Many Hollywood stars will be wearing black to Sunday’s Golden Globes in solidarity with the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements — but the awards show hasn’t always been a forum for addressing sexual predation in Hollywood.
Dylan Farrow on speaking out against Woody Allen: “I thought things would change”
Prior to the Golden Globes, Farrow tweeted about #TimesUp, #MeToo, and believing there’s “a brighter future ahead.”
Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
And in a series of tweets on Sunday morning, Dylan Farrow — who protested the Golden Globes four years ago when they honored her father, Woody Allen, with a lifetime achievement award — noted that fact:
Farrow’s tweets are part of a growing chorus of voices against Allen in the wake of revelations about systemic sexual predation in Hollywood.
Farrow first accused Allen of sexually molesting her in 1992, when she was 7 years old. The accusation came early in a long custody battle between Allen and Farrow’s mother, Mia Farrow. The couple never married but had adopted two children together, Dylan and Moses. They also had a biological son, Ronan Farrow, who is now one of the investigative reporters who helped bring to light accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein.
Dylan Farrow’s accusations kicked off years of controversy and acrimonious accusations against Allen, complicated by the fact that Allen left Mia Farrow for one of her other children, her daughter Soon-Yi Previn, and married Previn in 1997.
Those accusations died down after the custody battle ended, but were revived after the Golden Globes honored Allen with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2014. In response, Dylan Farrow wrote a blistering open letter, published on February 1, 2014, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, that not only reinforced her allegations from 1992 but called out those who continued to work with her father:
What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?
Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.
Dylan Farrow, along with her brother Ronan, has continued to speak out against Allen, most recently in a December 7 LA Times op-ed entitled “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?”
And she isn’t alone. Though some of Hollywood’s most well-known actors have continued to defend or at least remain neutral on Allen — most notably Kate Winslet, during the press tour for Allen’s latest eyebrow-raising film Wonder Wheel — a small but steady stream of people has recently begun to speak publicly about Allen, with some expressing remorse over working with him.
Several actors have made statements about their work with the director. In October, Griffin Newman, who appears in Allen’s upcoming 2018 film, voiced his regret and pledged his salary to RAINN, an organization that works to combat sexual assault and violence. In November, Ellen Page called her work with Allen on his 2012 film To Rome, With Love one of her “biggest regrets.” And on January 6, David Krumholtz tweeted that working with Allen on Wonder Wheel was “one of my most heartbreaking mistakes.”
Krumholtz’s confession came in the wake of a searing piece by the writer Richard Morgan, published in the Washington Post on January 4, that detailed a pattern of obsession with teenage girls in the writings in Allen’s archives.
In her pre-Golden Globes tweets, Farrow voiced both support for the #TimesUp movement and hope that this time, efforts to fight harassment and abuse in Hollywood will matter — that change is truly coming to Hollywood.
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