Mira Sorvino Apologizes to Dylan Farrow For Working With Woody Allen
LatestThough Harvey Weinstein and an astonishing number of alleged abusers are falling in entertainment and media, Woody Allen has largely escaped critique from the people who have worked with him. His alleged victim, daughter Dylan Farrow, has asked why the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up hasn’t encompassed her story; it’s starting to.
On Tuesday, director and actress Greta Gerwig released a statement on having worked with Allen in 2012, after facing a number of questions about it from the press while promoting her film Lady Bird. She apologized to Farrow for increasing “another woman’s pain.” Farrow appears to have accepted the apology:
On Thursday, Mira Sorvino, who discovered that her own career was stymied by Weinstein in retribution for rejecting his sexual advances, offered her own apology to Farrow in an open letter on HuffPost. Sorvino writes that this is just the first of “several apologies” she will be making, and includes Allen’s former wife Mia Farrow in the number of people she regrets disbelieving.
At the time she filmed Mighty Aphrodite, Sorvino says that she was young and willing to believe that the accusations against Allen were trumped up because of an ugly custody battle. She explains that she grew up worshipping Allen, which she says is not a “justification, simply a description of my background with Woody at that time and since.”
Eventually, she writes, when speaking to Ronan Farrow for the Weinstein exposé, she asked for more information on Dylan’s case, and he directed her to “publicly available details of the case” which she admitted she’d been unaware of. After reading them, Sorvino came to believe Farrow’s story:
I am so sorry, Dylan! I cannot begin to imagine how you have felt, all these years as you watched someone you called out as having hurt you as a child, a vulnerable little girl in his care, be lauded again and again, including by me and countless others in Hollywood who praised him and ignored you. As a mother and a woman, this breaks my heart for you. I am so, so sorry!
We are in a day and age when everything must be re-examined. This kind of abuse cannot be allowed to continue. If this means tearing down all the old gods, so be it. The cognitive dissonance, the denial and cowardice that spare us painful truths and prevent us from acting in defense of innocent victims while allowing “beloved” individuals to continue their heinous behavior must be jettisoned from the bottom of our souls. Even if you love someone, if you learn they may have committed these despicable acts, they must be exposed and condemned, and this exposure must have consequences. I will never work with him again.
Farrow appears to have accepted Sorvino’s apology:
Previously, The Tick’s Griffin Newman came forward to say he regretted working with Allen, and donated his salary from Allen’s film to RAINN; Ellen Page has admitted that working with Allen was an “awful mistake.”