm firmly in the "don't know" camp.
I don't want to get into the argument about Woody Allen, but I do want to respond to this bit of "argument by statistics"
As I said, a supporting hypothesis here is that it's actually pretty rare for a normal adult male who is confident with adult women to actually try to get off sexually with a young prepubescent girl
Even if that's true, it's also very rare for an adult male to be accused of sexually abusing children. So the fact that the majority of men neither abuse children nor are accused of abuse doesn't add much information to help estimate probabilities in a particular case.
Well, of course I don't and can't know either, but what are we doing on the internet with these kinds of stories if not speculating wildly?
Didn't read much of the thread before posting, but I see now there is much relevant conversation above.
206: I disagree with that. The question is whether the factors I'm arguing were highly likely to generate a charge of child abuse in this case are correlated or uncorrelated with being an actual for real child abuser. If they are uncorrelated then the population percentage of actual child abusers is relevant, if correlated then irrelevant.
Strip it down and the claim I was making was that any case where someone:
A) got involved with a family and bonded parentally/physically with one young child to the exclusion of their siblings,
B) fell in love with and had sex with one of the older siblings that he did not view as his child, and
C) attempted to fully maintain his parental/physical bond with the young child while all this was happening and everyone was freaking out about his having sex with the older child
would be highly likely to generate a charge of abusing of the young child regardless of whether anything was happening sexually. Because it's a totally fucked up situation all on its own in a way that is likely to generate all kinds of feelings of violation on the part of all concerned. If the kind of person who would get themselves involved in a situation like that is also more likely to be a for-real abuser of young children then yes, the fact that child abuse is rare wouldn't matter so much.
Admittedly, it is a highly fucked up situation just all on its own
any case where someone
That's what I can't really get past. You're arguing as if you could say "In every ten cases like this..." and I sincerely doubt there are any other cases meaningfully like this. I mean, just structurally, putting any wrongdoing or emotional injury to one side, it is a highly, highly unusual situation.
You should probably factor into the reasoning-from-stereotypes probability analysis that comedians are depressed creeps and actors and actresses are narcissistic, manipulative professional liars.
comedians are depressed creeps
That made me surprisingly sad when I realized how often it's true. I like funny, and there something about knowing that it often comes from terribly unhappy people that makes me feel as if I'm eating foie gras.
Clearly, everyone should read appellate decisions. Appellate law rules.
http://www.leagle.com/decision/1994524197AD2d327_1461
PGD is bringing up something that was present from a few other people on the first (I think) thread, that someone who's attracted to one 7-year-old would be a pedophile in general and therefore wouldn't be interested in a 19-year-old or whatever. I'm skeptical of any Grand Unifying Theories of Pedophilia anyway, but this case in particular from the side Dylan's defenders present seems less like specific pedophilic grooming leading up to a sex act and more like some kind of romantic infatuation from the start that evolved into something sexual, and it's much easier to believe that Woody Allen has fucked-up beliefs about relationships and abilities to be in any sort of love and to be a parent than it is to fit him into whatever pedo/ephebophilic schemes people were looking for.
And I said something in that thread about why it would matter that Soon-Yi was 19 by the time the physical relationship started and that there must have been some arbitrary non-age-of-consent reason for the insistence. Judge Wirk's ruling suggests that the question is whether he began an affair with her before or after beginning the process of adopting here siblings, which I agree has a bearing on the squick factor or at least the depths of his alienation from normal emotion for me at least.
Since we'll just continue this forever here's an obituary for Judge Wilk. Interesting guy. He sounds like a judge I'd admire but was also a super opinionated and not extremely cautious or "judicial" about hiding his biases. He kept a poster of Che Guevara in his chambers, which is something for a judge.
The judge's personal style was as direct as his language. He shunned robes, and tried unsuccessfully to convince court personnel not to call him ''your honor.'' His phone message gave just his name and his clerk's name, with no titles. He acknowledged in writing the contribution clerks made to his opinions.
There is a recurring Good Wife judge exactly like this.
Also? Heart: "In 1995, his order stopping the bulldozing of city-owned buildings on the Lower East Side particularly angered Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor said the judge represented ''ideology run amok.'' It was a phrase that Justice Wilk emblazoned on the shirt he wore for the New York City Marathon."
Oudemia, I was just about to point that out. That's great.
214: I also think it's creepy and tacky that the next two Farrow boys were named for him, since I'm sharing opinions.
Btw here is the thing I read that specifically used the words "I know...that Dylan Farrow is telling the truth." Just because this is the best thread ever, so fun, and so worth dragging out in whatever small way possible.
219: there's no need for an off-blog link; heebie's original post said flatly: "You can still like his movies, but you cannot pretend that they were made by someone who would never molest children." Plenty of similar sentiment was expressed in the comments.
A long, but really excellent and damning reading of Allen's own statements. Not really meant to get at the "truth" of what happened in the attic, but to put some of the assumptions about Allen and Mia Farrow into a different context. Highly recommended.
The link in 221 definitely gets bonus points for hypothesizing that Soon-Yi ultimately fell for Allen because he had been negging her for years.
It's a damning record that makes it much easier to imagine how Soon-Yi may have come to fall for him. Ignoring someone--a child--over a period of years spent in her company amounts, given the outcome, to an extreme form of negging.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. I'm not sure why you quoted it?
222 was mostly a joke anyway; I agree that's an excellent article.
That's a completely incorrect use of the term "negging." That article lacks credibility.
Let's all take the "Which Law and Order Detective Are You? Quiz" and call it day.
That's a completely incorrect use of the term "negging."
This is true, but why do you know that?
219: Yeah, I had meant to link that earlier, but lost track of where the link was. I found it to be an interesting read.
