Stephen King has warned that it makes him “very uneasy” that a publishing house has decided to cancel a scheduled memoir by star film director Woody Allen, who has previously faced allegations of having sexually abused his stepdaughter Dylan Farrow in her early years.
"It's not him; I don't give a damn about Mr. Allen. It's who gets muzzled next that worries me”, the best-selling author of “It” and “The Shining” tweeted.
The decision to axe the publication was made after around 70 staffers at Little, Brown and Company, a division of the publishing giant Hachette Book Group, staged a street protest against the planned memoir, titled "Apropos of Nothing" and which was planned to come out in April.
“The biggest complaint is that we feel strongly about everyone's right to tell their own story, but we don't agree with giving Woody Allen a platform with which to tell it that includes distribution, marketing, publicity”, an anonymous employee told Refinery29, adding that otherwise they would be “validating his story”.
“The decision to cancel Mr Allen's book was a difficult one. At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly”, senior Vice President of Communications Sophie Cottrell shared in a statement to the Daily Mail, speaking about the book, the publication of which was recently - amid #MeToo - considered totally unfeasible.
The move, Cottrell noted, came after a few days of “extensive conversations with our staff and others”.
TMZ earlier reported that the initial decision to decline to publish the book came after Ronan Farrow, Allen's son and a prominent journalist, expressed disappointment with Hachette over their collaboration with his father.
His sister Dylan was quick to tweet her gratitude to the publishing house staffers who walked out over the memoir, the rights to which will now be handed over to Allen again.
“To each and every individual who, at great professional risk to themselves, stood in solidarity with my brother, myself, and all the victims of sexual abuse yesterday: words will never describe the debt of gratitude I owe to you”, Dylan wrote.
Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Woody Allen, has accused her stepfather of sexually abusing her almost three decades ago when she was seven.