The Woody Allen Controversy Reader: (8) Debunking Maureen Orth’s “Undeniable Facts About The Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation” — Refuting Her Claim That Hair Evidence Placed Allen At The Scene And That His Account Was Not Credible

This is an excerpt of a larger and more complete essay that debunks Maureen Orth’s false and misleading article “10 Undeniable Facts About The Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation”. This particular section focuses on Orth’s eighth claim — That hair evidence placed Allen at the scene in Mia Farrow’s attic where the alleged molestation of his daughter Dylan was supposed to have occurred, and that Allen’s denials of being in the attic on the day in question were deemed by investigators to be not credible.

Here is Orth’s precise contention as stated in her article:

8. Allen changed his story about the attic where the abuse allegedly took place. First, Allen told investigators he had never been in the attic where the alleged abuse took place. After his hair was found on a painting in the attic, he admitted that he might have stuck his head in once or twice. A top investigator concluded that his account was not credible.

First, let’s examine the doubt that this claim is even true. Then, I will explain that even it were completely verified as being true, that it still isn’t evidence of anything.

To begin with, this claim is clearly not an “undeniable fact”. Do you know why? Because no such evidence was ever presented at a trial.

What we have here instead is complete hearsay from anonymous sources claiming that such evidence and interview transcripts exist. But there is no proof that any such evidence actually exists. That is why we have trials with rules regarding the admission of evidence to help ensure its authenticity.

Why doesn’t Orth cite what her source is for these claims? What is the person’s name? Do they have access to the evidence vault where the hair and lab report is locked up in a file box? Has she read the actual transcript of Allen’s interview with police? Does it even still exist (and if not, shouldn’t we then doubt its veracity just as Orth tried to dismiss the conclusive findings of the Yale-New Haven hospital just because individuals on the panel may have destroyed their personal notes — likely in accordance with state procedures)? Is her source Frank Maco, prosecutor who was already admonished for trying to tarnish Allen’s reputation in the press without choosing to file charges against him?

Even if a hair was found “on a painting in the attic” of a house that Allen regularly visited (hardly a surprising or incriminating fact in itself), how did investigator’s know that this specific hair belonged to Allen?

Orth herself reports that Allen “refused to submit hair and fingerprint samples to the Connecticut state police or to cooperate unless he was assured that nothing he said would be used against him.”

But we know that Allen did in fact willingly submit his hair and fingerprints to police.

On or about Sept. 24, 1993, Allen gave a press conference in response to the news that Prosecutor Maco had dismissed the charges against him. During that press conference, Allen stated: “You would have thought it was a scene from a movie of mine if you could have seen me cooperating with the Connecticut police. Numerous detectives from the major crime division hovered over me while hairs were pulled from my head, placed in glass envelopes, and then fingerprints taken.” (See transcript of Allen’s press conference as reproduced in the Appendix of “Mia & Woody: Love and Betrayal”, pg. 261.)

Since police managed to get a verified sample of Allen’s hair through his willing cooperation, did they then test the “hair on a painting” at a lab? Which lab? What was the result? Who conducted the tests? Was it a positive DNA match? Or did it merely not rule out the possibility that it might have been Allen’s?

(Surely Orth would not be so careless with her biases here as to conflate a positive DNA match of hair fibers with hair that is merely “consistent with” Allen’s — the latter of which not only fails to prove the identity of the source of the hair, but has been found to be so unreliable as evidence that courts have deemed it inadmissible and have refused to allow it as such. See Section III of the Williamson v. Reyonlds decision for a legal primmer on this issue. The use of hair evidence that is merely “consistent with” a suspect’s own hair has been relegated to the realm of “junk science” after it had been shown to have falsely imprisoned other people who were manifestly innocent.)

Orth offers no answers at all to any of these obvious questions, and offers no sources whatsoever for the claims she makes in her article. Yet she still boldly and dishonestly claims them to be “undeniable facts” based on nothing more than her mere proclamations.

But for the sake of argument, let’s cut Orth a break here on her non-existent evidentiary standards for declaring something to be an “undeniable fact”. Let’s just assume for the moment that her claims in this regard are all true and that police used proper lab procedures to positively match a hair found on a painting in Farrow’s attic to that of the hair belonging Allen.

