Recap of episode 4 of “Allen v. Farrow”: An adult Dylan Farrow speaks out

The latest installment of “Allen v. Farrow”, a series of HBO documentaries examining Dylan Farrow’s allegations of sexual abuse against his adoptive father, Woody Allen, covers the years 1993, when a state attorney refused to sue the filmmaker, to the present.

The previous three episodes explored what Farrow says happened on August 4, 1992, when she was 7 – that her father sexually assaulted her in the attic of the family’s country house in Connecticut. The filmmakers rummaged through police and court documents, examined the integrity of the investigations into her accusation, and sought specialized analysis of video footage of young Dylan telling her mother what happened.

Mr. Allen has long denied having sexually abused his daughter and accused his mother, Mia Farrow – Mr. Allen’s ex-girlfriend – of inventing the sexual assault charge because she was angry at him for having a sexual relationship with his daughter college-age, Soon-Yi Previn. (Mr. Allen and Mrs. Previn later got married.) A spokesman for Mr. Allen, who did not participate in the documentary, said he was “riddled with lies”.

The ending covers the world’s reaction to the events of the early 1990s, Allen’s continued fame and praise and, in recent years, a growing unwillingness among those in Hollywood to join him after the #MeToo Movement.

The prosecutor’s decision

The episode begins on September 24, 1993. That day, Frank Maco, a Connecticut state attorney, announced that although he had “probable cause” to sue Mr. Allen, he decided that he would not press charges to save Ms. Farrow from the potential trauma of a trial.

Maco, who was interviewed extensively for the documentary, says that earlier that month in 1993, he met young Dylan in his office, with toys in the room and a female police officer there. When Mr. Maco asked about her father, he said, she froze and didn’t answer.

“The strongest supporters of the prosecution just looked at me and we all shrug,” said Maco. “We weren’t going anywhere with this child.”

At a news conference, Allen said that instead of being happy or grateful for the decision, he said he was “just disgusted” that his children “suffered unbearably from the damaging alliance between a vengeful mother and a coward, dishonest prosecutor and irresponsible and its police ”.

Dylan grows up

In the years after the police investigation and custody trial, which ended in favor of her mother, Ms. Farrow says she suffered during a long period of guilt, thinking she was to blame for the division of the family.

“I felt that if I had kept his secret,” she tells the filmmakers, “I could have spared my mother from all that suffering, and my brothers and sister – myself.”

The brothers say in the series that Mrs. Farrow used to be secretive and looked full of anxiety. She says she hasn’t talked about the aggression in depth with anyone – not even her mother or therapist. At school, she remembers, she broke up with her only boyfriend after just three weeks because she anticipated that he would like to have an intimate relationship with her.

Ronan Farrow, Mrs. Farrow’s brother, tells the filmmakers that his mother tried to distance Allen’s children. But, he says, “there was always a lot of incentive to be attracted by Woody Allen’s efforts to discredit” his sister. For example, Farrow said, Allen made him an offer that if he spoke out publicly against his mother and sister, Mr. Allen would help pay for his college education.

After an award show

The saga returned to public discourse in 2014, after Allen received an award for the set of the work at the Golden Globe Awards. In the past, Farrow told filmmakers, he discouraged his sister from speaking publicly about her father and the events of the 1990s, in the hope that the family could leave it behind.

But after the award show, Mr. Farrow tweeted, “Missed the tribute to Woody Allen – did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed that he molested her at the age of 7 before or after Annie Hall?” Ms. Farrow says her brother’s willingness to speak publicly on the subject encouraged her to write about her memory of events, which were posted on The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog. (Farrow, who helped his sister publish the open letter, said that after another newspaper refused to publish the report, he took it to Kristof, a friend of the family.) Allen later published an Op-Ed in The Times denying your daughter’s allegations.

For two decades, says Farrow, she felt isolated and alone because of her experience. After publishing her letter, she received a flood of messages from people she knew sharing her own experiences with sexual abuse.

Loyalty to Mr. Allen

Still, many Hollywood actors remained loyal to Allen, despite the accusations, and his star power and reputation in the industry remained largely intact.

Four days after the publication of Farrow’s letter, his brother, Moses Farrow, told People Magazine that she was never harassed. He also said that Mia Farrow taught children to hate Mr. Allen and that she used to beat him as a child. When Dylan Farrow heard what her brother said, she started to cry, saying, “It was as if I had been told that this person I knew, loved and trusted had died.”

In interviews with the filmmakers, Ronan Farrow and two more brothers, Fletcher Previn and Daisy Previn, said the allegations of abuse against his mother were false.

In 2018, Moses Farrow published a blog post that continued to challenge his sister’s account of sexual abuse. He targeted a specific detail of her story, which she included in the letter from The Times: that while Mr. Allen sexually assaulted her, she remembers focusing on her brother’s electric train, which was traveling in circles around the attic . Mr. Farrow said that there was no electric train installed in the attic. In Allen’s recent memoir, “Apropos of Nothing”, he also contested that detail, calling it a “new creative touch”.

But, according to police documents, detectives investigating the alleged assault found a train stopped in the attic. A detailed 1992 drawing, which is shown in the episode, includes an object called a “toy train track” in the attic tracking space.

Dylan, decades later

This episode captures Ms. Farrow’s adult life, 28 years after she said her father assaulted her. It shows her husband, Sean, whom she met on a dating site linked to The Onion, and Farrow, now 35, playing with her daughter.

At one point, Mia Farrow asked her daughter, “Have you ever been angry with me?” referring to your choice to bring Mr. Allen into the family. In response, Dylan Farrow said that, first of all, she was happy that her mother believed her account of that day in 1992, saying, “You were there when it was important.”

Another scene from the episode shows Mr. Maco, the state attorney, meeting Ms. Farrow – his first date since 1993.

Mr. Maco said he told Mia Farrow that when his daughter became an adult, he would be happy to answer any questions. That opportunity came last fall – and the documentary team recorded the conversation.

“A part of me really, really wishes that I could have done that,” says Dylan Farrow to Mr. Maco, “that I could have had my day in court.”