Celebrity gossip can be terrifying

A couple of months ago I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a post by Chris Ryan about Woody Allen, who has lived under the shadow of child sexual abuse accusations since 1992 (almost 30 years as of this writing). This was never a case that I was terribly interested in, but I knew in a general way that Allen had been long ago convicted of Doing Bad Shit in the court of public opinion. So I was a little surprised by what Ryan said.

Then a couple of days later he posted a link to a blog post by Moses Farrow which discussed the whole sordid story in detail and rejected all of it.

Moses Farrow's blog is here. 

Why do I call it "terrifying"? Because for years I lived in fear of Wife making exactly the same kinds of accusations against me, and in fear of her getting away with it. Maybe I had a warped notion of how the legal system worked, but it was not until I finally got my own attorney that I could even imagine that the Court might not automatically take Wife's word against mine, or that reason and evidence might stand a chance against her self-proclaimed identity as a Woman Abused. I don't know where I picked up these ideas: maybe from the Internet, maybe from listening to my father's troglodytic opinions on sexual politics, maybe just from my own generic insecurities. No idea, really. But this is part of why I wanted us to stay out of Court when we separated, even though by then I was a lot more confident in my ability to survive the process.

At one point Wife did tell her pastor and a teacher at the boys' elementary school that she thought I was too violent with them. The case got referred to a local Social Services office (I don't remember the exact department name after all these years), so that she and I had to make an appointment to go sit in someone's office and explain What Really Happened. She had based the whole story on some event that really had taken place a few days ago, though she had twisted elements of it to make it sound far worse than it really was. I described what happened, she didn't contradict me, and the official dismissed the whole event with a vague irritation as clearly not having been worth the time and effort. 
 
I don't know if she was trying to play some kind of three-dimensional chess by getting my name on a record somewhere so that she could use it against me later? Or maybe she didn't even know why she did it? Honestly I don't know. If she had really believed the children were at risk, surely she would have made some objections when I described what really happened in a way that exposed how small a molehill this really was. Wouldn't she?

I also remember that one time when the boys were playing with her very rambunctiously she got a bruise on her stomach from one of them careening headlong into her. She took a Polaroid photo of the bruise right away and kept it in her dresser. Whenever I asked why she gave an answer that told me nothing. I always assumed she was going to claim I had hit her and that she had the photo as proof.  

In any event it seems like she stopped trying to build this kind of a case against me after the night she was arrested. That whole business cost us lots of money, but if it made her decide there was no point in trying to make me look bad, I suppose that was an unexpected benefit. 

I've wandered a long way from talking about Woody Allen. As I say, I was never very focused on the story in the first place. But reading Moses Previn's blog was terrifying in retrospect, for much the same reason that I found "Gone Girl" so scary. And I guess I'm grateful that Wife never actually did any of those things to me in real life. For whatever reason ....