Home » Weinstein unveiled: what the Farrow article reveals

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Weinstein unveiled: what the Farrow article reveals — 19 Comments

  1. Allen didn’t just have sex with Ronan’s sister Soon-Yi when she had barely reached the age of legal majurity (he later married her), resulting in enormous family upheaval and estrangement, but Farrow’s sister Dylan has alleged…

    „Alleged“ means: it may be true (so says Dylan’s brother Ronan), it may be not true (so says Dylan’s brother Moses). If not, then Allen did just have sex with Ronan’s sister Soon-Yi when she had barely reached the age of legal majurity.

  2. zat:

    I am writing to explain Ronan’s motivation, and he most definitely believes the allegation is true. That’s the point of my bringing it up; it’s his point of view that concerns me here.

    But as for whether it actually is true or not, see this previous post of mine on the subject.

  3. Good for Ronan Farrow.

    Now that Harvey has been discredited, let’s discredit his political beliefs starting with global warming.

  4. The Weinstein affair just shows how horrible and corrupt the liberal establishment is starting with the media and ending with the politicians. The Clintons are Exhibit A.

  5. I want to know where the talent’s agent was in all this. Because the agent is generally like a father-figure or mother-figure to the talent (actor or actress) and every nuance of which way the wind is blowing is confided — there are no secrets here.

    To what extent would an agent pimp the talent to Harvey Weinstein, so that the actress knew very precisely what might be involved in a meeting with HW?

    I don’t trust Ronan Farrow here as any kind of objective observer one tiny bit.

  6. Ronan sees this as a career opportunity for him. He “wrote” (or had ghostwritten) an article vs Woody Allen that led directly to him getting his own MSNBC show — where he failed. He was terrible. He was tongue-tied, froze on camera, etc.

    Now he has another shot.

  7. I thought this story reeked of power politics from the beginning. And then there was Weinstein’s response that he is now going to commit himself to destroying the NRA. ??? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

    Then I saw this.

    Rabbi Spero believes this is all about Weinstein’s support of Israel and their strong national defense. He had also intended to make a period film about the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and its people, based on Leon Uris’ “Mila 18” book. The film would have emphasized the Jews lack of weapons.

    Could Weinstein have made an oblique comparison between Warsaw Jews fighting Nazis and Israel fighting Hamas etc.? Oh, the horrors!

    Rabbi Spero wonders if the NYTimes and others have been accumulating a “dossier” on Weinstein over the decades in the hopes of keeping him in line.

    So now Weinstein has been ousted from his company and can’t or won’t make his Mila 18 film. AND he will help take down the NRA, because self defense is not an individual right, dontcha know. It’s only the right of a well regulated community militia. (If that.)

    Couldn’t care less about what happens to a pig like Weinstein, BTW.

  8. miklos:

    I have little doubt that Ronan sees this as a potential career-making article that stands to benefit him personally. But I believe that’s only one of his motives. His other motive—and the thing that drives him the most—is outrage at what happened to his mother and his sister Dylan, and to the family in general, at the hands of Woody Allen, and at Allen’s shrugging it off and most of Hollywood’s shrugging it off.

    Also, Farrow did not make these stories about Weinstein up. He got people to go the record, names and all. I think their stories have the ring of truth, and I don’t necessarily reflexively think that with such stories. I’m well aware that false accusations sometimes occur. But I don’t think these are false.

    If you want to see how Ronan feels about Allen, see this from May, 2016:

    Being in the media as my sister’s story made headlines, and Woody Allen’s PR engine revved into action, gave me a window into just how potent the pressure can be to take the easy way out. Every day, colleagues at news organizations forwarded me the emails blasted out by Allen’s powerful publicist, who had years earlier orchestrated a robust publicity campaign to validate my father’s sexual relationship with another one of my siblings. Those emails featured talking points ready-made to be converted into stories, complete with validators on offer – therapists, lawyers, friends, anyone willing to label a young woman confronting a powerful man as crazy, coached, vindictive. At first, they linked to blogs, then to high-profile outlets repeating the talking points – a self-perpetuating spin machine.

    The open CC list on those emails revealed reporters at every major outlet with whom that publicist shared relationships – and mutual benefit, given her firm’s starry client list, from Will Smith to Meryl Streep. Reporters on the receiving end of this kind of PR blitz have to wonder if deviating from the talking points might jeopardize their access to all the other A-list clients.

    In fact, when my sister first decided to speak out, she had gone to multiple newspapers – most wouldn’t touch her story. An editor at the Los Angeles Times sought to publish her letter with an accompanying, deeply fact-checked timeline of events, but his bosses killed it before it ran. The editor called me, distraught, since I’d written for them in the past. There were too many relationships at stake. It was too hot for them. He fought hard for it. (Reached by The Hollywood Reporter, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times said the decision not to publish was made by the Opinion editors.)

    When The New York Times ultimately ran my sister’s story in 2014, it gave her 936 words online, embedded in an article with careful caveats. Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and advocate for victims of sexual abuse, put it on his blog.

    Soon afterward, the Times gave her alleged attacker twice the space – and prime position in the print edition, with no caveats or surrounding context. It was a stark reminder of how differently our press treats vulnerable accusers and powerful men who stand accused.

    There’s more, but you get the idea.

    I have virtually no doubt that this was Ronan’s main motivation. In fact, it may have been not long after that that he hatched the idea of being the reporter who broke the Weinstein story, about which he’d probably already heard rumors. This was very very personal for him. Part of the piece from 2016 that I didn’t quote mentioned that he felt bad because he hadn’t pushed the Cosby story when he had a chance.

