Something happened between Woody Allen and his then-seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan Farrow during the early 1990s. He may have molested her. She may have responded to all the stress over Allen leaving the family for her much older sister in a very unfortunate and unfair manner. The resulting fallout of her accusation played out in courts, in hospitals and in the media for years. Allen was never charged and apart from periodic articles revisiting the case, the controversy has remained on the backburner for years. That’s all about to change, however, because for the first time publically, Farrow has decided to share her side of the story.
In a multi-paragraph open letter written to The New York Times, which can be read in full here, Farrow describes in detail the things she claims Allen did to her. She also calls out numerous celebrities by name who have worked with Allen, most specifically his longtime friend Diane Keaton.
You can read an excerpt from the haunting text below…
”What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?”
According to Dylan, Allen was always weird around her. He allegedly spent an inordinate amount of time with her and did strange things like stick his thumb in her mouth and ask her to climb in bed with him while he only had underwear on. Most of it could have been interpreted as eccentric but not necessarily way over the line dad behavior, but that all changed one night in the attic when he allegedly sexually assaulted her while she played with a train set.
”When I asked my mother if her dad did to her what Woody Allen did to me, I honestly did not know the answer. I also didn’t know the firestorm it would trigger. I didn’t know that my father would use his sexual relationship with my sister to cover up the abuse he inflicted on me. I didn’t know that he would accuse my mother of planting the abuse in my head and call her a liar for defending me. I didn’t know that I would be made to recount my story over and over again, to doctor after doctor, pushed to see if I’d admit I was lying as part of a legal battle I couldn’t possibly understand.”
Allen has vociferously denied ever doing anything inappropriate with Farrow. More often than not, he’s chosen to stay quiet on the issue and retreat back to his quiet life with longtime wife Soon-Yi Previn. Given the length of time since the alleged incident happened and the lack of criminal charges, it seems highly unlikely we’ll ever know for sure what actually happened. What we can say for certain, however, is that an entire family was destroyed and everyone involved has never been the same, nor will they ever be the same moving forward.
