What made this moment so revelatory was not just what was being said, but who was saying it. In a world of “he said, she said”, what she said finally seemed to matter. Women were breaking the silence; women were blowing the whistles; women were telling their stories, and retelling each other’s, in the press. The two New York Times journalists who exposed Weinstein were women. Women owned this narrative…

Until they didn’t.

Men laid claim to the MeToo narrative in the way that Hemingway’s protagonist in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The shift could be observed first on social media, where men sensing the impending tectonic cultural shift began to seek firmer footing in the form of compulsive privilege-checking. They retweeted, they hashtagged, they made grovelling apologies on behalf of their sex — while also making sure to let you know that they were not among the men who needed to apologise, those troglodytes, those boors. Even the men who rushed to confess their own sins made sure to covertly congratulate themselves in the process for having always known better, been better, than the really bad guys. New York Times essayist George Yancy, suggested in an infamous piece that men atone en masse, online, under the hashtag #IAmSexist, even though “many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of”.

It’s understandable. The MeToo movement was dividing the men of the world into heroes and villains; most men, naturally, wanted to be on the right side. And in this moment, onto the national stage, the most right-sided of them all emerged: Ronan Farrow.

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Farrow was chasing the Weinstein story at the same time as the New York Times journalists, but his first report, for the New Yorker, didn’t come out until five days later. Still, he is regularly described — here in The Times of London — as “the man who exposed Harvey Weinstein”. The book he wrote about his MeToo reporting, Catch and Kill, was the same in substance if not in scale as all the men proclaiming their intent to #BelieveWomen on social media. Imagine every white-knighting male feminist ally impulse blown up to national (and extraordinarily telegenic) proportions: here was Farrow, vowing to use his position of privilege to speak on behalf of the downtrodden, to uncover injustice, and in doing so, atone for his complicity in the system that had wrecked women’s lives.

Farrow, who is gay, couldn’t claim to be a reformed cad à la the Yancys of the world, but a family connection to a famous sexual assault case — his father, Woody Allen, was accused of molesting his sister Dylan in 1992 — served the same purpose: “I once was one of those guys proximate to a woman with a claim like this saying, ‘why don’t you just shut up about it?’” Farrow said, on PBS NewsHour in 2019.

If MeToo coverage until this moment was by women, about women, Farrow injected a new perspective — and an elevated sense of drama. His reporting was very often described as “explosive”. Even as he claimed to be merely a conduit for the testimonies of courageous women, those women had a way of fading into the background of his stories, eclipsed by the jaw-dropping villainy of whichever man he accused — but also by the presence of Farrow himself, chasing leads. His quest to uncover evidence that Weinstein had hired surveillance operatives in an attempt to stop him from telling the truth is a prominent and thrilling subplot in Catch and Kill. It was all too easy to forget the female victims in the face of such a compelling narrative — one about a dogged, handsome reporter battling a conspiracy of menacing evildoers in America’s glitziest and most elite industry.

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And from this moment, what did we think of when we thought of MeToo? Something dramatic. Something sensational. Something with movie stars in it, maybe, or at least someone who hung out with them. At the beginning, the whole point of this movement — the reason why the hashtag was MeToo and not something else — was its ordinariness. Here was an indignity to which virtually all women could relate: not just the fear of being assaulted, or harassed, or propositioned, but the sense of sex looming like a shadow over their professional lives in a way that was frustrating, and limiting, and invisible to men.

But that ordinary narrative was, well, ordinary. It certainly wasn’t winning the Pulitzer anytime soon. People didn’t want the banal injustice of women’s daily lives; they wanted Harvey Weinstein, panting and whining and banging on doors like the lecherous troll in a Grimm’s fairy tale. They wanted Matt Lauer imprisoning nubile young women in his office using a secret button under his desk, like the bad guy in a James Bond movie. They wanted Brett Kavanaugh lining up to commit high school gang rape like a real-life Gossip Girl episode. They wanted larger-than-life villains committing acts of unfathomable evil — and they wanted a blond, blue-eyed Captain America of a journalist to serve them up on a platter, at great personal risk to himself. The fact that Ronan Farrow claimed to be a victim himself — not of sexual assault but of surveillance, harassment and intimidation by a powerful cabal of men who did not want these stories told — only made it that much more exciting. And the fact that these stories often turned out not to be entirely true? It hardly mattered at all.

