WHAT DO WOODY Allen and J.D. Salinger have in common? Start with this: The world knows them as iconic artists whose work transformed the cultural landscape of America. I see them both as predatory men with a taste for teenagers. Both possess the outlook of aging cynics who idealize and seek out innocence and—having done so—destroy it.

Here comes another disturbing similarity: In the case of each of these celebrated men, when a woman has dared to shine a light on their dark and disturbing behavior—in Allen’s case, possibly criminal behavior, which he continues to deny—their supporters close ranks. Often with stunning success, they deflect allegations made against the object of their devotion and turn on the person responsible for delivering them. That person would be a woman.

I know the part about Allen and very young women only from what I’ve read over the years—though watching his films with knowledge of his personal sexual and romantic history, a viewer may register a creepy shiver of recognition. It’s all on the screen. The part about Salinger and young girls (also visible in the work, if you look) is one with which I am more intimately acquainted. It’s a story I’ve told before. I tell it again because what I experienced long ago still happens—and because in the last handful of months, we’ve borne witness to a whole new round of stories sharing the same familiar theme: the phenomenon of demonizing the women and girls who dare to speak the truth about their lives.

“What CHILLED ME MOST was the level of violence in the way Allen loyalists spoke about Farrow.”

When I was a freshman at Yale—a few months past my 18th birthday—Salinger wrote me a series of letters that led me to believe he loved me as no one else ever had. Having read an essay I’d published, accompanied by a picture of a waiflike me in blue jeans—I weighed in at 90 pounds and expounded on my virginity, among other topics—he told me I was brilliant and perfect, his soul mate, and that we would live our days out together. He was 53. By 1972, a couple of generations of readers had fallen in love with the voice of Holden Caulfield. So did I, though the way I fell in love with the man came from the letters he wrote to me, alone. Or so I supposed.

I name two events that caused the greatest emotional damage in my life. I’m not speaking here of personal losses—the deaths of my parents, the death of my husband. I’m speaking of times when I felt unsafe, diminished, and under attack almost to the point of questioning the worth of my own life. One happened when I was a teenager, with Salinger—an experience that ended my college education, isolated me from my family, my friends, and the world, and left me in a state of profound shame that endured for decades. The second, and arguably the more painful one, occurred 25 years later, when I chose at long last to speak of what had happened to me when I was young.

It took me that long to recognize the truth: that I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life. When I published a memoir, I was accused of trying to make money from my brief and inconsequential connection to a great man. Adjectives applied to me by well-respected critics included the words “icky, masturbatory” (in Mirabella), “indescribably stupid” (in The Washington Post), and (from Maureen Dowd in the New York Times) “predator.” Cynthia Ozick condemned me as a person who had attached myself to Salinger to “suck out” his celebrity. In the eyes of many, I was a literary vampire. For some, simply a cunt.

No question, my personal history informed my experience of watching the recent HBO documentary Allen v. Farrow. Call the event “triggering” and you won’t miss the mark. So much of the language once directed at me is nearly identical to what I hear now employed by those who rush to discredit Mia Farrow. The story in Allen v. Farrow is haunting on two levels: First, for Dylan Farrow’s consistent and credible account that Allen did in fact touch her “privates” when she was seven, as she has always alleged.

Equally horrifying is what Allen and his team of high-priced lawyers, publicists, image controllers, and celebrity friends chose to do about the allegations against him. They successfully recast the narrative into the story of an aging, vengeful, and deeply troubled ex-lover who manufactured the story of abuse and coached her child to deliver it. Via his own press conference at the Plaza Hotel, now widely repeated, Allen became the victim of retribution for having rejected Mia for her daughter, Soon-Yi, a much younger woman. His crime comes straight out of a romantic movie: falling in love.

When I wrote about Allen v. Farrow on Facebook recently, over a thousand readers weighed in. The vast majority—those who’d actually watched the series—shared my outrage. Almost to a person, those who continue to subscribe to Allen’s story said they felt no need to watch the documentary. Allen himself had already explained it to them.

