On Woody Allen and Echoes of the Past

[question everything]

By Dorothy Rabinowitz:

It's impossible to read Woody Allen's reply to charges that in 1992 he molested his and Mia Farrow's 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan, without being struck by its haunting echoes of the words of countless people accused of such crimes. He had thought that the charges were so ludicrous he didn't think of hiring a lawyer, he reported in an op-ed for the New York Times on Sunday. He had believed that "common sense would prevail." He had "naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand."

It was a kind of naïveté evident in virtually every person known to me who had been falsely charged in the high-profile sex-abuse cases that had swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s—people convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of testimony from children coaxed into making accusations. Accusations made, at ages 5, 6 or 7, that many of them would continue to believe fervently were true, into adulthood.

Though dazed when confronted with such accusations in 1984, the Amirault family of Massachusetts, owners of the Fells Acres nursery school, never doubted even when they were arrested that everything would soon be cleared up. Violet Amirault, school head, marveled that at age 60 she was suddenly supposed to have turned into a sexual molester of children.

(snip)

Like Woody Allen, Kelly Michaels had willingly taken a lie-detector test and passed. After a trial that saw some famously memorable children's testimony much like that given against the Amiraults—that Ms. Michaels had abused the children in a tractor, turned one of them into a mouse, etc.—she was sentenced to 47 years. Her conviction would be thrown out. Not before she had spent five years behind bars. Violet Amirault and her daughter, Cheryl, would spend eight years imprisoned before their convictions were overturned in 1995. Violet died the following year. Her son, Gerald, would do 19 years before being released in 2004.

(snip)

To prosecutors bent on holding on to convictions won, like the prosecutors who kept Gerald Amirault imprisoned, this sort of thing was of course no problem. Such was Martha Coakley's determination, when she was a district attorney in Massachusetts, to keep Mr. Amirault in prison, that she tried to have him committed elsewhere—as a sexually dangerous person—when he was paroled in 2004. An effort in which she was thwarted. Ms. Coakley is now the state's attorney general.

For no one, perhaps, is the importance of keeping alive the charge of guilt greater than the person who was, as a child, part of a famous child sex-abuse case built on false charges. These children, reinforced again and again in the truth of the accusation, would believe as adults that their horrific victimization early in life has caused them psychic injury of untold depths.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579372971308988130

(If you cannot open by clicking, try copy and paste the title onto google)

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And the most famous case is the McMartin case. Read it and shudder

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/mcmartin_daycare/1.html

[marble falls]

1. The problemis there'sno way to proveut didn't happen. An accusation is as good as a conviction...

and it would be almost impossible for the alleged victim to prove anything. Its a crying shame all the way around.

[btrflykng9]

4. +1

[CrawlingChaos]

2. This makes my blood boil. I wonder how much Woody paid for this garbage.

It cannot be lost on Ms. Rabinowitz that the cases of false accusations she writes about are VERY different than the Woody Allen case, and yet it appears she tries to draw an extremely misleading analogy (the WSJ will only let me see a preview, so I have only the excerpt above to go on).

In all these instances of children being coaxed to lie, their stories become increasing bizarre to the point of ludicrousness. Notice the mention above of a child claiming to have been turned into a mouse by their abuser. The McMartin case was full of hallucinogenic details including flying in the air and sex with goatmen. There's another maddening case I'm familiar with which was well-covered in the documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" wherein, yet again, the children's coaxed false accusations resulted in increasingly bizarre and impossible claims. The stories always change over time and usually the children reach an age where they recant entirely.

The McMartin case started with the ravings of a mentally ill mother who would eventually go on to claim her dog was also raped. I've repeatedly heard people here at DU refer to Mia Farrow as "crazy" based on, well, I'm not really sure what. I would suggest they familiarize themselves with the McMartin case if they need to know what crazy looks like.

All of the false accusation cases discussed shared two key features - mob hysteria and ambitious prosecutors without any shred of human decency or scruples, seeking to further their own careers. These are people I would have dearly loved to see criminally prosecuted for the unspeakable evil they have done, but they are shielded from that by their positions.

Dylan Farrow, on the other hand, has told an extremely credible, consistent story, free of telltale childlike embellishments. There is a well-established history of what a judge called "grossly inappropriate" behavior by Woody Allen toward Dylan. Some facts that support Dylan's credibility are here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/02/woody-allen-sex-abuse-10-facts

Let me just say, few things have made me as angry as the McMartin case, as well as other cases of false accusation such as the Friedmans, the West Memphis Three, etc. - and I think it's very, very important that we always remember those terrible events. But to exploit what those people suffered to prop up a lowlife scumbag like Woody Allen is truly sickening.

[question everything]

3. Thank you for a very detailed resposne

You obviously are familiar with this field.

I would not say that Mia Farrow is crazy, but I am having hard time with "celebrities" like Mia Farrow, Angelina Jolie and Madonna who collect children - biological and adopted - like a bracelet charms. Apparently she is not even sure who is the father of one of her children, perhaps Frank Sinatra, she said.

I would like to think that all of these children have loving home where all they needs are met. And yet..