In 2014, there was a hashtag on Twitter #IbelieveDylanfarrow. She had written an open letter detailing allegations of being abused by her father Woody Allen. I wrote at the time that I was “inclined to stand alongside Dylan’s howl of pain” but was concerned that opinion was being tweeted as fact and worried that the rush to judgment may end up not helping victims of sexual abuse in the end.
Today, if I was so inclined, I would use the hashtag #IbelieveMosesFarrow. Moses has written a weary and disturbing blog about the physical and emotional abuse he says he suffered as a child. But he claims that the abuse came from his mother, Mia Farrow. He says Dylan was not abused by his father, rather that she was coached from a very young age into making these allegations. Mia Farrow has responded by saying: “Moses has cut off his entire family – it’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up. We all miss him and love him very much.”
Morally, Allen certainly betrayed the family through his relationship with Soon-Yi, Mia’s adopted daughter, said to have started when she was 20. This relationship broke boundaries and trust but it is not illegal. Moses writes that Satchel (who would later change his name to Ronan) was only four when he would announce to a nanny “My sister is fucking my father” so often did Mia repeat this. Allen’s penchant for much younger women, “evidenced” by his films, meant that when Dylan Farrow alleged he had sexually assaulted her, Allen was seen as a paedophile who had also groomed Soon-yi.
Though the abuse claims against Allen were not upheld in court, his reputation has been destroyed. At the time of the custody case, the judge said: “I am less certain … that the evidence proves conclusively that there is no sexual abuse [of seven-year-old Dylan].” He also damned Allen’s parenting skills.
Ronan Farrow has always supported his sister and his mother, and has gone on win a Pulitzer prize for his work exposing allegations of sexual assault and harassment against Harvey Weinstein. There is no doubt that this has been brilliant, and he is partly responsible for the #MeToo movement.
Now though, Moses Farrow is deemed “dead” to his sister Dylan for saying #MeToo . He is also a victim, this time allegedly from his mother. The whole sorry mess shows how several truths may coexist in families.
Moses writes of the darkness in Farrow’s family: Mia’s brother who molested children, another uncle who killed himself. There is also the the suicide of his adopted brother Thaddeus. Another sister, Lark, died in her 30s from pneumonia after contracting HIV. He talks, as he has before, of Mia’s rages, physical violence and bitterness. In his version, the adoption of seven children from completely different cultures looks like skewed egoism.
His entire experience of childhood sounds traumatic, and the interplay between trauma and memory is immensely complicated. Survivors of sexual and other abuse often experience dissociation and then begin to gradually disclose. Moses doubts Dylan’s version of events, and now we have these competing narratives of victimhood.
It is possible to believe that Dylan believes she was abused. It is possible to believe that Moses is telling his truth too – that these children were both the collateral damage of a custody battle between adults neither of whom seem to have a clue actually how to be a parent in the first place. There are myriad violations and alleged violations here. Allen violated the family for sure.
Mia had violated Dory Previn’s trust when she had an affair with a much older André Previn. She had, at 21, married a 50-year-old Frank Sinatra so knows a thing or two about age gaps in relationships. None of this is to excuse anything, it is simply to point out all this dysfunction. In families where sexual abuse happens , it is indeed common for siblings to have entirely different accounts of what took place.
Disgust at Allen’s behaviour has lead him to being described a paedophile and predator. Legally this is not the case, as painful as it is to read Dylan’s story. In Moses’s quiet and resigned account, his childhood seems to have equally painful, with sides having to be taken so young.
The truth, as far as we can know, is that damage was inflicted on all these children, and that there may have been more than one type of abuse.
Such complexity may be too much for hashtag justice, but again it is not uncommon to encounter multiple levels of betrayal when family history starts unravelling. That this is played out in the court of public opinion makes it even more dysfunctional.
But once again I want to listen to the victims, even when they contradict each other. We owe children that. That there is more than one truth may be unbearable to live with, as it is appears to be for these children of this pair of extreme narcissists. How desperately sad for all of them.