She is a sad and slightly distracted girl, sitting on a bed, curling a lock of hair and sucking, answering questions that her mother asks kindly:
“What did Daddy do?”
In a never-before-released home video that represents a crushing blow to Woody Allen’s years of denial, his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, tells her mother, Mia Farrow, that her father touched her at her Connecticut farmhouse.
“Where did he touch you?”
Dylan reaches for his ass.
“We went to his room,” says Dylan, “and we went to the attic, and he started telling me strange things. He went after me and touched my private parts. … He said: ‘Don’t move. I need to do this.’ But I moved my ass a little to see what he was doing. He said, ‘Don’t move. I need to do this. And if you stand still, then, um, we can go to Paris. ‘”
This was in the summer of 1992, the start of an intense and sordid battle between Allen and Farrow that resulted in charges, investigations, a prosecutor’s difficult decision not to file charges against the iconic filmmaker and an ugly final custody battle initiated by Allen. That he lost. In a hard-hitting decision, the judge considered Allen “self-centered, untrustworthy and insensitive”. Farrow’s main disability as a mother, the judge said, was his ongoing relationship with Allen.
No joking.
Many important questions are raised in the new HBO documentation “Allen v. Farrow”, four excruciating, enraging and enlightening hours by investigative filmmakers Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Amy Herdy, who, in previous films, addressed issues such as sexual abuse on campuses university students and the armed forces. “Allen v. Farrow ”is based on archives of lawyers and police, testimonials, interviews with friends and house staff and private recordings that have never been made public until now.
“I’ve always been in your clutches,” says an adult Dylan to filmmakers. “He was always hunting me.” At the time of the alleged incident, Allen was in therapy because of his “inadequately intense” relationship with Dylan, who describes his father instructing her on how to suck a finger and “what to do with my tongue”.
Not sure what to think about Allen? Just watch and judge for yourself.
But why is it so difficult for us to believe that beloved artists are capable of monstrous acts? Why don’t we believe in children who tell stories of abuse that are consistent and supported by circumstantial evidence? (Three nannies, who have never spoken in public before, say in the film that Allen disappeared with Dylan for 20 minutes on the day in question; they searched the couple up and down.)
Why do we apparently find it easier to believe Allen’s misogynistic and selfish narrative that Mia Farrow was a woman scorned and determined to take revenge?
“You can’t have sex with my kids,” says Mia Farrow in the film. “This is not part of the agreement.” However, as Allen himself admits, he had sex with another daughter of Farrow when she was a teenager.
Allen has devoted much of his film career to fantasies about relationships between older men and much younger women. As Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson told filmmakers, Allen’s entire career was about “getting ready” – the audience.
“Basically, it’s always an older guy dealing with a younger woman,” says Richard Morgan, a freelance journalist who read the entire Woody Allen archive at Princeton University – 56 boxes of material, made and unmade, spanning 57 years. In a 2018 Washington Post essay, Morgan wrote, “Examining all the boxes is an insistent and vivid obsession with women and girls.”
I confess that I was delighted with Allen’s 1979 masterpiece “Manhattan”. But now, when I see 16-year-old Mariel Hemingway’s Tracy kissing Isaac de Allen in her 40s, lying on the bed next to him, all I feel is deep discomfort and disgust.
Allen did not speak to the filmmakers. But her voice is heard throughout the series, in clips from the audiobook version of her 2020 memoirs, “Apropos of Nothing”, at press conferences addressing allegations of abuse and in scary phone calls recorded by Mia Farrow, where her voice is cold and calculating.
Shortly after Dylan told his story to his mother, Connecticut state prosecutor Frank Maco found a likely case for issuing an arrest warrant against Allen for sexual assault on a minor. He did not proceed with the arrest and prosecution because he feared for the emotional well-being of Dylan Farrow, who had already been interviewed nine times excessive – unprecedented treatment of a suspected child abuse victim – by experts at Yale University. child sexual abuse at New Haven Hospital, whose often cited results question whether the abuse occurred, is questioned in the documentary by the prosecutor and other experts.
At the end of the series, Dylan, now an adult, sits with Maco in the backyard of his rural home. It is the fall of 2020. She is now 35, married and the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, and considers herself an incest survivor. Maco explains, almost crying, that he didn’t want to drag her into the trauma of a trial after she has been through so many things.
“I wish I had witnessed it,” she says to Maco. “I wish I had been stronger. To this day, I feel like I had the opportunity to be brave and I refused. “
“I never want to hear that you blame yourself,” says Maco. “I made the decision.”
Mia Farrow, for her part, wishes repeatedly that she never allowed Allen to become part of her family.
“Are you mad at me?” Mia asks Dylan, as they sit down for coffee at Mia’s farmhouse.
No, says Dylan. “When it mattered, you were there for me.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.