Given the fact that Allen was in a regular visitor to Farrow’s house in Connecticut and routinely interacted with Farrow herself, this is proof of absolutely nothing. According to Orth’s own account, the disputed hair wasn’t even found on the floor of the attic, but rather “on a painting” in the attic.

Did anyone testify as to when the painting was moved into the attic? We know that Farrow first purchased the house during her relationship with Allen (See pg. 189 of Farrow’s own memoir, “What Falls Away”).

Presumably the painting didn’t come with the house. Since we know the painting was moved there at some point while Farrow was still seeing Allen regularly, how do we then discount the quite likely possibility that Allen inadvertently transferred his hair to the painting while it was in another room in the house, or when he was first helping to carry it in, and then only later had his painting-embedded hair transferred into the attic when the painting was placed up there for storage? What evidence is there that establishes when the hair was lodged on the painting? What evidence is there as to the timeline location of the painting itself? The very timeline of Farrow’s house purchase suggests that the painting hadn’t always been in the attic during the years that Farrow and Allen were together.

Again, since Allen was a frequent visitor to Farrow’s Connecticut home, it is only logical to expect that his hair would be found throughout the house to some degree.

And again, assuming that the hair is even Allen’s to begin with, does Orth suggest that his was the only hair to be found in the attic? Did they collect and test for other hairs? Did they find any of Dylan’s hairs? If not, why not? Did they find any hairs from Farrow’s brother John in the attic or any object that was placed in the attic? Did they bother to look for them? If so, did they find any? And if so, what would that prove, exactly?

Did they find any hairs from Farrow herself, or any of her other children in the attic or on any objects placed in the attic? If so, would that mean that they should be considered suspects in a child abuse accusation?

Naturally, such conclusions would be absurd, especially when considered in the full context of the evidence regarding Dylan’s accusations. But all of this only points out the very absurdity of Orth’s argument here.

If police had also obtained a sample of Allen’s fingerprints, did they ever find his fingerprints in the attic in addition to a hair? If not, why not? If so, then why haven’t Maco, Orth and the bevy of Allen accusers ever highlighted this fact? Did they find fingerprints of Dylan, Farrow or Farrow’s brother John there as well? And if they did, what would that prove exactly?

It is also notable to point out that Orth herself describes the attic space in question as “not really an attic” but rather “just a small crawl space off the closet of Mia’s bedroom”.

Yet this “small crawl space” was supposedly big enough to hold not only a painting, but also a trunk full of styrofoam heads, clothes, mousetraps, and a full, operating electric train set with tracks among other items.

Orth would have us believe that this “small crawl space” with all of these items was also the place where both the extremely claustrophobic Allen and Dylan were able to enter, and where presumably Dylan was made to fully lay down after Allen supposedly dragged her up to this space off the closet of Mia’s bedroom without anyone noticing, where he then fired up the train set to have it circle around and cause noise, and then returned in less than 20 minutes, again without anyone noticing — all in a house full of people who were told to be on guard about his behavior and where Mia was on her way back to at any moment from a shopping trip. (See this essay for more details and proof regarding the utter absurdity of this scenario, given the timeline and witnesses in Farrow’s house that day.)

That’s quite a lot of items and people to be able to fit into a “small crawl space off the closet” of Mia’s room. Maybe that’s why Moses Farrow insists that the train set was never in the attic and that Dylan is making up these details, as she is with the rest of her story.

Moses’s statements alone completely demolish Orth’s “undeniable facts” and accounts for Allen’s and Dylan’s respective movements every minute on the day in question.

It should be stressed up front that underlying the very premise of Orth’s “undeniable fact” is the notion that Allen willingly spoke to the police without evoking his right of refusal that is afforded all suspects in a criminal investigation. Allen surely did so for the same reason he said he willingly took the lie detector test — He has nothing to hide.

But even if we are to simply accept Orth’s word that Allen made inconsistent statements to the police regarding his personal recollection about casually sticking his head up once or twice into an attic of a house he regularly visited over the course of several years, it is impossible to consider this as even being suspicious without an actual transcript of the interview where the full questions and responses are seen in context.

