Woody Allen. Credit: Francois Guillot / AFP via Getty
Who remembers that Woody Allen was a stand-up comic? He told the moose joke. It was a good one. Now he is involved in something unfunny: his memoir A Propos of Nothing, which the US publisher Hachette announced they would publish next month, has been cancelled after staff walked out.
“We take our relationships with authors very seriously” said a spokeswoman, “and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard.”
She did not address the true cause of the drama: in 1992 Allen was accused of sexually assaulting his seven-year-old daughter Dylan at her mother Mia Farrow’s house in Connecticut. And Dylan’s brother Ronan, a Hachette author who has written on #MeToo, led the protests against A Propos of Nothing. The accusation was a grave one, but there were two investigations, and Allen was neither charged nor convicted. I will not detail the claims and counter claims because this column — like Twitter, like the Hachette offices — is not a court of law.
“Everybody has a right to respond to allegations against them,” said a Hachette employee, “but do we have to pay them God knows how much to do that? Everybody should take responsibility for their actions.”
That is true. I would ask Hachette staff to take responsibility for eroding the presumption of innocence, which is more precious than any empathy, however deeply imagined, because it is the active instrument of empathy. I am surprised presumption of innocence is something these obviously progressive people – they work in publishing, in New York City, after all — would wish away, and so glibly, but there you are. The law is slow to give justice, and often it fails. Twitter, of course, is not.
Allen’s critics say they do not seek to erode the presumption of innocence. They are merely seeking to deny him “a platform”. They probably think that eroding liberal institutions is something for the Trump supporters they despise. They say rather that Allen left his former partner Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter Soon-Yi, to whom he is now married, and so he should not be published, even though this behaviour, though very cruel, was not illegal. Or they say that his films — Manhattan, Husbands and Wives — sexually objectify very young women, although they seem able to tolerate this in the rest of cinema, which is no stranger to it.
But if you read Allen by his films alone, you could argue that Crimes and Misdemeanours is a call to murder your mistress and Play It Again Sam is a manifesto for only having relationships in which you consult a Humphrey Bogart impersonator for advice. You could say he wants to fill the world with giant walking breasts, as he did in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).
I do not extend this presumption of innocence to Roman Polanski, because he was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 in America and fled to Europe. He should be in prison, not making films about the Dreyfus Affair (An Officer and a Spy) or demonic books (The Ninth Gate).
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