For some reason, New York Times book critic Janet Maslin weighed in on the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow sex abuse allegations during a panel on Thursday night. Maslin brought up Allen's "private life" during a talk about the Academy Awards at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, criticizing columnist Nicholas Kristof for publishing Farrow’s letter online, and arguing that Farrow was "calling attention to herself" due to a sibling rivalry with brother Ronan Farrow.
Gawker reports that the discussion got sparked when Maslin was talking about Cate Blanchett's Oscar hopes for Blue Jasmine. Maslin took umbrage with "a columnist who is a friend of the family" publishing an op-ed rejected by the paper: "Those columnists have a lot of freedom in what they can put into columns, but I think that was a really questionable use of that space," she reportedly said. "Anyway. Does that have anything to do with this movie? I don’t think it really does."
Then she brought up the Vanity Fair piece from the fall, the one in which Mia Farrow implied Ronan Farrow could be the son of Frank Sinatra:
One odd thing about that Vanity Fair piece, that one that ran a few months ago, was that the big news in the piece was supposed to be ‘Dylan Farrow Speaks Out’ and what happened, just purely by chance, was that the news became, 'Ronan Farrow May Be Frank Sinatra’s Son.’ And Dylan Farrow, I happen to know this through a friend very close to the story, was very unhappy that this suddenly wasn’t about her. And I think that’s that part of why she decided to start calling attention to herself.
Allen's adopted son Moses Farrow previously spoke out in support of his father, saying: "I don’t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible." Maslin noted, "no one has ever dared to consider the sibling rivalry issues in there. It’s just too much to think about."
In regards to Allen, Maslin said that he, "managed to rehabilitate himself through his work [though] he went through a very dark period creatively." In response to the comments, Maslin told Gawker, "Those comments were speculative. But I stand by what I said."
Actor and essayist Wallace Shawn also wrote a piece this week about the allegations, coming to the conclusion: "I personally would have to say that it would take overwhelming evidence to convince me that he had sexually abused a child, just as it would take overwhelming evidence to convince me that Desmond Tutu, Franklin D. Roosevelt or Doris Lessing had sexually abused a child."
