When Dylan Farrow again accused her adoptive father Woody Allen of having sexually assaulted her when she was seven, she unleashed a horde of elephants that hitherto had been standing silently in that very room. Angry elephants don't care who they squash or what damage flows from their rampages.

Unlike sensitive seven-year-old girls who are bystanders in red-hot domestic disputes and divorces, elephants have long memories. A child's memory of events, even if neo contemporaneous, can tend to be very unreliable and the sad fact is that they are commonly poor historians of what happens.

Dylan Farrow: Called on father, Woody Allen's creative collaborators to take a position on her allegations of sexual assault. Credit:Scott Morton

This tendency is enhanced if one parent exerts pressure for leverage in custody and domestic family legal proceedings. Children tend to be people pleasers, whether to a marauding father figure or to an angry and hostile mother upset by discovering a sexual relationship between her older partner and her adopted teenage daughter.

What Dylan did deliberately and defiantly was call on Allen's creative collaborators to take a public position on her allegations by asking, ''What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? … Emma Stone? Scarlett Johansson … Diane Keaton?'' Blanchett has been singing Allen's praises since winning her Golden Globe.