Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?

It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached his four-film contract, preferring to settle out of court. Actors have lodged their public regret at working with him. He is one of Hollywood’s notable sinking stars. In March, following a demonstration by staff, Hachette pulped this book. ‘Everybody should take responsibility for their actions,’ one protesting employee told the Guardian — anonymously, and apparently without irony. The New York Times called him ‘a monster’. And if you think that’s social rock bottom, in 2016 the Clinton campaign refused his donation. Imagine that: money so tainted that not even the Clintons will bank it. That’s the basement level below rock bottom.

What is curious about Allen’s partial blacklisting is that it isn’t a response to some recent unanswerable development in the case against him. Rather it seems to express the more summary verdict of a culture impatient with moral uncertainty and suspicious of the formal procedure of the law. The publicly available evidence remains much the same as in 1992 when, in the crossfire of a bitter child-custody suit, Mia Farrow accused Allen of molesting their seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan. No charges were brought against Allen; he submitted to a lie-detector test (Farrow did not) and a six-month criminal investigation found no evidence of abuse by Allen and that Dylan’s testimony had a ‘rehearsed quality’. To date, two of Farrow’s children support the argument which Allen develops in this book, that the allegations were a fabrication, part of Farrow’s ‘Ahab-like quest for revenge’. He writes:

Off the record, I had envisioned a little more peer support, nothing overwhelming, perhaps a few organised protests, maybe some irate colleagues marching arms linked, a little rioting, perhaps a few burned cars.

In Apropos of Nothing, the reader senses that even Woody Allen – who always had such a vivid appreciation of his own persecution at the hands of the universe, such well-exercised imaginative paranoia and capacity for cynicism — is a little dizzied by fortune’s extreme turns.