I know this from personal experience. When I was 8 years old, I was molested by a much older cousin while he was babysitting. He spent hours taunting me and my 5-year-old sister, threatening that if we didn’t behave he’d unzip his pants. Then he led me into the bathroom while my sister watched TV. He fastened the latch on the door, which was higher than I could reach, and ridiculed me when I didn’t want to do the things he told me to. So I did them . He kept me there with him, locked in the bathroom, until it was time for bed.

But he and I are the only people in the world who know for sure what happened. I can’t prove a single word of it, and my cousin was never charged with a crime. I am grateful that my parents took the situation so seriously, and I haven’t seen him since. Like Woody Allen, he moved on. He has a house, a wife, and a kid.

As so many writers have reminded us, Allen is not a convicted criminal. Even Nicholas Kristof emphasized this in his introduction to Farrow’s February 1 letter: “It’s important to note that Woody Allen was never prosecuted in this case and has consistently denied wrongdoing; he deserves the presumption of innocence.” And Allen’s defenders continue to remind the public that an independent investigation by a Yale medical team found no reason to conclude the charges were true. Furthermore, they insist, Dylan’s stories were inconsistent and rehearsed.

The problem is that if young victims can be dismissed for sounding inconsistent and rehearsed, then the whole game is rigged from the beginning.

Farrow says that when she first told her mother what Allen had done, she “didn’t know the firestorm it would trigger.” That was my experience as well. In fact, it was my little sister who brought the story to light—when she asked my parents if they’d ever heard my cousin threatening to unzip his pants, I was angry at her for acting like a little kid. I thought keeping quiet meant I was acting like an adult. I bought into my cousin’s cool teenage cachet; although I felt wrong about what had happened, I assumed the problem was me.

When my alarmed parents sat me down to draw out every detail of what had happened, trying to construct a timeline and zeroing in on specific actions and body parts, I was terrified by their seriousness. The conversation was such an important one that we had it sitting right where we were when my sister brought up the subject: on the stairs. It’s hard to give an accurate account of something when you’re under that kind of strange pressure—when the facts are suddenly so palpably urgent that you can’t even move to a chair. The seeds of “narrative inconsistency” are planted right then, before you even know why the story matters.

This is why amassing evidence in childhood sexual assault cases is a dirty game. My parents filed a police report a few days after the incident, and I was questioned by a state investigator. She came to my school one morning, pulling me out of class for some fabricated reason that struck me even then as bogus. I remember sitting there with her for a long time. When she steered the conversation toward the investigation, she started to ask if I knew the clinical words for my private parts. She very carefully explained that there were no wrong answers, and that I was not in trouble. But I phrased my answers in a way that would deflect follow-up. I was acutely aware that I was the only person in my class who had to do this, and that the game of “Heads Up, Seven Up” I was missing was probably a lot more fun.