Young Dylan Farrow with his mother, Mia.
Photo: HBO
For nearly 30 years, the claim that Woody Allen molested his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, was in the public domain, having been first reported by the media while Allen was in the midst of a highly controversial separation from his longtime partner. , Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow. We heard Allen repeatedly deny the allegation and point out that he was never charged with a crime related to the incident. In recent years, we read the words of Dylan Farrow herself, who always reiterated the same thing she said as a child: that while her mother did errands and babysitters were busy, her father led her to the attic of her mother’s house in Connecticut one afternoon in August 1992 and sexually abused her.
What we hadn’t been able to do until now was actually see a young Dylan Farrow, in 1992, describe what happened to her. This changes in Allen v. Farrow, a four-part series of HBO documentaries premiering on Sunday night that reexamine the extremely public conversation about a life-threatening violation. Directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, along with producer Amy Herdy, discovered evidence from the 90s that hadn’t received widespread oxygen before, including Dylan’s much-discussed home videos filmed by Dylan’s Mia Farrow explaining what her father did to her, information that Allen characterized for years as a lie that Mia Farrow trained his daughter to tell.
After seeing and hearing 7-year-old Dylan, wide-eyed, it was natural to say, in his soft girlish voice, that his father “touched his private parts” while Farrow asked reasonable follow-up questions, the idea that the child been trained is more difficult to rationalize than ever, especially after psychologists analyze the tapes on camera and consider them reliable. If you believe Dylan Farrow is telling the truth – and after watching Allen v. Farrow, it’s hard to believe otherwise, if it weren’t already – it means that Woody Allen is responsible for sexually abusing and then lighting gas, a 7-year-old boy, an uncomfortable perception that some fans of his work are still going through through difficult processing times.
It is important to note that Dick and Ziering, who examined issues related to rape and sexual assault in previous documentaries – most recently Russell Simmons – focused In the registry – made a series that is transparent about their status as a reflection of the perspectives of Dylan and Mia Farrow. While listening to Woody Allen’s version of certain events through audio clips from the audio book of his recent memories, The purpose of nothing, he did not participate in Allen v. Farrow, which opens on Sunday night. At the end of each episode, Kirby and Ziering include a title card that states that he “denies being violent or sexually abusive to Dylan”.
Soon-Yi Previn, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter with her previous husband André Previn and the woman Allen has been married to for more than two decades, also did not participate. Neither Allen and Previn’s two children, nor Moses Farrow, another child originally adopted by Mia Farrow and later by Allen as well. In an interview with The Guardian two months ago, Moses reiterated what he said earlier: that Dylan lied about the abuse and that it was his mother, not his father, who abused her emotionally and physically. In an interview with this magazine in 2018, Previn provided a similar account. This article, written by Daphne Merkin, who revealed in the article that she is Allen’s longtime friend, was criticized for being what Allen’s supporters are likely to call a documentary: very one-sided and potentially biased.
Clearly, it is impossible to revise Allen V. Farrow without pulling again all the threads of the complicated personal and professional relationship of more than a decade between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and their dramatic disintegration. The series certainly portrays family events in the widely covered scandal: the revelation of Allen’s case with Previn, which surfaced when Mia Farrow discovered naked photos of Soon-Yi, taken by Allen, in her apartment; the attic incident with Dylan, which was not the first time that Allen’s behavior towards his daughter was flagged as inappropriate; the criminal investigations and the terrible battle for custody that followed.
But this series of documents is not really about Mia Farrow or Woody Allen. Instead, it puts Dylan Farrow at the center of his own story. Now also a wife and mother, she talks a lot about her parents, her abuse and the lasting effects of being victimized and then re-victimized by those who discarded her story or threw it aside for the sake of convenience. His own brother, Ronan Farrow, now famous for his work as a journalist bringing the stories of #MeToo to light, even admits that when he was trying to establish his career, he wanted Dylan to stop talking about all the confusion with his father.
