Dylan Farrow penned a powerful letter to New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof today about her alleged sexual abuse as a young girl by her adopted father, famed director Woody Allen.
 
The courts never filed charges against Allen, not wanting to traumatize a 7-year-old Farrow with the procedures. But as any survivor of sexual assault could tell you, Farrow spent decades suffering from the trauma she experienced as a child. She wrote,
 

That he got away with what he did to me haunted me as I grew up. I was stricken with guilt that I had allowed him to be near other little girls. I was terrified of being touched by men. I developed an eating disorder. I began cutting myself.

 
It’s unbelievably brave of Farrow to open up like this, especially decades after the fact.  And her voice sends an important message: sexual abuse is never okay, no matter the perpetrator.
 
People are appallingly willing to turn a blind eye to the evil and violence of humans, because to do otherwise would make them uncomfortable.  People can’t live with the dissonance of liking a director’s films and simultaneously acknowledging that director is a horrific human being.  So instead, they choose to ignore it or, worse, justify it.  Or, if you’re the Golden Globes, reward it with a lifetime achievement award (what an embarrassment).
 
As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
 
Silence tacitly condones the behavior.  It leads to a society where one in five women will raped in her lifetime, yet an estimated 60 percent of cases go unreported and only 3 percent of rapists are convicted.  It’s a society where high school football players can rape a girl on camera, believing they will receive impunity.  A society where women must carefully monitor what they say, what they wear, where they go, what time of day they go out in, and whose company they keep.
 
Farrow, who eventually changed her name and moved to Florida to avoid the media frenzy, makes the point– that we must speak out against violence to break the chains of injustice– eloquently:
 

This time, I refuse to fall apart. For so long, Woody Allen’s acceptance silenced me. It felt like a personal rebuke, like the awards and accolades were a way to tell me to shut up and go away. But the survivors of sexual abuse who have reached out to me — to support me and to share their fears of coming forward, of being called a liar, of being told their memories aren’t their memories — have given me a reason to not be silent, if only so others know that they don’t have to be silent either.