Unseeing Woody Allen: A Daughter's Cry in the Glass Jar

Dylan Farrow could not unsee what happened to her.

The attic light fell like a judgment. She, a child of seven, pressed into corners where wallpaper curled like old mouths. She told her mother. She spoke. And the world hissed.

A child allegation of abuse should sound an alarm. Should be heard. Should silence the room. But instead, it raised a fist of cameras pointed it at her mother. Mia Farrow the former wife and muse of Allen, went from victim to perpetrator. It was not civil to call the child a "liar." So they attacked the mother.

Mia stood—her hair wild, her voice the trembling arc of a matchstick. She said, I believe her. And for that, they broke her on the altar of genius. In the process they emboldened the parental alienation estrangement syndrome. They named her unstable, jealous, as if a woman believing a child must first be dismissed as mad at the father. It is an old tactic. The kind mothers have worn since Salem.

Woody Allen did not need to touch the child again to erase her. He only needed to frame the mother as wretched. he was not the victim of a child, his child, he was the victim of his wife another bitter women. He found his tools of leverage elsewhere. On scripts. On stories. He conjured women with biting wit and soft tragedies, women who smoked long cigarettes and laughed through betrayal. Women who were not Mia.

Dylan sat in the silent isolation of her memories, while Hollywood handed him golden statues.

The same hands that wrapped bouquets for Allen, unsaw the ugly. They praised the work. They sang to the myth. Diane Keaton, in her black suit of praise, told the world: "Woody's women cannot be reduced to categories or clichés." But Dylan was reduced—to an asterisk, a complicated family dynamic celebrity would not speak on, a footnote in the artist's portfolio.

Scarlett Johansson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019: "I love Woody. I believe him, and I would work with him anytime." Kristen Bell, when asked about the allegations, said it was "unhealthy to personalize something you didn’t experience." Cate Blanchett, during the awards season for Blue Jasmine, responded to questions about the abuse with: "It's a very painful and complicated situation for the family."

One by one, the women stood before the cameras and peeled themselves away from the girl. Their heels clicked on the bones of someone else’s memory.

They did not defend the man directly—they defended his art. They called it sacred. They called it essential. As if cinema were holy ground and the truth too crude to touch its surface. They said, he writes women so well. As if fictional women could rise from the page and speak for him, drowning out the real one who already had.

We are forced into a false choice: choose between the art and the human man. We’re told to separate the man from the work, but the work is the man’s alibi. The art becomes the mask, the performance that shelters him from scrutiny. And because the stories were elegant, the dialogue sharp, the camera drawn to the softness of young girls, audiences convinced themselves the man behind it all must love women too.

But it wasn’t love. It was a studied impersonation of admiration that bought him time, applause, and a curtain to hide behind. Allen crafted his defense in advance, building films that showed how deeply he understood the interior lives of women—while ignoring the very real, very violated life of the girl in his own home.

When given the choice, most opt to unsee. The man is sheltered by what he makes. And those who cannot unsee—like Dylan—are treated as if they are spoiling the show.

And it wasn’t just Allen.

There was Neil Gaiman, who offered flowery defenses of a friend with long shadows. Matt Lauer, behind his morning smile and his locked office door. Roman Polanski, calling trauma an old wound while standing ovations echoed around him. Johnny Depp, forgiven mid-sentence by studio PR. Bill Cosby, whose legacy of fatherhood on television shielded decades of violence in silence. Jeffrey Epstein, who didn’t bother with art to disguise himself—he bought influence wholesale, surrounded by gilded apologists who paved the road for his kind of wealth in high places.

The names change. The strategy does not. Each time, the women are asked to choose between truth and decorum. And each time, some do not.

Were the worship of youth hung in painted images on gallery walls—long limbs, vacant eyes, the fragrance of early rot—not also an alibi? Was this not the illusion of legitimacy, the decorous shell around a hunger that devoured innocence? The artist’s gaze cast it as beauty. Society called it taste. But the truth sat quietly beneath the varnish.

And behind the varnish, a pattern. A preference for women too young to resist, a fixation on the thinness of girls not yet grown. In Manhattan, Allen's character, in his 40s, dates a 17-year-old played by Mariel Hemingway. In real life, Hemingway later wrote that Allen tried to seduce her at 18. "I wasn’t going to New York with him," she said. "I was a virgin."

The script followed him off the screen. In film after film, Allen reinforced the very stereotypes we pretend to condemn: the neurotic, self-pitying male intellectual; the much younger love interest whose appeal lies in her malleability; the older man whose transgressions are forgiven because he is clever, or broken, or merely human. In Husbands and Wives, he plays a professor who leaves his long-term partner for a student. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, moral compromise is rendered poetic, even necessary. In Annie Hall, his character treats love like a puzzle to be solved with charm, complaint, and control. His women are complex on the surface but always in orbit around the male center.

These roles did not challenge toxic masculinity and all its nuance. They performed it with sophistication and turned it into art. His male characters are allowed to be selfish, sexually insecure, and morally bankrupt—but still sympathetic. Still funny. Still the hero. The damage they do is framed as a byproduct of sensitivity. Their flaws, never too ugly to glamorize.

And the audience leaned in.

What they defended was not genius. It was the distance. The privilege of being able to unsee. To let the discomfort slide off like satin. They disassociated to protect themselves—from consequence, from grief, from implication. They floated on the fiction, while Dylan sat in the attic.

But Dylan had no curtain. She had no script. Only memory. Only the attic. Only the sound of footsteps behind her, and the knowledge that her story was inconvenient. It came at the cost of laughter. Of nostalgia. Of a genius.

He married her sister. He smiled for the cameras.

She watched from a house that did not smell of popcorn.

What is survival when it must always wear proof? Dylan spoke again. Her voice was steady. Her hands shook. The world nodded, then reached for another film. There is a theater in the mind that plays what it wants.

Let them say we protect children. Let them write it in policies, in pledges, in laws. But we protect the children who don’t name beloved men. We protect those whose wounds are polite—whose pain does not disrupt the story—and we protect the men with an artistic alibi. The ones like Woody Allen, or Marilyn Manson, whose transgressions come wrapped in dialogue and set design, who offer up their misdeeds with a clever script in hand and a film reel spinning behind them. Their crimes are softened by lighting, deflected by genius, framed as eccentricity. Their defenders call it complicated, as if complexity were a shield. We protect the ones whose brilliance distracts us, whose reputations offer a shelter from scrutiny. We protect the men whose art serves as their alibi—because the myth is easier to love than the truth is to live with. We protect the ones who don't meet the standard of Jethro Tull's Aqualung "sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls."

We abandon the victims whose stories are raw and unfiltered. The ones who bleed without a script. Whose trauma isn’t curated. Whose truth carries no soundtrack. The ones who interrupt the show, not headline it. The ones who are punished for speaking instead of praised for pretending.

Mia was burned for believing her child. Dylan was shamed for surviving.

The films remained. Framed like relics. Screened like sacraments.

This is how a culture folds itself inside out. A girl becomes a whisper. Her mother a punchline. And the man—he becomes art.

So we keep watching.

And Dylan cannot unsee. And Mia cannot forget. And the attic remains but the art. There is only the decision. Whether to watch the film. Or finally let the reel go still.