A reader writes:
Without being able to judge the truth of the competing claims, the rage I see in Dylan Farrow’s piece strikes an all too familiar chord. I know from hard experience the isolation that the experience of sexual abuse can engender. One sees the rest of the world going about its business indifferent to the suffering and all-consuming rage that never really goes away. This need to go public is a step in coming to terms with the impotence that can be part of a victim’s self-definition. A skilled therapist can guide one around the pitfalls of this strategy. Going public in such a vindictive way may feel like a good plan, an assertion of power, but one is far better served by working with others from similar backgrounds in private.
Another confides:
After reading Dylan Farrow’s letter and then your post, I feel compelled to give you my two cents. The fact that she was constantly sick when Woody Allen was around and instantly felt better when he wasn’t certainly rang true for me. When I was around 6 or 7, my cousin attempted to molest me. While my mom and my aunt were upstairs, he called me into his room on the ground floor. He was exposed and erect and tried to get me to touch him with a promise of being able to play with his really cool car set if I complied. I was tempted. Sure I was a girl but loved playing with cars. Somewhere a little voice in my head which I think of as God, kept screaming NO! So I refused. Of course, like all child molesters, he said if I told anyone, I would get in trouble and I believed him. Afterwards he let all of my cousins play with his toy cars except for me.
Now he was probably about 14 or 15 when this occurred – hardly an adult, but to me, he might as well have been. From then on, whenever I would visit that particular family, I would become nauseated and throw up until we left. It became quite the family joke with them. This occurred until I was about 15 and finally told my parents what happened.
I hadn’t thought about this for a long while. Thanks for the opportunity to vent.
It’s one of the main reasons we have a strict anonymity policy with reader emails.
The Dish 