In 2020, New York Times reporter Ben Smith wrote what remains the most definitive dissection of the inadequacies in Farrow’s reporting, noting (among other things) that Farrow had cut corners when it came to verifying stories and checking facts, and had sacrificed nuance in his reporting in order to make his stories more straightforwardly dramatic. “The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know,” Smith wrote. “Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.”

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But Farrow’s place as the poster child for MeToo reporting is about more than the siren song of shoddy journalism. It’s about what the movement could have been, and what it eventually became instead — because in hindsight, Farrow hitching his apple wagon to the star of MeToo seems like a harbinger of all the ways in which the movement would eventually fly off the rails.

There was the emergence of grifters and hucksters like the now-disgraced Michael Avenatti, who first rose to prominence as the attorney representing Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against Donald Trump, and later promulgated explosive (and ultimately discredited) allegations of gang rape by a then-teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. He was a darling of the MeToo media — until he went to prison for extortion and embezzlement. There was the way that the everyday sexism faced by working-class women in less glamorous professions vanished from the conversation, replaced by thinly-sourced celebrity gossip and first-person essays from supermodels with books to promote. There was the way that MeToo eventually came to serve as a magnet for the romantically embittered and the professionally jealous, and allegations of sexual misconduct became a magic bullet for relegating a loathed ex or competitive colleague to the fringes of society.

It’s not that Farrow is to blame for these things; it’s that where a male celebrity reporter was able to cast himself as the true protagonist of a story about women, other sorts of opportunism would invariably also find fertile ground. But it’s also telling that today, five years later, it’s hard to think of anyone for whom the MeToo movement was better — or anyone who remains more visibly connected to it — than Ronan Farrow.

Citations of his Pulitzer prize-winning journalism almost invariably fail to note that he shared the honour with the two women who exposed Weinstein in the New York Times, women who broke the story first and yet have always been a distant second to Farrow when it comes to getting famous from it. Their book about uncovering the story, She Said, did not make headlines in Hollywood Reporter for having sold 44,000 copies in its first week, unlike Catch and Kill. Their audiobook didn’t get a Grammy nomination, unlike Farrow’s (he voiced it himself). Farrow is the one being lionised in the Hollywood press as a having “ignited the movement”. He’s the one lingering in the spotlight, long after the villains have gone to prison and the victims have moved on with their lives. The only name more closely associated with the movement, ironically, is Weinstein’s.

And the ordinary women who once saw hope in MeToo, which was supposed to transcend boundaries of industry and geography, education and class? We haven’t just forgotten their names; we never knew them to begin with.

The controversy at the centre of Allen v. Farrow is a sort of zombie scandal, a story that keeps lurching back into the limelight, just when you thought it was good and dead. It stems from a now nearly 30-year-old accusation by Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who claims that Allen sexually assaulted her at her mother’s Connecticut summer home in the year 1992. The incident was notable not just for its horrifying details and famous cast, but for its existence within a second, more conventionally sordid celebrity drama. The allegations against Allen came in the midst of a messy split from Farrow, after it was revealed that he’d been having an affair with her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

While two separate investigations were launched into Allen’s possible misdeeds, it was the Soon-Yi debacle that dominated both the press coverage and public conversation when the story first hit. Even I, then a 10-year-old kid living in the boonies of rural upstate New York, remember seeing headlines about it in the Arts & Life section of the local newspaper. But by the time the case against Allen was dismissed, thanks in part to a report from the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital that determined no abuse had occurred, the public consensus was largely in his favour. Not that Allen didn’t have issues — the man had been in therapy since birth and once wrote himself into the role of a sperm, for Pete’s sake — but a paedophile? No, said the gossip hounds and film fanatics. Surely not.

