Four years ago, when Woody Allen was given a lifetime achievement award by the Golden Globes, Dylan Farrow curled up in a ball on her bed, crying hysterically. Then she wrote an open letter<\/a> for my blog (nobody else seemed to want to publish it) describing how, when she was 7 years old, Allen allegedly sexually assaulted her.<\/p>\n \u201cThat he got away with what he did to me haunted me as I grew up,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI was terrified of being touched by men. I developed an eating disorder. I began cutting myself. That torment was made worse by Hollywood.\u201d<\/p>\n We now know that Hollywood was hiding many such secrets<\/a>, and was quite uninterested in accountability for powerful bullies. After she bared her soul, Dylan was met with much \u201cvitriol and disbelief,\u201d as she put it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were days when I thought, \u2018I\u2019ve made a terrible mistake, I should never have opened my mouth,\u2019\u201d Dylan told me the other day.<\/p>\n But in the last few months, the #MeToo movement has changed that. \u201cI am so sorry, Dylan,\u201d Mira Sorvino wrote<\/a>. Ellen Page declared<\/a>, \u201cI did a Woody Allen movie and it is the biggest regret of my career.\u201d Actors are donating earnings<\/a> from Woody Allen movies to sexual assault organizations, and Amazon is said to be considering canceling its distribution of his movies.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n All this has been \u201cincredibly healing,\u201d Dylan said.<\/p>\n Frank Maco, the Connecticut prosecutor who oversaw the case in the 1990s, told me that he watched Dylan recently on \u201cCBS This Morning<\/a>\u201d and was impressed by how the little girl had grown up to be \u201cstrong and determined.\u201d He reiterated what he had said at the time: that he had probable cause to bring a criminal case against Allen (who was Dylan\u2019s adoptive father) but couldn\u2019t justify putting a fragile child through a brutal trial.<\/p>\n Maco added that both Dylan and her mother, Mia Farrow, had appeared to be honorable and truthful. \u201cMia Farrow acted as nothing more than a concerned mother,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was no indication that this was a fabricated story.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m a friend of Dylan and her family, so I\u2019m not an unbiased observer. But over the years I have reviewed the evidence, and on balance it persuades me. The most important contrary point is that an evaluation team from Yale New Haven Hospital concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan, but it was sharply criticized by other experts. Meanwhile, the New York judge in the Mia Farrow-Woody Allen child custody case ruled that although he couldn\u2019t be sure whether the sexual assault itself had occurred, \u201cMr. Allen\u2019s behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n That judge, Elliott Wilk, noted that on the day of the alleged assault, a babysitter saw Allen with his head on Dylan\u2019s lap, facing her body. A tutor soon afterward found that Dylan wasn\u2019t wearing her underwear. And nobody has explained where Dylan and Allen went when they both disappeared as the babysitter was searching for them \u2014 except Dylan, who says that that\u2019s when the assault happened.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, it turns out that Allen\u2019s private notes over the decades are \u201cfilled with misogynist and lecherous musings,\u201d showing \u201can insistent, vivid obsession with young women and girls,\u201d according to Richard Morgan, who sifted through Allen\u2019s 56-box archive and recounted his findings<\/a> in The Washington Post.<\/p>\n There is always a risk that meticulous scrutiny of a long career leads to cherry-picking and finding whatever we\u2019re looking for, especially for somebody trying to be creative and funny. I reached out to Allen through his publicist but did not receive a response. He has consistently denied the allegations of abuse, and in October he warned against allowing \u201ca witch hunt atmosphere<\/a>, a Salem atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, the certainty of the Dylan Farrow case is that there has been a gross injustice: Either an innocent man\u2019s career is being destroyed, or a victim has been unfairly doubted since she confided in her pediatrician about an assault when she was 7 years old.<\/p>\n I asked Dylan if there was any chance that this was a false memory, that she had been brainwashed.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d she said flatly. \u201cI think it\u2019s more logical almost that the people who accuse me of being brainwashed are brainwashed themselves by the celebrity, the glamour, the fantasy, the pull they have to Woody Allen, their hero on a pedestal.\u201d<\/p>\n The larger point, she said, is not her own suffering over the years, but the need to listen to victims.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where we have systematically failed \u2014 with gymnasts, with Harvey Weinstein\u2019s victims, with the Catholic Church and with innumerable girls and boys suffering anonymously at the hands of abusive coaches, relatives, family friends or bosses. One demographer\u2019s new estimate<\/a> is that at least three-fourths of women worldwide have been sexually harassed.<\/p>\n Yes, false accusations happen, and we must struggle to balance rights of victims against those of the accused \u2014 but it should be obvious now that we haven\u2019t gotten that balance nearly right. Too often, we have deferred to the powerful and doubted the weak, creating impunity and injustice.<\/p>\n The problem is not only abusers but more broadly a society that often disbelieves or scorns those crying for help, like that young woman curled up on her bed crying during the Golden Globes. I\u2019ll leave her with the last word:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat needs to change,\u201d she said, with a teary firmness that comes from 25 years of pain, \u201cis our response.\u201d<\/p>\n