In August 1992, the American film director Woody Allen was accused by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, then seven years old, of having sexually assaulted her in the home of her adoptive mother, the actor Mia Farrow, in Bridgewater, Connecticut. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegation.
When the allegation was made, Farrow and Allen had been in a 12-year relationship and had three children together: two adopted children, Dylan and Moses, and one biological son, Satchel (now known as Ronan Farrow). The assault is alleged to have taken place eight months after Farrow learned that Allen had been having an affair with another of her adoptive daughters, Soon-Yi Previn, who married Allen in 1997; Previn was a first-year undergraduate when Farrow found out about the relationship. Allen alleges that the affair prompted Mia Farrow to concoct the assault allegation as an act of vengeance. The Connecticut State's Attorney investigated the allegation but did not press charges, and the New York Department of Social Services found "no credible evidence" to support it. In response to the allegation, Allen sued Farrow for sole custody of Dylan, Satchel and Moses. He lost the case in June 1993; the judge denied him visitation rights with Dylan, gave him limited, supervised visitation with Satchel, and allowed Moses, a teenager, to decide for himself. The decision was upheld on appeal in 1994 and 1995.
Dylan Farrow has repeated the allegation several times as an adult. Her first public comment was in an interview with Maureen Orth for Vanity Fair in 2013, followed by an open letter in the New York Times in 2014, a Los Angeles Times op-ed in December 2017, and an interview with Gayle King for CBS This Morning in January 2018. Allen responded in 2014 with a New York Times op-ed and in 2018 with a statement to CBS, denying the allegation in both.
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Background
Allen and Farrow
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow began a 12-year relationship in 1980, during which Farrow starred in 13 of Allen's films. They maintained separate apartments in Manhattan throughout the relationship--Farrow on Central Park West and Allen on Fifth Avenue--and did not marry; they had both been married twice.
When the relationship began, Farrow had seven children: three biological sons from her marriage to composer André Previn; three adopted girls (two Vietnamese and one Korean, Soon-Yi Previn); and one adopted Korean boy, Moses. In July 1985 she adopted a baby girl, Dylan, from Texas. Allen was not involved in the adoption, but when Dylan arrived he assumed a parental role toward her and began spending more time in Farrow's home. He and Farrow went on holiday to Europe several times with the Farrow-Previn children between 1987 and 1989. In December 1987 Farrow gave birth to Allen's biological son, Satchel (later known as Ronan Farrow). Farrow wanted to adopt another child in 1991; Allen said he would not take "a lousy attitude toward it" so long as she agreed to his adoption of Dylan and Moses, and in October that year she adopted another Vietnamese child. Allen's adoption of Dylan and Moses was finalized on December 17, 1991.
According to her testimony during the custody trial, Farrow became concerned about Allen's behavior around Dylan in 1987-1988. She reportedly told Allen that he was paying too much attention to Dylan and failing to give her "breathing room". He had allegedly read to Dylan while in his underwear, allowed her to suck his thumb, and would sit on her bed in the morning waiting for her to wake up. On one occasion, Dylan allegedly locked herself in the bathroom for four hours when he arrived; Allen had an employee pick the lock with a coat hanger. The family psychologist, Dr. Susan Coates, witnessed some of Allen's behavior and testified during the custody trial in 1993 that she did not see it as sexual, but as "inappropriately intense because it excluded everybody else". Allen said later that he had paid extra attention to Dylan to compensate for the time Farrow was spending with the newborn, Satchel. He agreed in 1990 to discuss the issue in therapy sessions.
Relationship with Previn
In or around 1991 Allen began an affair with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. According to Allen, it began in late December 1991. According to Farrow, it began while Previn was in her final year at high school, which ended in June 1991. She alleges that Dylan saw Allen and Previn on the bed together in the summer or autumn of 1991. One of the bones of contention has been how old Previn was at the time. When Farrow and André Previn adopted her from Seoul in 1978, the Seoul family court gave her a "presumptive birth date" of October 8, 1970; she had been abandoned and was living in that city's St. Paul's Orphanage. A bone scan in the United States in 1978 indicated that she was between five and seven years old; according to Farrow, the family regarded her date of birth as October 8, 1972. The timing of the affair became an issue in part because Farrow attempted, unsuccessfully, to have Allen's adoption of Dylan and Moses declared void after the molestation allegation, on the grounds that his affair with Previn had begun before the adoptions were finalized on December 17, 1991.
