No.
Sorry.
Nice try.
Allen’s supporters might argue that editors and publicists aren’t supposed to get a say in what gets published. They are supposed to follow orders, put their consciences and morals aside, and work on what they’re told to work on.
Only people who support Woody Allen’s denial of wrongdoing against Dylan Farrow believe that a business, unless it is formed as a collective enterprise, is not a democracy, but rather a hierarchy? Where, yes, people are essentially told what to do by their bosses in exchange for money and security.
This doesn’t necessarily obviate their freedom of speech. Hachette did more than protest, however. They refused to work on the book. Possibly it was noble of the company to uphold their freedom of conscience; more likely Hachette sought to avoid potential backlash and damage to the bottom line publishing the book might entail.
To compare Hachette staff’s dilemma to construction workers denied hard hats or physicians basic protection against communicable disease is to blow proportion out of the water. It’s absurd.
They were also saying that the voices of survivors matter, and that Dylan Farrow’s voice should be heard and respected.
Their actions, along with your essay, beg the question of whether or not Dylan Farrow actually is a survivor. Like many, I’ve come to believe that the more one studies the case—the claims, the counterclaims—the less one can say for certain. Clearly Hachette employees believe Dylan.
Personally, I don’t know.
I’m pretty certain, however, that Farrow’s allegations don’t belong in #metoo. Early on you reference “backlash” against the movement. Just so. Any social movement expands to the point where its boundaries become evident—as defined by a broad social consensus: i.e. backlash. There’s an opportunistic feel about the way Farrow (both Dylan and Ronan) single out actors and filmmakers who haven’t [yet] denounced Allen and any potential future collaboration with him.
Nor does this impact her credibility. You can be a bona vide victim and also behave opportunistically.
Allen is no Weinstein or Cosby, or even Polanski. He’s closer to Ray Buckey. Remember him? At the core of the McMartin Preschool Molestation Case (which unraveled to its sordid denouement just a year or two before the Allen-Farrow case began), Buckey, despite the vast girth of accusations that swirled around him, had not been accused prior or since. The charges against him, unproven, but not decisively repudiated, left hundreds hurt, uncertain and most certainly bereft of any sense that justice had taken place. Are the McMartin kids survivors? Yes. Of something.
As is Dylan Farrow.
Bottom line, for me, is that one need not be a Woody supporter or fanboy to be troubled by the way creative talent and enterprise is being chased off him by allegations that are unproven, which is certainly not the case with #metoo’s other targets, and associations that are dubious at best.
