What is it about famous people that they have a hard time resisting the urge to defend Woody Allen? Is there a secret brotherhood of famous people where everyone is supposed to stick up for each other no matter what? Either way, the latest famous person to decry how cancel culture has unfairly hurt Woody Allen is Spike Lee, who gave an interview to New York radio station 710 WOR’s In The Morning show back on Friday and said that Allen—as “a fellow Knicks fan”—is a friend and that he’s “going through it right now.”
Lee [via Deadline] says that Allen is “a great, great filmmaker” and that “this cancel thing” is not just going to impact him. “I think when we look back on it,” Lee says, “we are going to see that—short of killing somebody—I don’t know that you can just erase somebody like they never existed. One could argue that he’s not necessarily defending Allen against the longstanding allegation that he molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was a child, just that he’s saying you can’t completely cut someone out of the world the way people have with Allen, but that’s not really much different.
At some point later, Lee evidently learned a lesson in why you don’t say stuff like that. In an apology posted on Twitter, he said, “my words were WRONG” and “I do not and will not tolerate sexual harassment, assault, or violence.” He also added that “such treatment causes real damage that can’t be minimized.