Woody Allen’s Life Story: Canceled A publisher yields to the mob and drops a ‘challenging’ book. By Roger Kimball
https://www.wsj.com/articles/woody-allens-life-story-canceled-11583645773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
The Hachette Book Group announced last Monday that it would bring out “Apropos of Nothing,” a memoir by Woody Allen, in early April. CEO Michael Pietsch told an interviewer that the publisher “believes strongly that there’s a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen’s life as told by Woody Allen himself.”
There was also a noisy audience that didn’t—and that didn’t want anyone else to hear it either. Last Thursday Hachette employees staged a walkout to protest the book, and on Friday Hachette dropped it.
“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one,” said a spokesman for the publisher. “At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books.”
My own interest in Woody Allen is approximately zero. I used to find him funny, but the prospect of wading through “a comprehensive account of his life,” as Hachette put it, fills me with gloom. Hachette had nonetheless determined that many readers would be interested in Mr. Allen’s life story. They simply forgot to check with the feminist commissars to see if he passes muster in the age of #MeToo.
He doesn’t, owing to an accusation that is more than a quarter-century old. In 1992, amid an ugly and public romantic split with actress Mia Farrow, he was accused of inappropriately touching their adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, then 7. Connecticut State Police referred the case to the Yale New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic, which concluded that “Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”
The facts are somewhat murky. The state attorney declined to pursue the case, despite announcing that he had “probable cause” to do so. A judge denied Mr. Allen’s claim for custody, cast doubt on the Yale report, and wrote that “we will probably never know what happened,” but Mr. Allen’s behavior was “grossly inappropriate.”
Dylan, now 34, has periodically revived the charge against her adoptive father, whose biological son, Ronan Farrow, has led the charge. Mr. Farrow has also been a leading #MeToo journalist, whose recent book, “Catch and Kill,” was published by another imprint at Hachette.
“Your policy of editorial independence among your imprints,” Mr. Farrow wrote in an email to Mr. Pietsch last week, “does not relieve you of your moral and professional obligations as the publisher of ‘Catch and Kill,’ and as the leader of a company being asked to assist in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes.”
But there are no crimes, not even charges against Mr. Allen, only allegations. As the world saw during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has been replaced with “innocent until accused.”
As for Hachette, it is happy to publish “challenging” books, but only within the ever-encroaching boundaries of political correctness. Trespass on that orthodoxy and watch the capitulation begin. As Groucho Marx is supposed to have said: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them—well, I have others.”
Mr. Kimball is president and publisher of Encounter Books.
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