If you are among the elite in the arts and humanities, any crime you commit will be defended by a stream of articles and books written by those who appreciate the genuine contributions you have made to your field. I suppose that this is also true for the elite in other areas (the financial elite, the military elite, and so on). There is no act or situation that can't be defended on paper. Given Woody Allen's history of timid pursuit of teenagers, his daughter's account deserves attention.
When I was young, the troubling example of celebrity amnesty was the case of Ezra Pound, a major American poet and literary critic who lived out World War II in Italy defending Fascism and the hatred of Jews. After the Holocaust, not knowing what to do with him, our government put him in an insane asylum (although he wasn't insane), and some of the famous among our progressive community (including Jews) went to work and got him out. Was that the right thing to do? I suppose it was. I'm not sure.
Consider Martin Heidegger (a revered founder of existentialism and member of the Nazi party) and Paul de Man (a founder of deconstruction and a Jew-hating journalist during the Holocaust) and Roman Polanski (a great film director who drugged and raped a very young teenage girl in Hollywood, then fled to Europe). Consider Michael Jackson, still the King of Pop, defended by our entire entertainment industry. To what extent do we owe exceptional contributors amnesty? Or rationalizations or amnesia? We do owe them something. It remains open and troubling, the debate about Ezra Pound.
All this does, as some say, remind us of Edward Snowden, of which it is said that his only crime was that he broke the law.
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