What chilled me most was the level of something close to violence—an almost toxic rage—in the way many Allen loyalists spoke about Farrow. (“I’d like to smash her face in,” wrote one.) Some of them, weighing in on the documentary—and more on the Woody Allen fan page—chose to quote the old saw “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The scariest brand of fury I have ever witnessed is that of men confronted by a woman’s story of abuse at the hands of a man they idolize.

Consider Diane Sawyer in a 2003 interview for Primetime recently brought to light in the new documentary Framing Britney Spears. Sawyer leans forward in her chair—cool, self-assured, trustworthy—lasering in on the 21-year-old pop star, who looks exhausted. “You broke his heart,” Sawyer intones, speaking of accusations she’d cheated on Justin Timberlake. “You did something that caused him so...much...pain. What did you do?” What did you do? The assumption, unquestioned: It’s the woman’s fault.

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Sometimes the shamed and hated women remain faceless. Sometimes we know them well. One theme runs through all of these stories—from Meghan Markle to Monica Lewinsky to Andrea Constand. It’s not simply about how our culture continues to shame, dismiss, humiliate, devalue, and demonize women. It’s the injury—sometimes overt counterattack, often gaslighting—that an abused woman is virtually certain to endure when she breaks her silence to tell what happened to her. Call it a one-two punch.

The attacks I experienced when I published At Home in the World did not simply seek to invalidate a piece of work of which I felt deeply proud. They did not simply decimate my career for a long time (the same thing that happened to Mia Farrow after she leveled her charges against Allen). At the age of 44, I found my identity effectively reduced to that of a woman about whom only one pertinent fact remained: When I was very young, I had slept with a famous man. When I was no longer young, I told about it. Vagina dentata. Big mouth.

In pre-#MeToo 1998, when I published the book that told the story of what happened between Salinger and me, I might as well have murdered Holden Caulfield. Many have never forgiven me. I got on with my life, wrote many more books, but not without great cost.

For a lover of Woody Allen movies, confronted with the HBO documentary, it is as if Dylan Farrow ran into the theater and threw a bucket of paint on the screen. As for Mia Farrow: She speaks about her fears once the documentary has aired. There would be a new round of attacks. It will never end.

It has never truly ended for me either. The year following the publication of my memoir, I made the decision to sell the 14 letters Salinger had written to me when I was 18. I had no use for these. So I consigned them to Sotheby’s.

The letters were put on display for potential buyers. They remained available for examination—by collectors, literary historians, biographers, devotees of an important writer. The letters offered much about the author’s views on a wide range of topics—baseball, jazz, Buddhism, Hitchcock movies, gardening, his children, writing.

I was told by someone who worked at Sotheby’s that not a single serious critic or literary historian, biographer, or member of the press paid a visit to the auction house. But on the subject of me and my money-grubbing choice to sell what were described as my “love letters,” the press was relentless. Had I no shame?

Actually, no. I saw no crime in divesting myself of letters that served only as reminders of a hurtful and damaging time. As it turned out, these letters (whose buyer said he would return them to Salinger) were somewhat less rare than I had supposed. Over the years, I heard from over a dozen women who had similar sets of letters from Salinger, written to them when they were teenagers. It appeared that in the case of one girl, Salinger was writing to her while I sat in the next room, believing he was my soul mate and partner for life.

Among those angry Facebook messages, there was one citing, yet again, the story of how I sold my “love letters.” Hearing that a 53-year-old man wrote letters to an 18-year-old college freshman, some still condemn me rather than considering the motives of the man who wrote them in the first place.

Consider the irony of suggesting it’s the woman’s fault for sharing her story, not the fault of the man for having made the story happen. Call this person out and he may invoke cancel culture. Flip the narrative, make the perpetrator the victim. Then, the inevitable question. Sawyer was hardly the last to have raised it. What did you do?

My answer: I’m a woman. I told the truth.