In today’s edition of “why are you doing talking about this?” director Spike Lee raised his hand as a Woody Allen supporter for no reason at all and called him “a friend” amidst the sexual abuse allegations that have followed Allen for decades.
Lee went on New York’s WOR 710 radio to promote the release on “Da 5 Bloods” on Netflix, when the conversation suddenly turned to the topic of Woody Allen, as things tend to do. Asked to weigh in on the Allen controversy, Lee said “I’d just like to say Woody Allen is a great, great filmmaker and this cancel thing is not just Woody,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker said. “And I think that when we look back on it we are going to see that — short of killing somebody — I don’t know you if you can just erase somebody like they never existed.”
“Woody is a friend of mine, a fellow Knick fan, and I know he’s going through it right now,” Lee added.
For decades, Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has repeatedly accused the filmmaker of molesting her as a child, which Allen keeps denying. Of course, these decades-long allegations have gained renewed attention in the years since the #MeToo movement, with Allen’s memoir being dropped by its publisher as well as Allen’s latest feature, “A Rainy Day in New York” was dropped by its US distributor in late 2018.
READ MORE: Woody Allen Thinks Actors Denouncing Him Is “Silly” & Just “The Fashionable Thing To Do”
After the Allen conversation was dropped, Lee also spoke about the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, where he said “What’s uplifting to me is that people are marching all over this God’s earth for Black Lives Matter, is that there’s definitely something in the air… I think we’re in a very special moment in the history of the United States of America.”
Update: Lee has released a statement about minimizing sexual assault.