Fathers and daughters: Woody Allen's abuse

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

There is no room for sarcasm or double entendres or psychoanalytical babble with this one. Woody Allen is slime. End of story.

If Allen, who is proof positive that long-term analysis is lethal to mental health, had fallen in love with some youngster he met on a playground, it would be one thing. An aberration, perhaps. Distasteful. Definitely irresponsible. But young girls are exploited by old men every day. The world would have yawned at the news.

But the fact that Allen has professed his passion for a child he raised, for a child who thought of him as a father, a child he cared for since she was in first grade - he must have read her stories, must have tied ribbons in her hair - makes him worse than a dirty old man.

It makes him a sexual abuser.

"Regarding my love for Soon-Yi," Allen announced this week. "It's real and happily all true. She's a lovely, intelligent, sensitive woman who has and continues to turn my life around in a wonderfully positive way."

This "woman" who has turned his life around (how old is this cliche?) is between 19 and 21. She was adopted by Mia Farrow and then-husband Andre Previn and arrived from Korea without a birth certificate so no one is sure of her exact age.

This "woman" was introduced to Allen when she was around seven, when her mother began a 13-year relationship with Allen.

This "woman" graduated from high school just last year.

This "woman" who looks like a child is a child who has been exploited by a 56-year-old man who for all intents and purposes is her father.

He was supposed to guide her. He was supposed to protect her, not seduce her. He was supposed to love her, not lust after her.

But this man, who is a charmer, a writer, a director, a hot shot with words who has made millions manipulating people's thoughts and feelings, manipulated her thoughts and her feelings, too.

Incredibly, Allen stands in the spotlight dry-eyed. He isn't sorry for what he's done. He isn't begging the public's forgiveness. He is looking for and expecting understanding. He seems to believe he has done nothing wrong.

"This is what people who are in love do. You love Daddy, don't you?" the father-abuser whispers as he sneaks into his daughter's bedroom, as he crawls into her bed. "Your mother doesn't understand me. Your mother doesn't give me what I need. But you do. You're daddy's little girl. You'll always be my little girl."

And because the child loves her daddy, she believes what he tells her. She believes that her daddy would never hurt her, would never leave her and would do anything wrong.

How, I wonder, is this any different from what Allen has done?

He claims he fell in love with Soon-Yi only after he and Farrow started having problems - not when she was eight but when she was 18. "The one thing I have been guilty of is falling in love with Miss Farrow's adult daughter at the end of our own years together."

How civilized. How modern. I guess having been told this we're supposed to understand.

Are we to understand, too, the nude photos of Soon-Yi Farrow found in the child's bedroom? They were taken in Allen's New York apartment. Are we to conclude that these are yet another manifestation of Allen's love?

The focus of the stories in newspapers and on TV is whether this flagrant abuse of a child is an example of life imitating art or art imitating life. Will Allen's new film "Husbands and Wives" - a movie about a college professor, played by Allen, who falls in love with a 19-year-old student - be helped or harmed by this shocking revelation? This seems to be the burning question.

It shouldn't be. Even in a world as immoral as ours, there should be a trickle of outrage, a flutter of condemnation.

For this isn't a make-believe story about a professor lusting after a student. It's a real life tragedy about a father exploiting a child. Allen isn't a love-struck kid. He's a manipulative egomaniac whose actions should be denounced and whose film should be shunned.