Sean Penn doubts Woody Allen sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow and wouldn’t mind collaborating with him again.
“I’d work with him in a heartbeat — if it was the right thing,” Penn, 64, said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Louis Theroux Podcast.”
Penn starred in the 1999 musical comedy “Sweet and Lowdown,” which Allen, 89, directed.
Theroux then asked his guest whether he thought the filmmaker had “a bad rap.”
“With these things, I don’t know anyone well enough to say, ‘100 percent, this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen,’” the actor replied.
“The stories are mostly told by people that I wouldn’t trust with a dime. It just seems so heavily weighted in that way.”
Theroux pointed out that it was both Dylan, 39, and her journalist brother, Ronan Farrow, who made the allegations. (Their mother, Mia Farrow, initiated them.)
“Well, you gave him that title, not me. But yes, Ronan Farrow,” Penn fired back, prompting Theroux to note that Ronan “writes for the New Yorker” and is “quite respected.”
Acknowledging that perhaps he is simply “an ignoramus,” the movie star explained, “I am not aware of any clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or anyone I’ve ever heard talk or spoken to around the subject of pedophilia that in 80 years of life, there’s accusations of it happening only once.”
Penn went on to urge the general public to “check him with the facts separate from the moment and the movement and all,” referencing the #MeToo movement.
“Who benefited from that?” he wondered. “Let’s just take a second. That’s all I’m saying.”
Penn added that because Allen has never been proven guilty of a crime, he presumes he’s “innocent.”
Dylan alleged in 1992 that her adoptive father had molested her when she was 7, though he has long denied the accusation and was never charged.
In response, the director claimed Mia — whom he dated for over a decade — made up the allegation after he began dating her other adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, whom he ended up marrying in 1997.
The scandal was thrust back into the public eye in 2017 following Harvey Weinstein’s cancellation when Dylan wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times asking, “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?”
“The Louis Theroux Podcast” is available on Spotify and all podcast platforms.
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