I don’t know if Woody Allen molested Dylan or not, and neither do you. I keep going back and forth on whose story is more believable. But we can we agree that he is a pervy dude against who the accusations are at least plausible, even if Mia Farrow is a screwball? Here is his NYTimes self-defense, if you want to read it (and you should, if you care about this case). Here is Maureen Orth’s not-so-fast-Mister piece in Vanity Fair, which includes this:

7.   The Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sex Abuse Clinic’s finding that Dylan had not been sexually molested, cited repeatedly by Allen’s attorneys, was not accepted as reliable by Judge Wilk, or by the Connecticut state prosecutor who originally commissioned them. The state prosecutor, Frank Maco, engaged the Yale-New Haven team to determine whether Dylan would be able to perceive facts correctly and be able to repeat her story on the witness stand. The panel consisted of two social workers and a pediatrician, Dr. John Leventhal, who signed off on the report but who never saw Dylan or Mia Farrow. No psychologists or psychiatrists were on the panel. The social workers never testified; the hospital team only presented a sworn deposition by Dr. Leventhal, who did not examine Dylan.

All the notes from the report were destroyed. Her confidentiality was then violated, and Allen held a news conference on the steps of Yale University to announce the results of the case. The report concluded Dylan had trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. (For example, she had told them there were “dead heads” in the attic and called sunset “the magic hour.” In fact, Mia kept wigs from her movies on styrofoam blocks in a trunk in the attic.) The doctor subsequently backed down from his contention.

The Connecticut state police, the state attorney, and Judge Wilk all had serious reservations about the report’s reliability.

8.   Allen changed his story about the attic where the abuse allegedly took place. First, Allen told investigators he had never been in the attic where the alleged abuse took place. After his hair was found on a painting in the attic, he admitted that he might have stuck his head in once or twice. A top investigator concluded that his account was not credible.

The most powerful thing I’ve read yet about this mess is this essay, called “Brainwashing Woody,” which analyzes Woody Allen’s statements about this case over the years, and shows pretty conclusively that he may or may not be a molester, but he is certainly a weirdo and manipulator whose word should be greeted with intense skepticism. Excerpt:

Our choices are few: we can either accept that everyone in this case—Moses, Dylan, Ronan, Mia, Soon-Yi, and Woody—are of sound mind and able to speak competently, OR we can decide that Mia and Woody are masterminds who use their children and the press as pawns and puppets. What we absolutely cannot do, as a culture, is unthinkingly accept Allen’s premise that only Mia is capable of being manipulative, that only Mia uses powerful magic to make all her children (including Satchel when he was a subverbal infant) hate the other side. What we can’t do as a culture is scrutinize the testimony of a seven-year-old for minor inconsistencies while a rich and powerful man who admits to an organized pattern of lying over a period of six months and routinely contradicts himself—on the record, no less—goes unexamined.

Seems to me that the one thing we can all agree on is that Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (who now says that her son Ronan was probably not fathered by Woody, but by elderly Frank Sinatra, who was married to Barbara Marx when she allegedly had sex with him) are both wealthy celebrity narcissists who had no business being parents. I feel sorry for all those kids, growing up in that house, around such egotists.