In a televised interview Thursday, Dylan Farrow provided graphic details of her long-standing claim that as a child she had been molested by her adoptive father, Woody Allen. That same morning, filmmaker Allen responded to Farrow’s initial statements Wednesday, and reiterated his consistent denial.
“When this claim was first made more than 25 years ago, it was thoroughly investigated by both the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital and New York State Child Welfare,” Allen, 82, said in a statement. “They both did so for many months and independently concluded that no molestation had ever taken place. Instead, they found it likely a vulnerable child had been coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.”
Farrow, 32, told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King on Thursday, “I loved my father. I respected him. He was my hero. And that doesn’t obviously take away from what he did. But it does make the betrayal and the hurt that much more intense.”
She repeated her claim that in August 1992, Allen had taken her to an attic crawl space at adoptive mother Mia Farrow’s Bridgewater, Connecticut, country home and touched her inappropriately. On other occasions, she said, “He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on.”
An investigation by the Connecticut state’s attorney ended in September 1993 with no charges being filed. The issue was revived in February 2014 through Dylan Farrow’s open letter to The New York Times.
Farrow said she felt newly gratified by the credibility given to her by others in the #MeToo movement. “With so much silence being broken by so many brave people against so many high-profile people, I felt it was important to add my story to theirs,” she said, adding, “I am a real person and I’ve been struggling, coping on my good days, with the aftershocks of being sexually assaulted as a small child and that’s real.”
Allen, who has noted he and Mia Farrow were in a contentious custody dispute when Dylan’s accusations surfaced, said in his statement, “Dylan’s older brother Moses has said that he witnessed their mother . . . relentlessly coaching Dylan, trying to drum into her that her father was a dangerous sexual predator. It seems to have worked — and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says.”
He added that, “even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time’s Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn’t make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter — as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”
Allen’s spokeswoman Wednesday told Newsday that in addition to being exonerated by Yale-New Haven Hospital and New York State child welfare services, two adoption agencies found no impropriety when Allen and wife Soon-Yi Previn adopted their now teenage daughters, Bechet and Manzie, soon after the couple’s 1997 marriage.