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Of course, the thing about public consensus is that it’s changeable — and even malleable, if conditions are favourable and the proper pressure is applied. And while Allen continued making films, and telling stories, his accusers stood by theirs. The assault allegations first resurfaced more than 20 years later, after Allen was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Golden Globes. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof published a letter from Dylan Farrow in his column at the paper, and questioned Hollywood’s continued support of Allen: “The standard to send someone to prison is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but shouldn’t the standard to honour someone be that they are unimpeachably, well, honourable?”

In 2016, Ronan Farrow, Dylan’s brother, renewed the allegations in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. A year later, Dylan spoke out again, this time in the LA Times. The cultural tides began to turn: actors who’d worked with Allen in the past publicly denounced him; his new film struggled to find an American distributor; and the publication of his memoir was cancelled after employees at Hachette staged a walkout. (The book was eventually released by another publisher.)

And now, three years after the peak of the #MeToo movement, comes a new entry — the “definitive” entry — in the form of Allen v. Farrow. And it’s perfectly attuned not just to a changed political landscape, but a moment of cultural obsession with documentary crime series that make the audience feel like part of the story.

The Farrow camp has asked why the same movement that took down Weinstein didn’t catch Allen under its wheels, a sentiment that’s repeated in the first episode of Allen v. Farrow: “He was able to just run amok while I was growing up,” Dylan Farrow says, her voice full of incredulous frustration. The running amok in question was not criminal or even deviant — Allen is the peculiar #MeToo figure for whom only a single, isolated incident of misconduct is alleged — but it was a life, a fruitful one, and wasn’t that just as bad? If this was a story of good versus evil, Allen’s outcome was the worst sort of twist: here was a villain who not only escaped punishment but thrived in his freedom, so untouchable that not even a movement explicitly founded on the dispensation of justice for long-ago crimes could topple him. As fairytale endings go, this one positively sucked.

But in the era of Serial and Making a Murderer, this apparently glaring miscarriage of justice is the stuff prestige TV is made of — and you, the audience, are part of it. Not just watching but participating, nudging the universe another degree in its incremental path toward justice. Sometimes, the thrill is in correcting the mistakes of overzealous prosecutors, a righteous quest to free the protagonist who was found guilty, yes, but nevertheless seems innocent. But sometimes, and this is even more exciting, you get to catch the bad guy. The audience plays cop, judge, jury, and executioner. The police couldn’t punish the perpetrator, and now it’s up to us; if we all work together, we can make him pay.

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Allen v. Farrow is best understood as an attempt to draw us into a narrative that is gripping, outrageous, scandalous, horrifying, and most of all, definitive. This TV series is meant to be the final draft of Woody Allen’s biography: you’ve heard this story before, sure, but this time it’s the official version. The one you remember him by. The one that ensures that when the 85-year-old dies, his obituary headlines describe him not as Woody Allen, Oscar-Winning Director, but as Woody Allen, Alleged Child Molester. (Allen has described it as a “hatchet job”.)

It should come as no surprise that Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick are the team behind the scenes on Allen v. Farrow. These filmmakers often present the “definitive” take on issues like this, which is a nice way of saying that they flatten away the complexity and nuance of a story until what you have is a tale so one-sided, so simple, that it goes down like a communion wafer. Take it on faith. Swallow it whole. Though they bill their work as documentary, the team prides itself on not giving a microphone to whomever it plans to paint as a villain; in a screenshot of a 2013 email that has been circulating online, an associate of Ziering and Dick assures a source that she and her collaborators “do not operate the same way as journalists,” promising “no insensitive questions or need to get the perpetrator’s side.”

