Just leave the experts out of this: Peter Pringle assesses the judge whose simple approach battered Woody Allen's image

IN THE end, why was the judge so hard on Woody Allen? The turning point in the film-maker's custody suit against Mia Farrow came early in the hearing, when Judge Elliot Wilk asked Allen about the sexual relationship he had struck up with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi. The judge, who has a reputation as a strong supporter of traditional family values in matrimonal cases, was clearly upset by the answer.

In his scathing report about the inadequacies of Allen as a father, Judge Wilk wrote: 'Mr Allen's deficiencies as a parent are magnified by his affair with Soon-Yi . . . Mr Allen characterised Ms Farrow's home as a foster-care compound and drew distinctions between her biological and adopted children. When asked how he felt about sleeping with his children's sister, he responded that Soon-Yi was an adopted child. He showed no understanding that the bonds developed between adoptive brothers and sisters are no less worthy of respect and protection than those between biological siblings.'

Another passage: 'Mr Allen admits that he never considered the consequences of his behaviour with Soon-Yi . . . Mr Allen still fails to understand that what he did was wrong . . . His self-absorption, his lack of judgement and his commitment to the continuation of his divisive assault, thereby impeding the injuries that he has already caused, warrant a careful monitoring of his future contact with the children.'

From that exchange onwards, as Farrow's sharp, no-nonsense lawyer observed after it was all over, 'the more Woody Allen talked, the worse it got'. And clearly that was how Judge Wilk felt, too, when he denied the 57-year-old Allen the right to look after the three children - his two adopted ones, Dylan and Moses, and his biological son, Satchel.

It was Allen himself who summed up what most Americans appeared to be thinking about the case - if they hadn't had the same thoughts before it burst on to their front pages. What had he learnt from it all, an interviewer asked? He made three points. 'One, that if you are accused of child molestation you are presumed guilty. That's just awful. Two, no one legally involved has the best interests of the kids at heart. It has too much to do with careers and adults. Three, the law is slow and there's just no quick way to help the kids involved.'

The judge's report not only battered Allen's image for Manhattan males (and others, too) as a role model whose lifestyle they would like to emulate, but also, I suspect, will make the entire nation think harder about the American readiness to worship at the altar of psychotherapy and permit lawyers to take over their tangled relationships instead of exercising common sense and parental responsibility.

In the moment of her victory after a near-faultless courtroom performance, Farrow's lawyer, Eleanor Alter, also observed that Allen's long treatment by a psychotherapist was no credit to the profession. 'He looks for permission to do what he wants,' she said. And, apparently, he got it.

For Allen, as the court hearings revealed, it was not necessary for him to know the names of his son's teachers, or even which children shared which bedrooms in Farrow's apartment. During their 12-year affair, he lived in a separate apartment on the other side of Central Park. He did drop in for breakfast, he read to the children and told them stories and bought them presents, and he was extremely generous with financial support - at one time writing Farrow a cheque for a dollars 4m - but, noted Judge Wilk, none of this compensated for his 'evident lack of familiarity with the most basic details of their day-to-day existences'.

The judge was also worried by Allen's over-affectionate attitude toward his daughter Dylan - the trigger for the custody suit. Supported by a phalanx of psychiatrists and social workers, Farrow had alleged sexual abuse. But the judge was not ready to rely on the lawyers and experts who were produced to discuss the matter.

Judge Wilk listened to hours of criss-crossing testimony about the charge, and then asked his own simple, direct questions. Did the pyschologist for Dylan believe the girl had been molested? The psychologist did not. The judge then asked the baby-sitter who had made the original charge what exactly happened when Allen put his head in the child's lap? 'Was he facing her body?' the judge asked? 'Yes,' answered the baby-sitter.

In the end, the judge found the evidence inconclusive and said that it was unlikely that Allen could be prosecuted for sexual abuse. But at the same time he questioned the reliability of a report from a group of independent child-abuse experts from Connecticut who had concluded that the child-abuse charges were untrue. 'We will probably never know what occurred,' he wrote, adding that Allen's behaviour towards Dylan was 'grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her'.

Throughout the hearing, the judge was determined not to give the 'experts' more credence than they deserved. He would have no truck with the permissiveness of the bygone era to which these two film stars belong. And in a case charged with more media pyrotechnics than anyone can remember, Judge Wilk deliberately kept it low-key, refusing to allow television cameras in the courtroom and at times ordering reporters to leave, a process he called 'moving the herd'. He kept the nude photos of Soon-Yi, taken by Allen and discovered by Farrow, in the courtroom safe, much to the distress of the New York tabloids.

In his harsh ruling, which described Allen as 'self-absorbed, untrustworthy and insensitive', the judge concluded that Farrow was not a faultless parent, either, and that she had been unable to provide the kind of support Soon-Yi needed to prevent her having an affair with Allen.

'Ironically,' wrote the judge, 'Ms Farrow's principal shortcoming with respect to responsible parenting appears to have been her continued relationship with Mr Allen.'