During her final year at high school, Previn told Allen that she wanted to be a model; he advised her how to dress and arranged for professional photographs to be taken. She reportedly asked if she could accompany him to a basketball game, and after attending several together, they became closer. Their affair came to light on January 13, 1992, when Farrow found nude Polaroid photographs of Previn on the mantel in Allen's home. Previn was by then in her first year at Drew University in New Jersey. Allen, then 56, told Farrow that he had taken the photographs the day before, and that he and Previn had first had sex in the last week of December 1991. Allen told the custody trial in 1993 that he regarded the images as erotic, but not pornographic; the appellate court said that it did not "share Mr. Allen's characterization" of the photographs.
Although the discovery shocked the family, Farrow did not stop Allen from visiting her home, and she completed her work on Husbands and Wives (1992), the last film of his in which she appeared. According to Farrow, Allen said his relationship with Previn was over; she alleged that Allen asked her to issue a joint press release, in response to rumors about the relationship, in which she would confirm there was nothing between Allen and Previn, but she refused to do it. She was hurt and angry; in February she sent Allen a Valentine card with skewers through the hearts of the children and a knife through hers. She nevertheless adopted two more children that month: Tam, a blind Vietnamese girl, and Isaiah Justus, an African-American baby boy.
Allen and Previn remained in contact; in July 1992 she lost her job as a summer-camp counselor in Maine after spending too much time on the telephone with a "Mr. Simon", who turned out to be Allen. On 1 August 1992, according to the testimony of Dr. Susan Coates, Farrow telephoned Dr. Coates to say she had learned that Previn and Allen were still in a relationship; Farrow was distressed and told Coates that, just a week earlier, she and Allen had talked about getting married. Previn and Allen's relationship did continue, and they were married in Venice on December 23, 1997.
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Allegation
On August 4, 1992, Allen visited his children at Frog Hollow, Farrow's country home in Bridgewater, Connecticut, while Farrow and a friend went shopping with the two most recently adopted children. Farrow and Allen had been due on August 6 to sign an agreement that Allen would pay $6,000 a month for the support of Dylan, Satchel and Moses.
Present in the house, once Farrow had left, were Dylan and Satchel; Farrow's babysitter, Kristie Groteke; the children's French tutor, Sophie Berge; Farrow's friend's three children; and Farrow's friend's babysitter, Alison Stickland. The day after the visit, Stickland told her employer that she had seen Allen kneel on the floor in front of Dylan, then aged seven, with his face in her lap turned toward Dylan's body; she testified to that effect during the custody trial. When Farrow asked Dylan about it, Dylan described what had happened and said she had not liked it; she also said that Allen had touched her "private part" while they were alone together in the attic crawl space.
Farrow made a videotape of Dylan repeating the allegation, which she said was filmed "in fits and starts" over the following 24 hours, and telephoned her lawyer, who told her to take Dylan to a doctor. Dylan did not repeat the allegation to the pediatrician that day, but she did the following day during a second visit; the doctor then informed authorities. The doctor found no physical evidence of sexual assault. Dr. Susan Coates informed Allen of the allegation during a therapy session; he responded "I'm completely flabbergasted," repeating it several times.
Legal action
Custody proceedings, statements
On August 13, 1992, a week after being told about the allegation, Allen began proceedings in New York Supreme Court for sole custody of Dylan, Moses, and his and Farrow's biological son, Satchel. Farrow's mother, the actor Maureen O'Sullivan, issued a statement on August 15 that was critical of Allen and said that Farrow had retained Alan Dershowitz. Two days later, Allen released his first public comment about his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn: "Regarding my love for Soon-Yi: It's real and happily all true. She's a lovely, intelligent, sensitive woman who has and continues to turn around my life in a wonderfully positive way."