This full-throated commitment to incuriosity is a hallmark of Dick and Ziering’s work, which also includes the 2015 film The Hunting Ground, an examination of sexual assault on college campuses that has been broadly criticised for using discredited data and playing fast and loose with the truth. When Ziering was asked by the Boston Globe what people could do to combat the scourge of campus sex crimes, she replied, “You can believe the survivors.”

You can believe — and Ziering is here to help you do it. Her films are something beyond truth: they create the narrative that becomes the official story, drowning every doubt or alternative theory in blazing certainty. The Allen v. Farrow series promises to tell you everything you need to know about the allegations against Woody Allen, yet the information provided over four hour-long episodes points exclusively to his guilt.

What’s in the blurred-out text of the New Haven report from which only a handful of incendiary, out-of-context words have been highlighted? Why are Dylan Farrow’s allegations treated with the utmost respect, while Moses Farrow’s claims of abuse by Mia are dismissed, with a scoff, as fabrication? What was happening in the moments before and after Mia trained a camera on Dylan and asked her to describe where her father touched her? What aren’t we seeing, hearing, being given the chance to consider? Don’t ask. It’s not part of the story.

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The documentary is haunted by the spectre of recovered memory — only instead of the victim, it’s the viewing public being asked to confront the truth they’ve been hiding from all these years, to edit their understanding. It’s a tactic that has been effective, even important, for addressing past wrongs within the framework of #MeToo: to think again about that encounter that left you feeling grimy, to revisit, reframe, and ask yourself if maybe it wasn’t your fault after all. For individual women, retelling the story in a different way can be a powerful means of illuminating the grey areas between consent and coercion, or violation versus regret.

But as a means of shaping the public understanding of decades-old allegations, it feels more like propaganda pushed on us by powerful people with tons of cultural clout. Ziering and Kirby’s history of deceptive filmmaking is one thing, but even Ronan Farrow, who appears frequently in Allen v. Farrow as his sister’s staunch defender, has often blurred the line between journalism and activism in his quest to unmask MeToo’s biggest villains. Writing about the work that became Ronan Farrow’s book about Weinstein, Catch and Kill, Ben Smith at the New York Times noted, “[Farrow] delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic.”

In other words, it’s not that Ronan Farrow makes things up. It’s just that he doesn’t like to interrupt the narrative with pesky doubts, quibbles, or caveats. Like this documentary, his work favours a good story over a messy truth.

At the end of the day, Allen v. Farrow is about establishing a narrative more than it’s about changing anyone’s mind. The information it contains is the same information we’ve always had, just repackaged as brave and groundbreaking for the Serial era, in which documentaries are supposed to make a difference — and in a lost year in which the only “safe” activity is sitting at home and watching TV. In this year of no socialising, no sporting events, and very little new content as Hollywood struggles to produce amid pandemic restrictions, here is a chance to feel something. To do something. To be on the right side of history, and be a hero of sorts, instead of just watching them in reruns.

But this is a rerun, too. It’s a story we’ve all heard before, a reboot of a horror show that never should’ve been made into a tabloid spectacle the first time. And no matter how much we might like to think so, tweeting our outraged intent never to watch another Woody Allen film again will not make the world a safer, kinder place for victims of abuse, most of whom will never see their stories told once, let alone over and over. That there’s nobility, even justice, in staying in on Sunday night to watch a premium cable documentary series about a 30-year-old celebrity breakup might be the biggest lie of all.

But we don’t want to think about that. Never mind all the kids who were abused yesterday, who will be abused tomorrow. Tell us the one about the bad little man in the attic again. Maybe this time, it’ll have a happy ending.

He is, as he says, a pariah now, stalked by accusations that he sexually assaulted his seven-year-old daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992, and contempt that he married his partner Mia Farrow’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn in 1997.