Once again, Orth provides no details here. What is her source? Who exactly is this “top investigator” that she refers to? And on what specific basis did he or she conclude that Allen’s statement wasn’t “credible”? Is this person’s personal assessment somehow more accurate than the lie detector test that Allen passed? And if so, how does one go about concluding that? (Many suggest that such personal speculations are less reliable than lie detector tests like the one Allen passed. See also, for instance, pg. 203 of Richard A. Leo’s “Why Interrogation Contamination Occurs”.)

Do transcripts (or even notes) of the interview that Allen willingly sat down for even still exits? If you are going to label something as an “undeniable fact”, you need to actually cite your sources rather than rely on hearsay from biased sources attempting to justify their already prejudicial behavior.

What Orth fails to explain to readers is that when police are investigating crimes, it is quite common for them to lie to a suspect about the evidence they have discovered and try and gauge their reactions — a variation often used in the already controversial and confrontational “Reid Technique”. Though this technique is entirely legal, it has been often criticized by legal and psychological professionals as helping lead to false confessions or other forms of false statements from innocent parties in interviews — a reality that is far more common during confrontational interrogations than people tend to believe.

So again, if police never went through full and proper lab procedures to positively match his hair to the hair found in the attic crawl space, how were they able to tell him that “his hair was found on a painting” there? Did they fully explain to him the fact that it had been found on a painting that had been moved into the attic and was not there originally when the house was first purchased? Did they make that story up in order to trick Allen and gauge his reaction? Did they lie to him about other evidence they claimed they had in their investigation? If so, it would be a perfectly natural reaction for an innocent person to speculate or just spout out that maybe, over the years, they simply forgot about briefly going into a small crawl space in order to explain a hair that was found on a painting that, by itself, proves nothing, even if true.

The only alternative to this reaction is to escalate the confrontation by calling police investigators liars to their face. Even steel-willed people have a hard time doing that, and Allen hardly seems like the kind of personality who would do so. Since he had no way of knowing for sure if they found a hair or if it had already been identified as his through DNA testing, he, like most others, would instead chose to defuse the situation by engaging in idle speculation in order offer an explanation for a claim that they strongly suspect to be false.

Can Orth give us complete, absolute assurance that police didn’t lie to Allen about hair evidence or other so-called evidence in a good faith (but misguided) effort to see what his reaction would be? Either way, she engages in pure speculation without so much as a transcript of the interview. But if it turns out that police did engage in the common tactic of lying to Allen about the evidence they possessed in the case, then it is not only unsurprising that Allen (or any innocent suspect) would give inconsistent responses about it, but it is actually to be expected in such a case.

Of course there is another innocent explanation for all of this: Woody Allen may have simply forgot that he had poked his head up in Farrow’s attic one or twice over the course of several years. And by first emphatically denying it to police since he knew himself to be innocent, he ended up being inconsistent when he eventually remembered enough to speculate that maybe he had been up there.

Once again, this so-called “evidence” must be considered within the totality of the full set of evidence in the case. What might seem suspicious in one context will prove to be completely innocent and innocuous in another.

A found hair is not proof that it is specifically Allen’s hair. Even if it is Allen’s hair, finding it on a painting placed in the attic does not prove that he was ever even in the attic to begin with. And even if he was in the attic on more than one occasion, his presence there is not proof of his behavior.

Orth’s argument is built purely on speculation, on top of speculation, on top of speculation.

When you combine that broad speculation with the concrete realities of Moses’s statements, Allen’s passing of the lie detector test, the many witness statements that cast doubt on the accusation, the improbability of the timeline for Allen’s supposed actions, the obvious motivations for Mia Farrow to set him up on false charges and the telegraphing actions and statements she took in doing so, the pressure on witnesses to lie on Mia’s behalf, the two thorough state investigations that affirmatively cleared Allen of the charges, the utterly improbable coincidence of a songwriter Farrow had taken her husband from writing a song about a playing father molesting his daughter in the attic more than a decade before the allegations were made against the clarinet-playing Allen, the utterly improbable coincidence of Farrow’s brother being convicted and jailed for the same offense that was lodged against Allen, etc., etc. etc.. the insignificance and utter desperation of Orth’s argument becomes clear.