Richard Cohen Goes Full Rape Apologist

[Content Note: Rape apologia.]

Richard Cohen, in his continuing bid to be the country's most contemptible columnist, goes full rape apologist in his latest column, accusing the New York Times of "rushing to judgment" against Woody Allen. This is the actual opening paragraph:

The defenestration of Woody Allen started Feb. 2 with a column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. He began by saying all the right things: that allegations against Allen of sexually molesting Dylan Farrow, the 7-year-old daughter of his onetime companion Mia Farrow, had never been proved and that Allen "should be presumed innocent." Then Kristof threw Allen out the window.

Cohen thinks that undermining a survivor in the introduction to her first-person account of abuse is "saying all the right things." Of course he does.

He spends the rest of his column regurgitating indecent (and mendacious) apologia, getting paid for collating the greatest hits of Woody Allen's Twitter Apologists and calling it a column. He goes after Ronan Farrow for believing his sister, and draws an utterly absurd equivalence between himself and Dylan Farrow's own brother:

I am not here today to settle the matter. I have no idea what happened, but neither does Ronan Farrow, the child of Farrow and Allen and soon to be an MSNBC television host, who has gone after Allen with the Twitter version of an ax. Ronan Farrow's sincerity is not in doubt. But he was not present when the alleged crime took place, and he was a mere 4 at the time.

Oh my god. OH MY GOD.

And then he ends the mountainous heap of rank apologia thus:

The paper permitted a columnist to settle the functional equivalent of a personal score. He did not uncover a shred of new evidence; he did not provide us with a unique take on the matter. He simply believed his two friends, Dylan's mother and brother, and so, for a moment, did I. His was a powerful piece.

It's hard to imagine a more odious crime than child molestation. It's hard also to imagine the mortification of those falsely accused of it. If the Times thinks it has made matters right by printing Allen's rebuttal, it is both naive and wrong. It may or may not owe Allen an apology, but it owes one to its readers.

Richard Cohen says he has "no idea what happened" and isn't "here today to settle the matter." But he's sure that Allen has been falsely accused and that the New York Times owes their readers an apology.

(The Times does owe their readers, and Dylan Farrow, an apology—though not for the reasons Cohen imagines.)

Cohen is hardly the first person to call Allen's rebuttal "persuasive." Which is a subjective term. It is not persuasive to me, but then I'm not looking to be persuaded. Many of the people who are saying in Serious Tones that Allen's piece was persuasive are people who just needed anything that sounded like a vaguely coherent denial in order to breathe a sigh of relief that their favorite filmmaker isn't a sexual predator.

And I'm sure many of the people who found Allen's piece persuasive weren't consciously seeking to be persuaded, either—but found themselves persuaded all the same. Which is maybe because Allen's piece neatly hits all the points for which rape culture narratives prepare us: It just sounds so gosh darn reasonable to someone who hasn't spend a moment deconstructing how this shit works to subvert our critical thinking around sexual assault.

But, in any case, here's the thing about being persuaded: Predators are persuasive. They are extremely adept at convincing people of their innocence, even when they aren't famous auteurs surrounded by people who want to believe they're innocent. That one finds Woody Allen, or any other accused predator, "persuasive" constitutes exactly zero evidence of anything. Except your willingness to be persuaded.

What does it even mean to say that Allen's account is "persuasive"? It means that Dylan Farrow's account was not, for one thing. And it means that the person who found it persuasive imagines themselves to be some sort of magical identifier of sex predators, imbued with a fantastical talent for discerning the innocence of accused abusers simply by auditing the "persuasiveness" of their self-defenses. They can identity predators.

Such certainly is a luxury of having never been a victim.

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