The Wrong Time for Moral ‘Rapid Fire’

“Of course, I did not molest Dylan. I loved her … “

In a comment published on Saturday in The New York Times, Woody Allen has denied allegations that he molested his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. The 78-year-old director’s reaction was as expected: Allen denies the 1992 incident and indirectly accuses his ex-wife Mia Farrow of having “implanted” this memory in Dylan’s mind. He also refers to the controversial report by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which established, after a more thorough investigation, that Dylan had not been abused.

Nobody will ever be able to establish what really happened in this deeply dysfunctional family, as Allen’s comment also shows. The only concrete fact in all of this is that no legal proceedings were filed against the director and that he was, therefore, never convicted of anything. This fact is all too often forgotten in the debate that has been raging over this case for the past week; sensitized by Dylan’s emotional impact, a camp of supporters eager to believe the alleged victim quickly sprang up. Opinions not based on provable facts are only legitimate in private, however. In the op-ed pages of established newspapers, even in social media, other rules should apply. Even the respected New York Times was not doing anyone a favor by publishing this family feud. All it did was give the affair a momentum, which then accelerated on Twitter and Facebook.

Now is the time to finally control ourselves and focus on the dynamics of a debate that has gotten strangely out of hand. Why is a celebrity family feud able to generate so much attention? And why do we think we have to illustrate important moral conventions using an example that offers no suitable basis for this?

One answer probably lies in the media’s focus on a celebrity society that suggests a false intimacy, and where the private and public precariously overlap. The case of the Allen-Farrow patchwork family offered the tempting front for a debate, which centered more on the defense of a politically correct fundamental consensus than on the actual accusations. Abuse scenarios are, however, much too sensitive to be used as outlets for ideological weaponry — particularly if no one has been proven guilty.