#MeToo has morphed into a career-destroying angry mob

#MeToo has done a lot of work exposing uncomfortable truths, but now its eagerness to denounce is taking on a censorious tone. #TimesUp is becoming #ShutUp.

Recall that the movement got going when women who had long remained silent felt emboldened to speak up after many years. Yet last week one such woman was telling her story. There was a broad public attempt to silence this Korean runaway who doesn’t know her own birthday and grew up eating out of garbage cans on the streets of Seoul before being dumped into an orphanage. Her adoptive mother, she says, regularly belittled her, abused her and essentially made her serve as a household domestic. Then this crazy momster labeled her daughter “retarded.” After all of this, Soon-Yi Previn doesn’t get a right to speak? Because she’s married to Woody Allen?

I’ve written before about how it’s nearly impossible to believe that Allen is guilty of child molestation when you look at the evidence, but the fanciful-to-preposterous case for his guilt is, 26 years after his alleged crime, suddenly being accepted as gospel by the #MeToo crowd, which in turn has rebuked Previn and also Daphne Merkin, a longtime friend of Allen.

When Merkin’s convincing New York magazine profile of Soon-Yi ran last week, #MeToo told both of them to shut their pie-holes about Woody Allen, forever. (The editor who actually ran the piece, New York chief Adam Moss, seemed to escape censure.) “Let the women speak” somehow turned into “Only certain women should speak.”

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