The suicide note linked in that piece is powerful stuff.
227: halford is just the man I'd expect to know the correct definition of negging, ogged. the question is rather, why do you know?
Don't we all know about negging? I mean, there've been like half-a-dozen threads where the PUA stuff came up to some degree or other.
There's an interesting essay to be written about the marketing of scandals with all of this. What makes this awful business so much different from the awful Sandusky business or the awful Michael Jackson business -- scandals that were at their core, fairly similar, and yet have been treated very differently? I didn't see much doubt expressed by anyone other than Sandusky's lawyers and some athletic supporters that he was utterly guilty. And virtually everyone except the most die-hard Michael Jackson fans acknowledged his guilt, but also didn't seem very exercised about the fact that he was getting away with it buy buying off his victims' pimps families. So what's the difference?
Dude, DUDE, the Sandusky thing involved like over half a dozen victims and an adult literally walking in on him boning a 10 year old.
I didn't follow the Sandusky case all that closely, but my impression is that there were a number of people who either knew or should have known...and yes, an adult (an assistant coach?) who actually walked in on him in the act. Years and years of criminal complicity, but all within the confines of a small, insular, supposedly self-regulating world.
Once the story finally hit the national media, however, we didn't see much doubt, or second-guessing of the victims' accounts. Which I think is Natilo's point?
This whole thing makes me really sad. Much more than when people die. Famous people dying doesn't often make me sad. The link in 221 is unbearable.
unbearable
Like, she wrote dumb stuff, or you hate that Allen has lied so much?
I deeply resent negging, on feminist grounds and because I like to be able to insult people without worrying that I'm accidentally hitting on them.
Is there a name for the (perhaps hypothetical) strategy of making negative comments strategically W->M?
Typically, coinages which start gender-specific blur at the edges until they are used neutrally. Has this happened?
I'm learning so many terms in this thread alone.
Is there a name for the (perhaps hypothetical) strategy of making negative comments strategically W->M?
Do fish have a word for water?
Dolphins have a series of clicks for it.
SICKBURN, ajay. no, that's what the eyebrows are for, man. so we can look at you all, "seriously? are you? do you even--?"
231: I personally think woody allen is guilty as a motherfucker, but it's nothing like what people had on MJ, let alone sandusky. in the former case there were constant, bizarre, inappropriate sleepovers with non-related children, and constant under-the-table massive payouts to families who then kept quiet because they had been paid off. in the latter case there may well have been more than a hundred victims; it horrifyingly seems (in retrospect) that he started a charitable group home for underprivileged kids just to get boys to rape; many people were involved in a conspiracy of silence; and there was an adult eyewitness to forcible penetration. I mean, that was so far beyond any reasonable doubt that it was at the orbit of pluto in the system of which "it's not 100%, but he prolly fucked that kid though" is the sun.
And virtually everyone except the most die-hard Michael Jackson fans acknowledged his guilt, but also didn't seem very exercised about the fact that he was getting away with it buy buying off his victims' pimps families.
Is this true? I never followed it very closely but I honestly thought the popular consensus was that it was pretty murky--that he was no doubt a bizarrely weird dude (but we already knew that) who was clearly doing things most of us would consider inappropriate with kids, but who may or may not have been sexually abusing any of the kids.
Well, okay, yes, there's a difference in quantity when you talk about the underlying abuse. But I was thinking more of the great-man-brought-low aspect of the various cases.
I guess closer parallels to the facts in dispute would be John/Mackenzie Phillips or the Sarah Silverman thing, sort of.
It is interesting that just a few comments serve to produce the kind of ambiguity that I thought was missing from the Michael Jackson business. I mean, I guess where I'm at with that is that it's possible he didn't actually rape any kids, but there was very likely tons and tons of fondling and what have you. Still, it seems like he was at least partially rehabilitated in the public eye upon his death.
239: Teasing someone is a broader category than negging, but it's pretty much unisex, no?
238 through 245 made me laugh heartily. Well done, comrades.
242: Of course, there are downsides to the eyebrow thing.
Of course, there are downsides to the eyebrow thing.
Reading the linked anecdote:
[A partner] . . . was incorrect according to the law I'd just spent a month researching, and saying things like 'It should be more swashbuckling! If we're going to go down, why don't we go down big!' I was thinking: 'Howsabout we skip the drama, and just win the motion,'
I'm reminded about the article that was linked a while ago about managing programmers. That story is a non-IT example of a conflict, within a hierarchical organization, between two people who each have reason to think that they have knowledge/experience which should make them an authority.
My sense is that law firms also do a poor job of handling that conflict but it does seem like the same dynamic.
Not really the same dynamic. When that story happened, I was so junior that the senior partner shouldn't have known I was in the room; I wouldn't have dreamed of saying anything unless asked a direct question. I had an opinion, which I think was shared by the senior associates and of counsel I was working with directly, who'd been drafting the brief that the senior partner had swanned in and decided wasn't exciting enough, but there genuinely wasn't any reason that the partner should have been listening to me directly about it.
I just didn't realize that keeping my mouth shut wasn't an effective way of keeping my opinion to myself.
I'd just like to say that as unpleasant as the rehash of these events in the media has been, and as unpleasant as I know many people found the threads here on the topic, I liked that they existed because they educated me and helped me understand the relevant issues and the range of opinions and reactions, so thanks to all who contributed to that.
(I'm a little disappointed that the piece ogged linked damning Woody in his own words went and occupied the one little patch of unique conceptual space I thought I might have, which was that the Valentine, in and of itself, wasn't that crazy. I mean, it's crazy, but in response to such extreme provocation that I would spot someone that amount of crazy.)