Dislike of Woody Allen Isn’t an Excuse for Censorship
Hachette’s cancellation of the director’s memoir under pressure violates some basic principles.
Creepy? To some. Guilty? Not in any court of law.
Photographer: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images
Purely as a matter of economics, it’s perfectly understandable why Hachette Book Group would toss Woody Allen overboard hoping to keep his son Ronan Farrow happy.
At 32, Farrow is a journalistic supernova. His Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker articles about Harvey Weinstein in 2017 helped expose a sexual predator and usher in the MeToo movement. And his book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” a cloak-and-dagger account of how he got the story, was an instant best-seller, selling more than 200,000 copies. The publisher of that book was Little, Brown & Co., one of Hachette’s two primary imprints. No doubt Little, Brown harbored dreams of publishing Farrow for years to come.