Woody Allen Memoir Incites Walkout of Dozens of Publisher’s Employees

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Mere days after the announcement that filmmaker Woody Allen would have a memoir hit shelves on April 7, dozens of employees from Hachette Book Group have staged a walkout from its New York City offices. Hachette owns the memoir’s imprint, Grand Central Publishing, as well as Little, Brown and Company, the publisher behind Allen’s estranged son Ronan Farrow’s #MeToo investigative reporting tome “Catch and Kill.” Farrow announced yesterday that he was dropping the publisher.

In a report from Deadline, news of the walkout on Thursday surfaced via Twitter, where one participant said there were at least 75 employees from the various imprints who took to the streets to protest the forthcoming memoir, titled “Apropos of Nothing.” See more reactions below. Another participant noted that this tactic was used similarly back in February 2018 to cancel disgraced political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos’ book “Dangerous” at Simon & Schuster, which ended up dropping the title.

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The Woody Allen memoir was also condemned earlier this week by his estranged, adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow in a statement that alleges she was never contacted to corroborate details in the book — and specifically targeted Hachette.

“Hachette’s publishing of Woody Allen’s memoir is deeply unsettling to me personally and an utter betrayal of my brother whose brave reporting, capitalized on by Hachette, gave voice to numerous survivors of sexual assault by powerful men,” Farrow’s statement read. “For the record, I was never contacted by any fact checkers to verify the information in this memoir, demonstrating an egregious abdication of Hachette’s most basic responsibility. On the other hand, my story has undergone endless scrutiny and has never been published without extensive fact checking. This provides yet another example of the profound privilege that power, money, and notoriety affords. Hachette’s complicity in this should be called out for what it is and they should have to answer for it.”

According to Hachette, “Apropos of Nothing” will span both Allen’s professional life as a director, and his personal life, including his relationships.

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