On August 18 Allen held a news conference at the Plaza Hotel. Calling the molestation allegation "an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives", he alleged that, during a meeting on August 3, Farrow's lawyers had demanded $5-8 million. Dershowitz responded that the lawyers had suggested Allen pay a lump sum in child support, rather than a monthly one, to reduce Allen's interaction with Farrow. On August 20 Allen's publicist announced that Allen had passed a lie detector test. The following day, Allen gave an interview to Walter Isaacson of Time magazine, describing the nude photographs of Previn as a "lark of a moment". Of the affair, he said: "I didn't feel that just because she was Mia's daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import."
Yale-New Haven Hospital team
On August 17 the Connecticut State Police announced that they were investigating the assault allegation. Frank Maco, the Connecticut State's Attorney for the Litchfield district, asked the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital to evaluate whether Dylan would make a viable witness. Consisting of two social workers, a nurse and Dr. John M. Leventhal, a pediatrician, the Yale-New Haven team interviewed Dylan, Dylan's psychologist, Allen, Farrow, their domestic staff, and others. Leventhal signed the team's report, while Dylan was interviewed by the social workers. Completed in March 1993, the report went beyond its brief, concluding: "It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen". Its conclusion was based, in part, on the view that Dylan had difficulty telling a consistent story and suffered from "thought disturbances". The team destroyed its notes for reasons that were never explained. It passed its report directly to Allen and Farrow, rather than giving it to Maco, who had requested it. Maco told a reporter in 1997 that Yale "took the case and ran away with it".
Custody trial
Testimony
The custody hearings began on March 19, 1993, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and ended on May 4. Journalists were allowed in court but not with television cameras or microphones. Taking the stand on the first day, Allen said the allegation was Farrow's vengeance for his affair with Soon Yi-Previn, which he had not intended to be "anything but a private thing"; he had hoped Farrow would not find out about it. He described her anger when she did.
Kristie Groteke, Farrow's babysitter, testified in April that for about 15-20 minutes on the afternoon in question, she had not been able to find Dylan or Allen in the house; she had assumed they were outside with the other children. Allen said he had gone to the bathroom during the disputed period. The children's French tutor, Sophie Berge, testified that she had noticed Dylan had been wearing no underwear under her dress that day. Another Farrow-household nanny, Monica Thompson, who was not present in the house on that day, told Allen's lawyers in two affidavits in February 1993 that she had felt pressured by Farrow to support the allegation. Thompson said that Groteke had also had reservations; according to Thompson, Groteke told her, days after the allegation was made, that she "did not have Dylan out of her sight for longer than five minutes. She did not remember Dylan being without her underwear."
Dr. Susan Coates, a Farrow family therapist, testified that Farrow had been so angry with Allen when she discovered the affair with Previn that Coates had feared for Allen's safety. Farrow's lawyer accused Coates of gullibility for having accepted Allen's version of events. One of Allen's lawyers alleged that Farrow's lawyers had suggested "the charges could be made to go away" if Allen agreed to pay around $7 million. Alan Dershowitz, representing Farrow, said there had been an "exploratory" session to attempt mediation. "To have this described as an extortionate meeting is ridiculous," he said. He added that Allen's lawyers were "trying to set a trap, the trap failed and now they testify as if the trap succeeded". One of Allen's lawyers acknowledged when cross-examined that the discussion about money related mostly to the children's education and medical care, as well as money owed for Farrow's film work for Allen.
Dr. John Leventhal of the Yale-New Haven Child Sexual Abuse Clinic testified by deposition on 20 April. Citing inconsistencies in Dylan's account, he said the Yale-New Haven team "had two hypotheses: one, that these were statements that were made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind. And the other hypothesis was that she was coached or influenced by her mother. We did not come to a firm conclusion. We think that it was probably a combination." Farrow and Allen both hired experts to discuss the report. Dr. Anne Meltzer, a forensic psychologist, testified for Allen that the report had "reached conclusions that were supported well by the data they collected." She said the tape of Dylan making the allegation was "flawed" because it had been filmed by one side and not by a professional. Dr. Stephen Harman, a child psychiatrist, testified for Farrow that the report was "seriously flawed", and that he could find no evidence of a thought disorder in Dylan's statements. According to Charles Patrick Ewing and Joseph McCann, the most damaging criticism of the report was that the team had destroyed its notes from the interviews it conducted, which meant the court could not test the validity of the report's conclusions; they write that forensic experts have an obligation to retain their notes for review. Another criticism was that the team was unwilling to testify in court, except via Leventhal's deposition.
