Last week, an open letter from Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, was posted on NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's blog, where she described being taken to the attic by Allen at age seven, "He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me." After a week of debate, now the NY Times has published a response from the 78-year-old actor-writer director, "Of course, I did not molest Dylan. 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."
Allen says that the allegations were part of Mia Farrow's campaign to destroy him, because she discovered he was involved with her adopted 19-year-old daughter Soon-Yi Previn in 1992. (Allen and Previn later married and are still together.) He wrote, "Mia insisted that I had abused Dylan and took her immediately to a doctor to be examined. Dylan told the doctor she had not been molested. Mia then took Dylan out for ice cream, and when she came back with her the child had changed her story… I very willingly took a lie-detector test and of course passed because I had nothing to hide. I asked Mia to take one and she wouldn’t."
He also cites the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, a "group of impartial, experienced men and women whom the district attorney looked to for guidance as to whether to prosecute, spent months doing a meticulous investigation, interviewing everyone concerned, and checking every piece of evidence." The group found:
It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992... In developing our opinion we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.
Allen points to adopted son Moses Farrow's support; Moses said, "I don’t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible."
On his biological son Ronan Farrow's paternity, Allen said, "I pause here for a quick word on the Ronan situation. Is he my son or, as Mia suggests, Frank Sinatra’s? Granted, he 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."
He closed his statement, "No one wants to discourage abuse victims from speaking out, but one must bear in mind that sometimes there are people who are falsely accused and that is also a terribly destructive thing. (This piece will be my final word on this entire matter and no one will be responding on my behalf to any further comments on it by any party. Enough people have been hurt.)"
Dylan Farrow
Since Dylan Farrow's harrowing open letter was posted, sides have been drawn: Some have flocked to Allen's side (including Allen documentarian Robert Weide, whose Daily Beast piece has been decried) while others say Dylan must be believed (here's an interesting perspective from a self-described child abuse investigator). People who have no idea what happened are adding their inane two cents—we're looking at you, Stephen King—and Allen's creepy history with young girls has been rehashed, as has Farrow's scary 1992 Valentine to Allen.
There are some issues with Allen's op-ed, if you want to believe (friend of Mia) Maureen Orth's listing of "undeniable facts" about the case, like "Allen had been in therapy for alleged inappropriate behavior toward Dylan with a child psychologist before the abuse allegation was presented to the authorities or made public" and "Allen refused to take a polygraph administered by the Connecticut state police. Instead, he took one from someone hired by his legal team."
Even though Allen has said all he wants to say, the allegations will remain part of the conversation up until the Oscars, where he's nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Blue Jasmine. It also turns out that Dylan Farrow originally submitted the letter to the LA Times which rejected it—she does specifically address actors in her father's films, "What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?"