“She and I had prolonged fights where I basically told her to shut up,” he says. But as an adult, when he read the court documents and evidence in the abuse cases filed against Allen in Connecticut, where the Dylan incident happened, and in New York, where Allen lived, his reaction was, “Well, holy shit. I have moved away from a real judicial error here. “
Allen v. Farrow it is not just an accusation by Woody Allen or even an accusation by those who unequivocally supported him, although some of the actors he worked with, including Diane Keaton and Scarlett Johansson, do not leave this documentary looking particularly good. In fact, it is a sharp criticism of the institutions and structures of power, from Hollywood to the New York City government, to the criminal justice system and to the media, which have some investment in ensuring that certain men in power remain there. He joins another HBO documentary, Leaving Neverland, which made Michael Jackson’s alleged status as a child abuser into something almost impossible to refute, like a story about how society can turn a blind eye to abuse when famous people are involved. The series is also about how it has historically been easy to dismiss women and girls – labeling someone like Mia Farrow a vengeful and scorned woman, for example, and then cementing that narrative in the press. In that sense, looking back at how a celebrity’s personal crisis was covered with the 2021 vision, Allen v. Farrow also shares some things in common with the recent Gifts from The New York Times: Framing Britney Spears. The breadth of what the series addresses makes it much more attractive and thought-provoking than it would have been as a strict repetition of the Farrow-Allen division.
At this most basic level, the doc does a solid job of recontextualizing our understanding of the details surrounding that separation, as well as Dylan’s relationship with Allen, through the display of several home videos; recordings of telephone conversations between Allen and Mia Farrow following the breakdown of the relationship; examination of testimonies and court documents; and interviews with some of Dylan’s other siblings, family friends who have witnessed Allen’s behavior towards Dylan over the years, psychologists and, notably, Frank Maco, the former Litchfield County, Connecticut, state attorney who opted for did not sue Allen for sexual abuse in the 1990s. Maco then said, and repeats now, that he found a probable cause sufficient for an arrest, but he did not want to subject Dylan, who had already told and retold his story many times, to suffer even more, putting her as a witness.
Holes are made in other aspects of history that are often highlighted as evidence of Allen’s innocence. A report from Yale-New Haven Hospital that concluded that Dylan was not abused is considered inaccurate, in part because two of the social workers believed Dylan, but all notes of their interactions were destroyed. The New York prosecutors’ decision to drop the case against Allen is characterized as the result of a cover-up motivated, in part, by a desire to keep the filmmaker synonymous with Manhattan by injecting money into his economy. (A New York City social worker who believed that Dylan’s report was fired during the turmoil, and later rehired.) Another claim Allen made is that Dylan’s reminder of facing his brother’s train during the heist in the attic does not match because there was no train set in the relatively small space. But a 1992 crime scene sketch by the Connecticut police includes the design of a train line. If the public stops Allen v. Farrow were a jury, they would probably find many reasons to cast reasonable doubts about Allen’s version of events.
Even after sifting through all the information and interviews in the four episodes, there are still some questions that lack adequate answers. The most obvious: why did Allen, after exposing his affair with Previn and knowing that his behavior towards Dylan often raised red flags, do what he did that day in August? Since he denies that he abused her, we will probably never know for sure. He faced some professional consequences in the wake of the rise of the #MeToo movement, however, including the suspension of his production contract with Amazon, which led Allen to file a $ 68 million lawsuit against the company that was later liquidated.
Others may wonder what Dylan gains from joining a premium cable network to discuss the worst day of his life. This is easier to understand: there is a closure to owning your own story, even the scariest parts of it, the parts that cannot be undone. One of the most notable things about Allen v. Farrow it is how Dylan appears to be firm and strong, despite everything she has had to face. Occasionally, feelings of sadness or panic interfere. At one point, she has to pause while talking about her father because she unwittingly starts to tremble and her teeth start chattering. But most of the time, she feels comfortable and balanced while sharing her feelings about experiences she says were devastating.
“Sometimes, when I see my husband and daughter together, I get a little jealous,” she admits as she watches her husband and daughter, who looks so much like the girl that Dylan once was. “It’s bittersweet because I know I’m paying in advance.”
After all that happened to her, Dylan Farrow has something that most people would agree that Woody Allen never had: an unwavering sense of self-awareness and his responsibility to the world at large.