Decision
In his 33-page decision in June 1993, Justice Elliott Wilk rejected Allen's bid for custody of the three children, and denied Allen immediate visitation rights with Dylan, saying of Allen's behavior toward Dylan that it was "grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her". His criticism of Allen's parenting was harsh. Rejecting Allen's portrayal of Farrow as a "woman scorned", Wilk said there was no credible evidence that she had coached Dylan, and he criticized Allen for his "trial strategy" of turning family members and employees against one another. The Yale-New Haven team's unwillingness to testify in court, except through Leventhal's deposition, together with the destruction of its notes, had rendered its report, he wrote, "sanitized and, therefore, less credible". Wilk called the case "frivolous" and ordered Allen to pay Farrow's costs.
The police interviewed Allen in Litchfield in January 1993 for over three hours. He said he had never been in the attic crawl space; when the police said they had taken fingerprints in there, he said it was possible that his prints were there. On September 20 that year, Frank Maco, the State's Attorney, accompanied by a female police detective, talked to Dylan; Maco told a reporter in 1997: "I saw complete withdrawal any time I tried to discuss the incident."
On September 24, 1993, Maco held a news conference to say that he would not pursue the molestation allegation, despite having probable cause, citing a desire not to traumatize Dylan. The New York Department of Social Services closed its own 14-month investigation in October 1993; its letter to Allen stated: "No credible evidence was found that the child named in this report has been abused or maltreated. This report has, therefore, been considered unfounded."
Allen filed complaints with the Connecticut Criminal Justice Commission and the statewide bar counsel over Maco's statement about probable cause. The former dismissed the complaint in November 1993. In February 1994 the statewide Grievance Committee ruled that, while Maco had not violated the state's code of conduct for lawyers, his statement was a cause of "grave concern". In addition, Maco had sent a copy of his statement to the judge who was deciding whether to overturn Allen's adoption of Dylan and Moses. That act was "inappropriate, unsolicited and potentially prejudicial", the panel ruled.
Allen's appeals, other legal action
In December 1992 Farrow began legal action, which was ultimately unsuccessful, to have Allen's adoption of Dylan and Moses declared void. Her position was based, in part, on her view that Allen's affair with Soon-Yi Previn had begun before the adoption was finalized on December 17, 1991. Allen stated that the sexual relationship had started in the last week of 1991. Allen offered not to appeal the custody ruling if Farrow would drop her attempt to have his adoption of Dylan and Moses declared void, but she refused.
In January 1994 Allen appealed Wilk's decision. Of the assault allegation, the appellate court stated that its "review of the record militates against a finding that Ms. Farrow fabricated the allegations without any basis". Although the Yale-New Haven team's view that Dylan had a tendency to "withdraw into a fantasy", and that she had offered inconsistent accounts, had to be taken into account, the court stated that "the testimony given at trial by the individuals caring for the children that day, the videotape of Dylan made by Ms. Farrow the following day and the accounts of Dylan's behavior toward Mr. Allen both before and after the alleged instance of abuse, suggest that the abuse did occur." It added that "the evidence in support of the allegations remains inconclusive". The court was critical of Allen's parenting skills and relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. The appeal failed, although two of the five judges said the visitation rights regarding Satchel were too restrictive. Allen appealed again, and in July 1995 the New York Court of Appeals upheld the original decision.
Later statements, reception
Siblings, open letter
When Allen won the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in January 2014, Mia Farrow and Satchel (now the journalist Ronan Farrow) tweeted objections. Dylan Farrow, by then 28, repeated the assault allegation the following month in an open letter in The New York Times blog of Nicholas Kristof, a family friend. Writing that Allen had made her feel uncomfortable "for as long as [she] could remember", she alleged, for example, that he would get into bed with her in his underwear and that she would hide to avoid him. Allen called the allegations "untrue and disgraceful", and responded with an op-ed in The New York Times. The newspaper allowed Dylan's open letter 936 words within Kristof's blog, Ronan wrote, while Allen's op-ed was given twice the length and published in the print edition.
