http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579372971308988130?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
It’s impossible to read Woody Allen’s reply to charges that in 1992 he molested his and Mia Farrow’s 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan, without being struck by its haunting echoes of the words of countless people accused of such crimes. He had thought that the charges were so ludicrous he didn’t think of hiring a lawyer, he reported in an op-ed for the New York Times on Sunday. He had believed that “common sense would prevail.” He had “naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand.”
It was a kind of naïveté evident in virtually every person known to me who had been falsely charged in the high-profile sex-abuse cases that had swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s—people convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of testimony from children coaxed into making accusations. Accusations made, at ages 5, 6 or 7, that many of them would continue to believe fervently were true, into adulthood.
Though dazed when confronted with such accusations in 1984, the Amirault family of Massachusetts, owners of the Fells Acres nursery school, never doubted even when they were arrested that everything would soon be cleared up. Violet Amirault, school head, marveled that at age 60 she was suddenly supposed to have turned into a sexual molester of children.
It was said of Kelly Michaels, a young New Jersey schoolteacher convicted in 1987 of molesting 20 children, that it had done her no good with jurors that she had seemed calm, and lacking in urgency, as she answered questions, as though she were an onlooker at the proceedings. But what the jurors had seen—and some resented—was typical of the falsely accused, who had all led normal law-abiding lives. Many were unable to absorb the reality that they were suddenly accused of frightful crimes they could never have imagined committing.