Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story: Woody Allen B.Z. (Before Zelig)

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In Scott Marks review of The Honeymooners: The Man from Space ([email protected], May 20) he asks “Please don’t hip the Republican lawmakers .. lest..(we) go the way of Dr. Seuss and Pepe LePew”. I’ll remind Scott that Dr. Seuss and Pepe didn’t become Cancel Culture “Poster Boys” until AFTER Donald Trump was Swindled out of office, AND all the Warner Bros. cartoons that have been “Politically Corrected” happened during the Clinton’s reign. Thank God for YouTube and the Banned Cartoons (record them while you can to show your children how censorship works!)

• John Richardson
• San Diego

Flaming a fan

While the rest of the journalistic world is at least finally acknowledging that there is more to Woody Allen than meets the public eye, Scott Marks is penning God’s blessings to the “hilarious” filmmaker in an article this week (“Woody Allen’s PBS mockumentary,” [email protected], June 4).

An argument could be made that Mr. Marks simply writes about art without concerning himself over the private lives of the artists. That’s fair; however, the argument fails to hold water when you read his response to a reader who can’t as easily suspend disbelief when it comes to the controversial celebrity. Rather than responding that his piece is strictly about Allen’s work, and not his personal issues, in his comment, Mr. Marks defends Woody Allen. He goes as far as to declare Allen’s innocence with a conviction that would suggest he has stood within six inches of the man, unblinking, since Allen came of age in 1953. “When last I checked, Allen has never been charged with a crime. He’s a lot of things, but a child molester isn’t one of them.”

I would like to suggest that Mr. Marks take a few moments to research child molesters and the percentage of them that actually get charged with their crimes, so he can better understand the ignorance of his statement. He might also consider researching how many Catholic priests have been criminally charged with child molestation, or how many have served time in prison. Are the vast majority of priests accused of molesting children innocent as well?

Mr. Marks is free to believe that Woody Allen isn’t a child molester. He may prefer to ignore the mounting evidence against Allen, and keep hero worshipping him in his writing. However, it is an insult to the 42 million+ survivors of sexual abuse in the United States for Mr. Marks to state definitively, even in a comment, that a man he doesn’t know, who has been credibly accused of raping a seven-year-old, is not a child molester. Not only is there evidence, eyewitness testimony and expert opinion to the contrary, the reality is that pedophiles don’t typically invite audiences to their crimes, rendering the vast majority of cases he said, child said. (That reality favors the perpetrator 100% of the time, by the way).

Unless Mr. Marks had a front row seat in the attic with Woody and Dylan, I’m not sure where his decisiveness over Allen’s innocence comes from. Surely not from the fact that Allen is a beloved celebrity; after all, if “men of God” are capable of living the double life required to violate children in this way, celebrities can’t be exempt from the possibility. Hopefully he hasn’t determined Allen’s innocence based on the fact that he wasn’t an eyewitness to the crime or because Allen has never been prosecuted—if Mr. Marks needs to physically watch child abuse happen in order to believe it occurred, or needs criminal charges to be filed against the accused in order to take a victim’s word seriously, child molesters don’t exist at all in his world.

If Mr. Marks wants to keep fan-girling over Woody Allen and write about him as though the distinct possibility that he is a child rapist doesn’t exist, that’s obviously his prerogative. But when a reader calls him out on it, he needs to do a little better than “When last I checked, Allen has never been charged with a crime.” .

• Kelly Downing
• Miami, FL