Ronan, aged four in 1992, has been critical of Allen for several years; in 2011 he tweeted: "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression." In The Hollywood Reporter in May 2016, he wrote that, following the publication of Dylan's open letter, his colleagues had forwarded him the daily emails "blasted out by Allen's powerful publicist", with an open cc list, offering talking points for reporters and the names of friends, therapists and lawyers willing to be interviewed. He wrote: "Reporters on the receiving end of this kind of PR blitz have to wonder if deviating from the talking points might jeopardize their access to all the other A-list clients."
Dylan's brother Moses Farrow, who was 14 in 1992, has taken a different view; he has reconciled with Allen and is now estranged from the Farrow family. When Dylan published her open letter, he said in an interview that several people had been in the house on the disputed day and that "no one, not my father or sister, was off in any private spaces". He asserted that Mia Farrow had cultivated a climate in which he and his siblings had felt compelled to support her views, and that she had both physically and emotionally abused him. He repeated the allegations in 2017 to Eric Lax, one of Allen's biographers.
Op-ed and interview
In December 2017, following the Weinstein controversy, Dylan Farrow wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times asking, "Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?" She repeated the assault allegation in January 2018 in a television interview with Gayle King for CBS This Morning. Allen issued a statement in response:
[E]ven 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."
After Dylan Farrow's 2014 open letter, several actors issued statements critical of Allen, including Rosie O'Donnell, Lena Dunham, Sarah Silverman, and Susan Sarandon.
The mood changed further as a result of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements and Dylan's op-ed. In November 2017 during a women's rally, a banner referring to the allegation was hung around the neck of Allen's statue in Oviedo, Spain, and a women's group later asked that the statue be removed. From October 2017 statements supportive of Dylan, or expressing regret at having worked with Allen, were issued by Griffin Newman, Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood, David Krumholtz, Greta Gerwig, Mira Sorvino, Rebecca Hall, Timothée Chalamet, Rachel Brosnahan, Natalie Portman, Colin Firth, Marion Cotillard, Chloë Sevigny, Joaquin Phoenix, Hayley Atwell, Peter Sarsgaard, Elle Fanning, and Michael Caine. Newman, Hall, Chalamet and Fanning said they would donate their earnings from Allen's film A Rainy Day in New York (2018) to charities.
Those expressing support for Allen included Barbara Walters and Diane Keaton in 2014, and Alec Baldwin in January 2018. Robert B. Weide, who made a documentary film on Allen, published his rebuttals to the Farrow allegations in an article The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast. Cherry Jones, addressing the topic, said, "There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don't know the truth ... When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope." In January 2018, the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut canceled its adaptation of Allen's film Bullets over Broadway (1994). Emily Mortimer, when asked about Allen in an interview, said "I believe in due process...I think these things really need to go through all the legal processes before anyone can judge. I don't really have an answer to those questions." Jeff Daniels when asked if he would work with Allen again, responded : "I believe Dylan Farrow. Would I do another one with Woody? The difficult decision would be to turn him down, because of The Purple Rose of Cairo." In February 2018, Circle Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan also cancelled their adaption of Bullets over Broadway. In February 2018, Savanah Lyon, a theater major at the University of California, San Diego, began organising an online petition to have a course teaching Allen's films removed from the UCSD syllabus. Lyon stated that because of the abuse allegations against him, the university should not have a class devoted to studying Allen's work. On February 16th, the UCSD Academic Senate announced that they were going to retain the course on Allen's work, stating that the removal of courses featuring "controversial material, or even material widely regarded as morally problematic" would undermine the values of free inquiry and academic freedom. Cate Blanchett, when asked about the allegations against Allen by Christiane Amanpour, replied "At the time, I said it's a very painful and complicated situation for the family, which I hope they have the ability to resolve." Blanchett added: "If these allegations need to be re-examined which, in my understanding, they've been through court, then I'm a big believer in the justice system and setting legal precedents,....If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in support of that."
Notes
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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