Column: What a Woody Allen reckoning can teach us about Lincoln statues, Dr. Seuss and the British royal family

And for decades, a sizable chunk of the public, coached and coddled by some complicit media, played along. In the early ’90s, Bellafante writes, after Jerry Seinfeld started dating a woman he met in Central Park while she was a high school senior, he took some ribbing. “But a year later,” she writes, “People magazine, as if clearing up a misunderstanding, featured the pair on the cover under the headline: ‘Look Who’s in Love: Jerry Seinfeld, 39, and Shoshanna Lonstein, 18, make an unlikely romance work.’”