Woody Allen by Raffi Asdourian, licensed under Creative Commons

On one summer’s day several years back, my mother and her mother took to a heated debate about Woody Allen. We were sitting on the porch of a cottage at Keuka Lake, affectionately called “the barn” since it was originally a run-down barn. My mother’s side of the family has had it in their possession for over 60 years, and visiting for at least a week has become a summer tradition. My grandmother believed that the allegations against Allen held no merit, while my mother insisted that he was guilty. She cited his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of Mia Farrow, as a questionable choice. Admittedly, taking nude Polaroids of your wife’s adoptive daughter is not a good look, even though it was consensual and Previn was 21 at the time. My grandmother responded by saying she thought he was looking for something simple, and it’s certainly clear what Allen had with Farrow wasn’t simple.

Being younger at the time, I didn’t have enough knowledge of the circumstances to weigh in myself. But I think that Dylan Farrow is telling the truth.

There is a case to be made against her, I know. There was never any rock solid evidence she was sexually assaulted by Allen. In a New York Times op-ed on February 7, 2014, he vehemently denied all of the allegations. “I hadn’t molested Dylan and any rational person would see the ploy for what it was,” he expressed. His statements hold value, as it rings true that Allen had never faced any accusations of pedophilia before or since. “I very willingly took a lie-detector test and of course passed because I had nothing to hide. I asked Mia to take one and she wouldn’t,” Allen later continued.

But what seems like conclusive evidence of his transparent honesty is not necessarily so. Scientific studies have proven polygraphs can potentially be unreliable.

Dylan Farrow had the opportunity to publish an op-ed herself. It included graphic details of the event, and rational explanations for the aftermath.

“I didn’t know that he would accuse my mother of planting the abuse in my head and call her a liar for defending me,” she stated. “I didn’t know that I would be made to recount my story over and over again, to doctor after doctor, pushed to see if I’d admit I was lying as part of a legal battle I couldn’t possibly understand.”

Mia Farrow has been accused of placing false memories into her daughter’s head, and her adopted son, Moses Farrow, described in equally graphic details the ways in which she was abusive. One description stood out in particular. “When Soon-Yi was young, Mia once threw a large porcelain centerpiece at her head. Luckily it missed, but the shattered pieces hit her legs. Years later, Mia beat her with a telephone receiver,” he recounted.

This is mostly consistent with what Soon-Yi Previn herself has said in multiple interviews with Daphne Merkin of New York Magazine. She described her adoptive mother throwing a porcelain rabbit at her, which then completely smashed into fragments. “I could see from the expression on her face that she felt she had gone too far. Because it could have really hurt me,” Previn explained.

I can’t pretend to know for sure whether that happened, even as someone who has worked at Marymount School of New York for many summers. But as both her interview and Moses’s blog post were extensive (his post was over 4,600 words and the Merkin piece clocked in at over 9,000), I would have expected all the details to add up. She didn’t once mention being beaten by a telephone receiver in any of her interviews.

That’s not to say that she didn’t simply repress that memory. But in the #MeToo movement, the pattern of “he said, she said” is all too clear, and just because an incident is isolated doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I happen to believe it did.

Daphne Merkin has been a critic of the #MeToo movement from the start, and as someone who has been a friend of Woody Allen for over 40 years, she was hardly the right choice for the article. “Some women, including random people I talk to in supermarket lines, have gone so far as to call it an outright witch hunt,” she said in an opinion piece.

I believe Soon-Yi Previn had every right to have her voice heard. But not by a source that biased.

Dylan Farrow responded herself, citing support from nearly all of her siblings. “We love and stand by our mom, who has always been a caring and giving parent,” they stated. “We reject any effort to deflect from Dylan’s allegation by trying to vilify our mom.”

Mia Farrow and Woody Allen’s biological son, Satchel, who now goes by Ronan Farrow, pointed out that The New York Times hesitantly ran his sister’s 936 word story on the blog of Nicholas Kristof. Meanwhile, when Allen responded with his op-ed shortly after, the Times gave him twice the length in a peak position of the print edition without as much reluctance.

This is not the first time Ronan, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has supported his sister Dylan. “We all grew up with offers from [Woody Allen] to speak out against our mother in exchange for support. (He made helping to pay for my college education contingent on turning against her and lying. I declined)” he said in a tweeted response to Moses’s blog post.

In spite of all of this, there’s no denying the #MeToo movement has its flaws. I think that Senator Al Franken, who was accused of sexual misconduct by 8 women, was overly vilified. No one denied he deserved to be held fully accountable for his actions, not even the senator himself. But forced resignation and aspersions on the level he received when our commander-in-chief, who faces many more serious allegations, remains in office? In an interview with ABC, Matt Damon said “There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he asserted. “Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?” He then received a huge wave of backlash, to the extent that he felt obligated to apologize for those remarks.

I don’t think he was wrong in what he said. There is a difference, and as citizens it’s our job to come to terms with the difference. If we consider one equivalent with the other, we’re telling legitimate rape victims and children who were molested that what they experienced is no worse than a pat on the butt. Maybe as someone who has never experienced any real form of sexual harassment or assault myself, I don’t have a right to say that. But sadly, I have friends who have experienced everything on the spectrum from catcalling to rape as a child. And I don’t think those friends would tell me the levels of trauma are the same.

In the case of Woody Allen, the evidence as I see it isn’t in his favor. Maybe I would’ve said something different if I were presented with only his side of the story all those years ago back at the barn. But almost every day, we see more allegations come out against people we never believed would do those things. No one believed Neil DeGrasse Tyson drugged and raped Tchiya Amet El Maat in 1984 when she came out and accused him in 2010 because there was no clear pattern there, and now other women are coming forward with allegations against the renowned astrophysicist. He released a lengthy statement welcoming an investigation, denying that he ever raped her, and suggesting that she might have had a “false memory.” Sound familiar? I never wanted to believe any of this was true of any of these people, least of all Tyson, who I have respected and held in the highest regard for many years. But just as a pat on the butt isn’t the rape of a 7-year-old girl, wanting to believe and truly believing are two different things.