Dylan Farrow Doesn’t Get How Supporting Woody Allen is Empowering to Women, Calls Out Justin Timberlake and Blake Lively
Zack Sharf
The Time’s Up initiative made a strong impression at the 2018 Golden Globes to advocate against sexual harassment and abuse. Dylan Farrow, however, is having a hard time understanding how many actors and actresses who count themselves among the movement still believe and support Woody Allen.
Farrow has long alleged that Allen molested her as a child, and yet that has never stopped Allen from attracting the best actors in Hollywood from working with him. Even in the height of the #MeToo movement, Allen released a film starring Kate Winslet and Justin Timberlake and finished production on another movie starring Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, and Timothée Chalamet.
“I fully support women taking a stand, linking arms with other women (and men), advocating on behalf of one another to effect change not only in the entertainment industry but in the world at large,” Farrow said about Time’s Up in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “That is an admirable and worthwhile objective, I hope these women change the world. That said, the people who join this movement without taking any kind of personal accountability for the ways in which their own words and decisions have helped to perpetuate the culture they are fighting against, that’s hard for me to reconcile.”
When the Time’s Up initiative launched on January 1, many actresses who have worked with Allen were included among the signees, including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Blake Lively, Emma Stone, and Greta Gerwig. Lively has been speaking out against sexual harassment for months, but when The Hollywood Reporter asked her about Farrow’s allegation against Allen, she had this to say: “It’s amazing what Woody has written for women. It’s very dangerous to factor in things you don’t know anything about. I could [only] know my experience. And my experience with Woody is he’s empowering to women.”
Lively’s words are hard to accept for Farrow. “I struggle to understand how a woman who believes Woody Allen is ’empowering to women’ can claim the role as an advocate for women suffering from sexual harassment,” she told Buzzfeed about Lively.
Farrow also called out Justin Timberlake, who was wearing a Time’s Up pin at the Golden Globes and donated to the initiative’s legal fund. When the creation of Time’s Up was announced, Timberlake tweeted: “No more accepting sexual harassment and inequality at work as normal. It’s NOT normal.” However, while promoting his role in “Wonder Wheel” during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Timberlake said that working with Woody Allen was a “dream come true.”
“I struggle with how a powerful force like Justin Timberlake can claim to be in awe of the strength of women and stand with them at this #MeToo moment and then in the next breath say that working with Woody Allen is a ‘dream come true,'” Farrow told Buzzfeed.
In a December op-ed written for the Los Angeles Times, Farrow summed up her point quite clearly when she wrote, “Although the culture seems to be shifting rapidly, my allegation is apparently still just too complicated, too difficult, too ‘dangerous,’ to use Lively’s term, to confront,” Farrow wrote. “The truth is hard to deny but easy to ignore.”
Only a few actors have come forward in recent months to acknowledge they regret working with Woody Allen, including Ellen Page, Griffin Newman, and David Krumholtz. Greta Gerwig was asked backstage at the Golden Globes whether or not she regretted working with Allen, and she told press that she hadn’t yet “come down on one side” in terms of an answer.
