Despite intense legal pressure from filmmaker Woody Allen and his representatives, Amazon is standing its ground, saying it was “justified” for terminating their film deal with the director after the #MeToo allegations against Allen came to light in 2016.
Allen is suing the tech company for terminating their deal on what his camp sees as inadequate grounds. Amazon is rooting its argument for ending the multi-million dollar deal in how Allen responded to the accusations he sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992.
A 2016 column in The Hollywood Reporter from Ronan Farrow brought the 1992 assault case against the director back to light, and in the wake of the column, Allen called the #MeToo movement a “witch-hunt atmosphere.” That’s when Amazon cut ties, ending a splashy deal reached in 2014. (h/t MSN)
The termination came in June of 2018. Allen was supposed to receive anywhere between $68 and $73 million for a multi-film deal.
Allen’s camp is arguing that the Farrow column, in rehashing allegations previously made against the filmmaker, isn’t reason enough to terminate the deal. They claim Amazon had knowledge of the allegations before the deal was made.
Amazon doesn’t agree. In a statement, they articulated how it was Allen’s response to the accusations that caused them to make a move to end the deal, explaining: “Despite immediate consensus on the importance of acknowledging and addressing this issue, Allen made a series of public comments suggesting that he failed to grasp the gravity of the issues or the implications for his own career. Allen expressed sympathy for Weinstein as well as his victims, describing the situation as ‘very sad for everybody involved.’ Then Allen added: ‘You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.'”
