related to the case of the convicted sex offender, again brought to the fore the way in which his economic and social influence was intertwined with the field of art, education and high intellect.
In addition to his friendship with Noam Chomsky, Epstein maintained a long-term relationship with him and his wife Sun-Yi Preven, which had multiple social benefits for the couple, although there is no evidence from the records that the two knew about and concealed the American businessman’s network of sexual exploitation of minors.
The main facility provided by the latter to the director and his wife was the education of their daughter Bessette Allen at Bard College after mediation and a donation to the university. The couple often had dinners with Epstein at his Manhattan mansion while Allen invited the businessman to private movie screenings. There was intimacy and trust between them – in one Sun-Yi repeatedly thanks Epstein for his help with the university case. “I can’t thank you enough for putting Bessette at the Bard,” she wrote to Epstein on January 11, 2017. “Leon was wonderful. He said he would take care of everything,” he notes in another email.
Epstein’s relationship with US universities
According to information confirmed by the New York Times, it was Epstein who put Bard College president Leon Botstein in touch with the Allen family to secure Bessette’s education. As the documents make clear that Epstein maintained an active role in university arrangements as an informal influencer, it is not surprising that Botstein, who had accepted a $150,000 donation to Bard College through an Epstein foundation, maintained a close relationship with him and even granted him access to prestigious academic meetings.
In other words, the admission of Allen’s daughter to Bard was not a simple academic process, but a product of social mediation, linked to financial flows, which emerges through the relevant correspondence and indirect references in emails.
U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein is pictured in a photo taken for the New York State Police sex offender registry on March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters on July 10, 2019. New York State Police/Handout/File photo via REUTERS
This practice was not limited to Bard as Epstein had built an entire system of infiltrating American universities, funding research programs, professors and institutions from Harvard to Stanford to the MIT Media Lab. The pattern was systematic and highly constructive as the money that flowed in – Harvard alone had received $9 million – ensured social access, institutional influence, and ultimately legitimacy and protection for the entrepreneur and convicted criminal.
Moving within Jeffrey Epstein’s system of social power exchange, Woody Allen is not involved in a recorded illegal incident or prosecuted. The issue is not his criminal involvement in the much-hyped scandal that preoccupies public opinion seven years after Epstein’s suicide in his cell, but his moral responsibility through his personal access to Epstein’s environment and himself.
Sun-Yi and #MeToo
The moral cracks in Allen’s profile, open wounds from the 1990s when he was accused of sexually abusing Dylan Farrow’s daughter and betrayal by engaging in an affair with Sun-Yi Previn (the two married when she was 23 and he 62), the adopted daughter of his ex-wife Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, widened new, with #MeToo and the resurgence of Farrow’s allegations dealing a major blow to his career in 2017-2018.
At the center of the new turmoil are Soon-Yi’s emails to Epstein, which cause a bit of a shock by bluntly dealing with #MeToo and victims of sexual abuse.
In an email sent in September 2018, Preven writes to Epstein that award-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, a frontrunner in the #MeToo movement’s revelations that supported Dylan’s sister’s accusation of sexual abuse against Allen, is overrated.
“It gives Ronan Farrow too much prestige. More than he deserves,” Preven writes to Epstein commenting on the article about Farrow in the New York Times.
Woody Allen with his wife Sun-Yi at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011. EPA/GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO
In an exchange of emails, also commenting on reports and television appearances by journalist Léa Salamé in France about sexual abuse cases and #MeToo, Sun-Yi writes disparagingly, among other things: “Salamé pretends to be a brave defender of the victims, but in reality she plays the role of a professional indignant. These people live on hysteria.”
In her correspondence with Epstein, Soon-Yi adopts a generalized discourse of disparagement toward underage complainants, typically referring to a “15-year-old” without naming her, and questioning the validity of sexual abuse allegations. The tone of the messages does not target a specific person, but reveals an overall attitude of distrust and irony towards the victims.
In a September 2016 email, Preven shared with Epstein an article about Anthony Weiner. Weiner, a former U.S. senator, served more than a year in prison after a scandal revealed he had sent sexual material to a minor. In her message to Epstein, Preven wrote that it was “disgusting what the 15-year-old did to him.”
“I hate women who take advantage of men and this is definitely one of them. “He knew exactly what he was doing and how vulnerable Weiner was, and he hooked him like a fish on bait,” Allen’s wife notes about the minor. “It’s also ridiculous when she says in her letter that she’s going public to help him. How does this help him? It only humiliates him,” he continues. “We know his excuse is that he is sick. What is her excuse for being a despicable and disgusting person who takes advantage of the weak? We know he’s sick, but she’s sick too for doing this to him. She is so manipulative. She should be ashamed of herself.”
Only silence
From the day the Epstein files were released by the US Department of Justice until today, the Woody Allen side has not commented on the content of the emails.
If the family saw Epstein as a useful “connecting link” — he was trying to play a role both in the intended “rebranding” of Allen, who suffered from labor bleeding in the shadow of #MeToo, and in the director’s approach to the Obama White House and Cameron’s Downing Street — he seems to have accepted his dark side as well, as he was already convicted as a sex offender in 2017 criminal. The question is how morally acceptable such a power transaction is.