    In addition, I confess I have a soft spot in my heart for Ronan because of this quip he tweeted in response to the report that he might be Frank Sinatra’s son.

  9. Possibly, Ronan could also have been influenced by this — Woody Hits Bull’s-Eye at Miramax: After being shunned by Hollywood over a domestic scandal, the writer-director has struck a deal with the company to release his film ‘Bullets Over Broadway’:

    While Allen was shunned by Hollywood’s movie community after his highly publicized courtroom war with Farrow last year, as well as his affair with her oldest adopted daughter, it’s no surprise he would team with an unconventional company like the New York-based Miramax, which is in his own back yard and is run by the scrappy brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

    “Shunned by Hollywood means nothing to Miramax. We’re talking about a comic genius,” Harvey Weinstein said Thursday. “Chaplin was shunned by Hollywood; so were a great many other international filmmakers, including Fellini–and those are the people who belong with Miramax.”

  10. neo —

    You’re probably right and I’ve been too hard on Ronan Farrow. I had a bad reaction when I first saw him on MSNBC. I’ve never been a Woody Allen fan, and I objected to the central conceit of ‘Manhattan” (a beautiful 16 yr old madly in love with the much older, homely nebbish) and didn’t even like “Annie Hall.”

    It’s an irrational aversion, unfair to Ronan, and I should just wait and see. I once, by the way, had an interaction with Mia in which we got along very well and she did not to the tiniest degree play the star. It’s Ronan Farrow’s looks and how he talks.

    So I have an irrational factor prejudicing me.

  11. Good analogy that this was like child abuse. After reading Farrow’s article it was appalling to see this shrugged off as regular ol’ casting couch shenanigans, such as was portrayed in “Bowfinger” (where Heather Graham’s character keeps, er, rising up the Hollywood power ladder). The interesting thing will be if the Hollywood pedophiles are outed next. Maybe Farrow can set his sights on that…

  12. If I’m reading the timeline correctly, Mr. Farrow started digging into Weinstein’s past shortly after the 2016 elections.

    I can only wonder what people would have said, had revelations like these become public before the election…

    (Yes, I know. Hillary would have had one more person to blame for losing the election.)

  13. Neo,

    Re: Ronan’s tweet.

    No one can ever tell how many of the 77 Baby Boomers were conceived while an LP of Frank Sinatra’s was being played on the RCA player in the background.

  14. This isn’t even half of what goes on at Hollywood people. And for those that have been reading my comments, they can probably infer what else is going on.

  15. Excellent insights into the mind of Weinstein, and the minds of those who he abused. Adults can, out of need become like children when their careers which also define their identities of success or failure. Young actors have often tied up their identities with whether they are making it or not. Their survival needs and ego needs leave them vulnerable to a powerful Weinstein who can deny or grant them anything. AND, it may also give insight into the rampant virtue signaling and projection of Hollywood type abuse onto a Donald Trump, and the need to seem virtuous in other areas to cover up their own complicit shame and guilt.

  16. I am not a big fan of Woody Allen, but there are some important facts that seem to have been left out of this discussion.

    1. Soon-Yi is not Farrow’s biological sister, but an adopted sister. She was never adopted by WA.

    2. Mia Farrow was never married to WA. They never even lived together.

    3. In 1969, Mia herself was the younger woman who broke up a marriage; she became pregnant with twins by André Previn.

    4. Barely legal is still legal. WA and Soon-Yi got married in 1997 and are still married.

    5. Soon-Yi is on record as having enthusiastically pursued WA:

    Soon-Yi issued her own statement to Newsweek, asserting her independence, savaging Mia, and declaring, “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather–not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.” Soon-Yi declared in writing exactly what Woody had said, that Mia would have been just as upset if he had slept with “another actress or his secretary.”

    6. MF’s response was to call SY retarded:

    Mia’s family were astounded by the statement. “Soon-Yi doesn’t know half those words, what they mean,” one close to them said. Equally astonished was Audrey Seiger, who has a doctorate in learning and reading disabilities and had spent hundreds of hours tutoring Soon-Yi from the sixth grade all the way through high school. When Soon-Yi was in the third grade, her I.Q. tested as slightly below average. She went to Seiger with “very deprived early language development, which carried on throughout the years.” Seiger and Soon-Yi became close, and Soon-Yi worked very hard. “She’s a very typical L.D. kid, very socially inappropriate, very, very naé¯ve,” says Seiger, who is deeply worried about Soon-Yi today. “She has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level. She’s very, very literal and flat in how she interprets what she sees and how she interprets things socially. She misinterprets situations.”

  17. John Smith:

    No one said Mia Farrow is a model of rectitude. She certainly was a marriage-wrecker in her younger days. But that’s a far cry from what Woody Allen did; I don’t think there’s much of a comparison. Mia never took up sexually with a young quasi-stepson, for example, and she never molested a child.

    As for the “molested a child” part, please see this. I think the evidence is very strong that it’s not a false accusation, as you may see if you read the history there.

    Also, in that post, pay attention to the story about the photographs.

    Also see this.

    Woody Allen never adopted Soon-Yi (even if he’d wanted to , he couldn’t have, because she already had a living father). But he had a child with her mother (that child is Ronan, unless you believe the Frank Sinatra story), and he adopted a child with her as well (Dylan, whom he is alleged to have molested, and who I think he did molest, and with whom he had documented and witnessed-by-others inappropriate behavior). Woody and Mia were a couple for many years, with a family (and two children they co-parented), although they never married. When he took up with Soon-Yi it was a profound betrayal to the entire family, including his own children (such as Ronan!), a betrayal Woody has not only never acknowledged but which he doesn’t seem to understand as a concept.

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