It’s been almost four years since Dylan Farrow published her open letter about Woody Allen in The New York Times. A lot has changed since then.
On Thursday morning, Farrow gave her first-ever TV interview to CBS This Morning’s Gayle King. In it, she outlined with excruciating specificity, how, when and where her father molested her when she was just seven years old. But the most devastating part of the interview came when King pulled out an iPad and showed Farrow video of Allen denying the assault on a 1992 episode of 60 Minutes.
“Isn’t it illogical that I’m going to, at the height of a very bitter acrimonious custody fight, drive up to Connecticut where nobody likes me and I’m in a house full of enemies—I mean, Mia was so enraged at me, and she had gotten all the kids to be angry at me—that I’m going to drive up there and suddenly on visitation, pick this moment in my life to become a child molester,” Allen said in that interview. “It’s just, it’s just incredible. I could, if I wanted to be a child molester, I had many opportunities in the past.”
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As the video played, Farrow got visibly upset and started to cry. “I’m really sorry,” she told King. “I thought I could handle it.” Asked whether it was simply seeing her father’s face or listening to his words that made her break down, Farrow said, “He’s lying, and he’s been lying for so long. And it is difficult for me to see him and to hear his voice. I’m sorry.”
Earlier in the interview, Farrow told King exactly what she remembers about that August day in 1992 when she says Allen took her into a small attic crawl space at her mother, Mia Farrow’s Connecticut house and instructed her to play with a toy train set as “sexually assaulted” her. “As a 7-year-old, I would have said he touched my private parts,” Farrow said, but now she knows he “touched my labia and my vulva with his finger.”
At times, King played devil’s advocate, trying to understand Allen’s side of the story, in which he claims Mia Farrow “brainwashed” Dylan into making up this story in order to get back at him for having an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi. “You could see why he might make that claim,” King said. “He would say that she was filled with rage after his affair with Soon-Yi had been discovered, and that she was out for revenge and full of rage.”
“And what I don’t understand is how is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?” Farrow asked, insisting that her mother has only ever encouraged her to tell the truth.
“I want to show my face and tell my story,” Farrow said at the beginning of the CBS segment. “I want to speak out. Literally.” And her decision comes at a time when many prominent women—and far fewer men—have been speaking out against Allen amidst the climate of the #MeToo movement.
“With so much silence being broken by so many brave people against so many high-profile people, I felt it was important to add my story to theirs, because it’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time and it was—it was very momentous for me to see this conversation finally carried into a public setting,” Farrow added.
As for the celebrities who continued to work with Allen even after she came forward with her story four years ago, she said, “I hope that, you know, especially since so many of them have been vocal advocates of this Me Too and Time’s Up movement that, um, they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of – of silence in their industry.”
But while Farrow is acknowledging that the movement empowered her to speak, Allen is now accusing her and her mother of exploiting it for their own ulterior motives. In a statement to CBS News, Allen again maintained his innocence, noting that both the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale New Haven Hospital and New York State Child Welfare “independently concluded that no molestation had ever taken place” decades ago.
“But even 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,” Allen wrote. “I never molested my daughter – as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”
It is exceedingly hard to watch Farrow’s interview this morning and believe that Allen is telling the truth.
