Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow at Mia Farrow's apartment in New York City on May 2, 1989
Woody Allen has finally broken his long silence about claims that he molested Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter with Mia Farrow, when she was 7. After several weeks in which the allegations have been rekindled by an open letter from Dylan, now 28, in the New York Times, and tweets by Mia and Ronan Farrow, Allen has responded with a fiery letter, also published in the Times.
“Of course, I did not molest Dylan,” Allen writes. “I loved her and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father and exploited by a mother more interested in her own festering anger than her daughter’s well-being. Being taught to hate your father and made to believe he molested you has already taken a psychological toll on this lovely young woman…”
Allen blames Mia for planting what he says is a false memory in Dylan’s mind, due to Mia’s anger at him in the midst of a custody battle following the revelation of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Mia’s adopted daughter with composer Andre Previn.
“If from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her, is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root?”
Allen further suggests Mia may have lied under oath about the paternity of their son, Ronan, who Mia recently suggested, in a Vanity Fair article, may be the child of Frank Sinatra.
“Granted, [Ronan] looks a lot like Frank with the blue eyes and facial features, but if so what does this say? That all during the custody hearing Mia lied under oath and falsely represented Ronan as our son? Even if he is not Frank’s, the possibility she raises that he could be, indicates she was secretly intimate with him during our years. Not to mention all the money I paid for child support. Was I supporting Frank’s son? Again, I want to call attention to the integrity and honesty of a person who conducts her life like that.”
Allen also claims that Mia enticed one of his former girlfriends, Stacey Nelkin, to testify falsely against him.
As evidence of his innocence, Allen points to the “impartial” findings of an investigation carried out by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, which ruled that no abuse had occurred. He also cites statements from Moses Farrow, a son he adopted with Mia, who says that his mother “drummed it into me to hate my father.” Now 29, Moses is a family therapist who has renewed his relationship with Allen.
In what sounds like the setup to a joke in a one of his movies, Allen describes the Connecticut attic in which the assault allegedly occurred as “a tiny, cramped, enclosed spot where one can hardly stand up.” Due to his acute claustrophobia, he says he was never able to stay in the space for more than a few minutes. He goes on to suggest that Mia imagined that location because of a song written by singer-songwriter Dory Previn, “With My Daddy in the Attic,” which leads to another ad hominem attack in which he notes that the song is on the same album as “Beware of Young Girls,” which Previn wrote after Mia Farrow took up with her then-husband, Andre Previn, in 1968.
No charges were ever filed against Allen, and a Connecticut prosecutor recently said the state’s statute of limitations meant that he could no longer be charged, even if conclusive evidence was found.