The title Apropos of Nothing is typical, combining, as it does, the nihilism and pseudo-intellectualism that is Allen’s signature. Concerning Nothing would be better; I am Nothing better yet; Nothing best of all, and I will call it that for brevity and emphasis. It is an interesting book, but not a good one, especially from a man who was nominated for the best original screenplay Oscar 16 times and won it three times. It is, rather, a sullen defence filled with anecdotes without texture. For instance, Allen writes that the other great Jewish comedian, Mel Brooks, liked him. I wanted more, but perhaps Allen isn’t interested in other great Jewish comedians.

Mostly, it reads like a witness statement with digressions about Ingmar Bergman, his hero. He calls Mia Farrow a narcissistic abuser of children (she bore four and adopted 10) and writes that, had she been reasonable, the three children they shared — Dylan, Moses and the writer Ronan Farrow — would have tolerated his relationship with Soon-Yi as merely “unorthodox”.

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I gasped at that; does he have no concept of betrayal? Does he not know what he did? He calls himself a good father, although Dylan says he assaulted her, and Ronan tried to stop the publication of Nothing; the children he adopted with Soon-Yi, he says, have money hurled at them.

He is not a good father. Nothing is a work of denial and self-deception, then; of gawping at young women; of anecdotage, including a note of every suicide in Farrow’s family. His response to #MeToo is basically #WhoMe? It is pitiable: a man who spent his career analysing himself hit a dead end. He ran out.

Only rarely does something heartfelt leak out, and when it does, it feels like a mistake, a loss of concentration, for instance this: “Finally, I enter the world. A world I will never feel comfortable in, never understand, never approve of or forgive”. Forgive?

Or this: “I managed to turn out nervous, fearful, an emotional wreck, hanging on by a thread to my composure, misanthropic, claustrophobic, isolated, embittered, impeccably pessimistic”. Impeccably? These lines made me want to watch his films again, because they are more telling than Nothing, and so I did. They are 40 years of barely disguised biography in which, hiding behind the nebbish, the fool, who is his stock character and his disguise — he maims women and himself.

Everywhere, there is betrayal. He obviously wonders, in Nothing, why so few people believe he did not assault Dylan Farrow, despite two investigations which did not lead to charges. I think I know. He has been baiting his audience since Manhattan, hiding on a 40-foot screen. No wonder he has depression. Suddenly, with Soon-Yi, they knew who he was, and he wasn’t funny anymore.

Allen was the most successful comedian of the 20th century. People think he is a filmmaker, but he is really a comedian. And, in the way of comedians, his work is both a shield and a riddle waiting to be solved. Anyone who knows comedians knows that depression, not joy, is their natural state. The laughter is merely the antidote; the bigger the laugh, the greater the void. Lenny Bruce killed himself with morphine. Joan Rivers maimed her face because she thought she was repulsive.

The early films — Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Sleeper — are silly and joyful, but the protagonist is not the essential Allen. After these, he began to write more personally, to spool his neurosis into film after film; to finesse the nebbish he depends on, because the nebbish does not have to take responsibility for anything. His success was artistically a gift, but with terrible emotional jeopardy. What do you do with that kind of power to deceive?

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Here it is in Manhattan, in which he seduces 17-year old Tracy — Mariel Hemingway, speaking like a 35-year-old woman who speaks like Woody Allen (“Everyone gets corrupted”) — to praise then, and disgust now. It is in Hannah and her Sisters, which had a rare happy ending — amid the usual intimate betrayal — and in Husbands and Wives, in which he deceives the Mia Farrow character with a very young girl (Juliette Lewis) as they were breaking up in life.

In Stardust Memories, he plays a famous film maker who despises his audience and falls in love with an insane woman; his character, incidentally, lingers in front of a poster that says ‘Incest’ as he defends himself from charges that he flirted with a 13-year-old-girl. In his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanours, a respectable Jewish optometrist (Martin Landau) has his mistress (Angelica Huston) murdered. It is a rumination on guilt.

