Wolff: Does media protect celebs charged with abuse?
Ronan Farrow, the NBC newscaster and personality, son of Mia Farrow, and estranged son of Woody Allen— although his mother says he may actually be Frank Sinatra’s son — charged last week that the media conspires to protect celebrities who are accused of sexual abuse.
The immediate issue was a publicity interview Woody Allen gave to The Hollywood Reporter about his new film Café Society that premiered last week at the Cannes Film Festival. (I’m both a friend of Allen’s and his wife Soon-Yi Previn and a regular columnist to The Hollywood Reporter.) In this interview, only passing reference was made to the 23-year-old allegation, vehemently and categorically denied by Allen, that he molested his then 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan. This charge was revivified two years ago by Farrow, his mother and his sister, angered that Allen’s film Blue Jasmine received several Oscar nominations without apparent taint from the 1993 scandal.
Ronan Farrow, offered the opportunity by The Hollywood Reporter to comment on Allen’s interview, was, ostensibly, not rearguing the merits of his sister and mother’s allegations. His point, instead, was to charge the media with a collective refusal to represent the voices of abuse victims, particularly those claiming to have been abused by celebrities. His charge had the immediate effect of attracting substantial new attention in the media and, hence, more coverage of the Farrow claims against Allen.
It’s a curious inversion. Farrow’s very ability to make his argument was prompted by The Hollywood Reporter’s sensitivity to the issue and its invitation to Farrow to make his case. What’s more, stories about sexual abuse, from the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight to Rolling Stone’s botched University of Virginia report, are now the cultural signposts of a new attitude — arguably, at least in the case of the Rolling Stone story, a too-accepting attitude. Likewise, a Google search offers long lists of celebrity offenders. And in the U.K., where there is no statute of limitations, there has been a steady series of trials of celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s accused of abuse.
Farrow’s article begins with an extended recap of the media’s failings in the case against Bill Cosby. In this, Farrow makes two polemical points. The first is to remind us that Cosby was long immune to media criticism. Pay no attention to the fact that Cosby has, after the fiercest sort of media opprobrium, become a hopeless pariah. Farrow’s second point is to associate Allen with Cosby. And yet, other than their cultural icon status, there is no commonality at all between what many different women have accused Cosby of doing, and what Allen, in the midst of a bitter domestic breakup, was accused of.
Farrow’s larger systemic point is that celebrities, because of their inherent power and unseen resources, have a pervasive and insidious control of the media. It’s a kind of conspiracy theory, or at least populist view of the power of elites. Like most such theories, it’s partly true, and yet not true at all. Power in media as in politics is often quite through the looking glass — little is what it seems. The illusion of top-down media power is in fact often used as a straw man for those busily taking that power.
The 80-year-old Allen might once, in another time, have been a savvy media player. But now, ever-strafed by the media, he lives a life carefully removed from it, as remote as anyone I know. He may be my only acquaintance with whom I don’t talk about the media. While he still makes a movie a year, he does it with little apparent concern for how it is received, acquitting himself of only the most formal press obligations.
Farrow, on the other hand, is in the prime of his media life. Indeed, it was the revival of the Allen-Farrow story in 2014 that helped turn Ronan into a celebrity — aided by his mother’s suggestion of his Sinatra paternity in a Vanity Fair article that was in turn driven by Mia Farrow’s willingness to revisit the 1993 case. The story was then further energized by her friendship with the journalist Nicholas Kristof, who used his column in The New York Times to re-air Dylan Farrow’s charges.
At the time, I wrote about what I saw as a media predisposition toward victimology in a column for the Guardian that caused great consternation there precisely because of what the Guardian describes as its “victim sensitivity.” Hence, I had to remove the word “victimology,” on the grounds that it might cause offense to victims, as well as any negative characterizations of the accusers. Similarly, at Vanity Fair, where I long worked, I was on many occasions privy to discussions with editor Graydon Carter about his relish of celebrity dysfunction and, once, a chortling session about Allen’s predicament — and, certainly, the magazine has benefited from Mia Farrow’s willingness to retry the case against Allen in its pages.
Indeed, it would take a particularly doctrinaire victims’ rights professional not to conclude that it’s actually the diametric opposite point to Ronan Farrow’s argument that’s true. Whatever view the media might have taken in the past, now it loves stories of celebrities and purported victims. It’s a bread and butter genre, one that throws every accusation into a common pot.
The Allen case is replete with exceptional circumstances. This includes the terrible domestic situation from which they arose, Mia Farrow’s own family history (her brother is in jail for abuse), that Allen’s accusing son may not be his son, and the odd fact that Dylan Farrow, emerging after 21 years to make her accusations in a blog post, has otherwise stayed silent and invisible, while her case is publicly pursued by her celebrity mother and brother. But all of this takes a back seat to the imperative that the media, urged on by the social media mob, must give the accuser quite a credulous fealty.
In the end, that’s Ronan Farrow’s point. He believes absolutely, and therefore can’t fathom that there is any logic why everyone else should not believe absolutely, too.