Two episodes have aired thus far of HBO’s Allen v. Farrow, a four-part documentary series examining Dylan Farrow’s child sexual assault allegation against her adoptive father, the filmmaker Woody Allen.
The series, helmed by the filmmaking team of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (The Invisible War, On the Record), along with their lead investigator Amy Herdy, includes testimony from numerous members of the Farrow family—Dylan, Mia, and Ronan among them—as well as interviews with neighbors, family friends, city and state officials, child psychologists, and troves of documents, all of which appears to back up Dylan’s allegation that on Aug. 4, 1992, Allen took a 7-year-old Dylan up to the attic of their Connecticut country home and sexually assaulted her. (Allen and Soon-Yi have claimed the series is “riddled with falsehoods.”)
Some of the more eye-opening evidence presented in Allen v. Farrow are never-before-heard recordings of phone calls between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen during their ugly custody battle. (A judge ultimately granted Farrow full custody of their children and ruled Allen’s behavior with Dylan was “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.”)
In this exclusive documentary clip of Episode 3 provided to The Daily Beast, Mia Farrow describes what she calls the “horrible lies” Allen told during the child custody fight. Allen, in the wake of Dylan’s assault allegation and the revelation that he was conducting a secret affair with Farrow’s young adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, whom he largely raised, had sued Farrow for custody of Dylan Farrow, Moses Farrow, and Satchel (now Ronan) Farrow. “I also faced losing all of my children, because if Woody were believed that I was a horrible mother, what would have happened to all the other adopted children in the family? I mean, there was a lot to lose,” Mia Farrow explains in the clip.
Later on, we are presented with a snippet of a recording of a phone call between Allen and Farrow:
<p><i>“You brought charges against me as an unfit mother.” </i><i>“And I’m gonna make ’em stick.” </i><i>“Woody, don’t do this. Don’t try this. Don’t do this. I don’t deserve it...”</i></p>
In virtually all of the phone call recordings provided in Allen v. Farrow, Mia comes off as distraught and worried for the safety of her children, while Allen appears cold, standoffish, and even detached.
“He does sound very, very different from the persona we all fell in love with, that’s for sure,” Amy Ziering told The Daily Beast. “And if you listen to that and look at it through the lens of, ‘If you were a father that was concerned about a daughter that made up charges, would this be your line of questioning as a response?’ It was just striking. Really striking.”
The four-part HBO Documentary series ALLEN v. FARROW continues this Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
