A lot of people love Woody Allen (in France most of all) and his work, starting with myself. He's one of the few living geniuses in American cinema.

That said, it's an example of puritanism, not the opposite. 21 years after the events and having been found blameless by US justice people in large numbers were still asking that he be put in jail for life or saying he was worthy of the death penalty on FB and Twitter recently after Vanity Fair resurrected the old accusations of child molestations again him, despite all the evidence this never happened (both physicians and psychiatrits had concluded the little girl had never been molested at the time and had either been coached by Farrow or traumatized by her mother's reactions about Soon-Yi - and the judge agreed. If you recall, Farrow accused Allen of having molested their 7 y.o. when he came for a meeting at her house during their custody battle, which is fairly absurd to begin with (as if Allen wouldn't have been cautious to avoid anything that might jeopardize his custody case, in a house full of people loyal to Farrow). One of the nannies indeed testified the little girl could not have been out of her sight for more than 2-3 min while Allen was present that day. The court dismissed the whole thing, but Allen's reputation as a pedophile resurfaces in the US periodically since, and also gets mixed up with his relationsip with Soon-Yi Previn (like the unfounded rumors he had been a father figure to her or had been close to her in her childhood, both untrue. She lived mostly with her father and barely knew Allen before Farrow encouraged her to get to know him, as a young adult. Also enduring is the rumor that she is slightly retarded and Allen abused of that to seduce her. She's actually brilliant, a polyglot with a prestigous university degree).

And most people still think he married "his step-daughter" when he didn't. First, she was the adopted daughter of Farrow and her husband Previn, not Allen. Then Farrow and Allen never married and didn't even live together when they were a couple. As Farrow herself admitted in court, Allen never even spent the night at her place in the 12 years they were a couple and was barely involved with her Previn children (unlike the three children they had together and who lived in either of their houses) and Allen never played a role in raising the Previns. It's Farrow who encouraged Soon-Yi to get to know her boyfriend when she was either 19 or 21 (her date of birth is in doubt), and they became friends then fell in love, and Allen immediately broke up his relationship with Farrow. They've been married and raising children together for over 15 years now, so it was haly a salacious little affair. For sure Farrow has all the reasons in the world to be furious with Allen and Soon-Yi for the rest of her life, but while Allen and Soon-Yi sure most inconveniently fell in love with each other, they never were an incestuous couple and did nothing illegal or even immoral except in the minds of the more puritans who never let it go. Outside the US it wasn't such a big deal (as with Clinton the big story was what the media and people in the US made of it rather then the story itself - and it didn't take long before the angle was that Allen was being persecuted both by Farrow and puritan public opinion. The media outside the US don't even cover the recent developments like the Vanity Fair interview with Dylan Farrow or Mia's Tweet that the Golden Globes were a disgrace for honouring a child molester (the irony is that she had to sign a whole lot of agreements so the GG could use clips of her in Allen's movies for the homage, but she preferred to wait for the ceremony to be outraged...). Farrow herself is hardly a model... She recently claimed Allen's son is very possibly Frank Sinatra's... meaning she's claiming to have had an affair with her remarried ex-husband of 71 y.o. right in the middle of her relationship with Allen.