In retrospect, and only in retrospect, we see him, and it is no longer charming. It feels, rather, like another betrayal. He did covet very young girls. He did destroy his family. He plagiarised their lives. In Hannah and her Sisters, Mia Farrow’s real mother Maureen O’Sullivan played her on-screen mother as a drunken bawd. It was very close to the truth. “How can you act,” she asks, “If there’s nothing inside to come out?” I think that, for Allen, betrayal is love. That would explain why he stayed with Soon-Yi. The scope of the betrayal of Farrow nourished him.

“He always attracted to the crazies, the nutcases,” says Jack, (Sydney Pollack) in Husbands and Wives of the Allen character, “deep down somewhere he knows it’s not going to work, so he suffers and that kind of atones for some kind of early on guilt over what I don’t know”.

He writes in Nothing that his mother beat him daily, but he doesn’t dwell on it — nor did the critics, though it was the most interesting thing he wrote — and it flies away. She “always”, he writes, took the side of “anyone who hates me”.

I found the films brilliant but desolate, because a distinct post-war Jewish identity grew around Woody Allen, and it is self-hating. For a certain type of Jew, liking Allen’s work was a signal of status, and belonging. For non-Jews it signified a liking of Jews; a solidarity. This identity was born in the Holocaust, of course; he was born in 1935.

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He wrote, for me, the best line on the Holocaust in cinema in Hannah and her Sisters. “You missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz,” says Frederick (Max Von Sydow) “more gruesome film clips, more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question, ‘how could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?”

That bitterness — that truthful cynicism — is what I want to hear. I don’t want Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List crying, “one more life”, with a redemptive ending patched on because Steven Spielberg panicked.

This identity is irreligious, existing to be thwarted — secular Judaism is flimsy — which is interesting, because Allen is like that too. But there was chosen-ness of a kind. Allen’s work is filled with pseudo-intellectualism — he taught me to namedrop Freud without reading him, he taught me to betray my readers — contempt for the homely, or religious, kind of Jew (his Jews are ghastly stereotypes) and social aspiration.

He mocked the New Yorker in cinema; in life he pitched to them. He mocked Hollywood in Annie Hall; in life, he demanded to star in What’s New, Pussycat?, the first film he wrote. In Nothing he writes with pride of his penthouse in the sky. That is the reason for his infamous attachment to Manhattan. It isn’t Brooklyn, where he was born. In Venice he stays at the Gritti Palace. In Paris he stays at the Ritz. He’s like the dentist he despises. His mother wanted him to be a dentist.

The self-hatred is so obvious; why couldn’t I see it? Was I laughing? The women — the love — are always unavailable. They are drug- or sex-addicted; too remote; too crazy; too young. Even if they weren’t, he would ruin it.

In Crimes and Misdemeanours, the nebbish plagiarises a love letter from James Joyce, and I can think of nothing more pitiful from a writer. In Stardust Memories he fantasises about placing the brain of a kind, plain woman in the body of a beautiful, mad one; but, he says later, he’d want the remnants instead: the mad drab. He cannot be happy.

Stardust Memories contains, for me, his essential revelation. An alien tells him, when he says his life is meaningless: “You’re not superman, you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service, tell funnier jokes”. He used an alien for comedy, but it only exacerbated tragedy. He wanted to be a great film maker, but he remained a comedian. He collected none of his four Academy Awards. You could call it a peculiar kind of vanity, or you could call it imposter syndrome; his films leak shame. I think he is a great artist, though parochial. I am certain he would not agree.

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When I first read the Soon-Yi story, I thought he should fire his shrink. He is famously in therapy, but narcissists are almost impossible to cure. And, like a narcissist longing to be found out he has goaded his audience to know him and suffers when they do; and Nothing is his surprised post-script. “I’ve seen it all before,” says a critic in Stardust Memories, “they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art”. “The way your lead character views women,” Rain (Juliette Lewis) tells him in Husbands and Wives, “it’s so retrograde, it’s so shallow”. He kisses her on her 21^st birthday and returns to Mia Farrow.

His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing.

Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.