Woody Allen’s son Moses Farrow defended his filmmaker father against his sister Dylan Farrow’s accusations of sexual abuse, saying their mother, Mia Farrow, coached Dylan to lie.
“I’m a very private person and not at all interested in public attention,” Moses Farrow wrote in a blog post titled “A Son Speaks Out.” “But, given the incredibly inaccurate and misleading attacks on my father, Woody Allen, I feel that I can no longer stay silent as he continues to be condemned for a crime he did not commit.”
In the piece, Moses Farrow says Mia Farrow was well-versed in “coaching, drilling, scripting, and rehearsing — in essence, brainwashing” her children. Moses Farrow said he “witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside.” He says Mia Farrow slapped his face or ordered him to stand naked in front of his siblings when he wasn’t behaving the way she wanted him to.
“For all of us, life under my mother’s roof was impossible if you didn’t do exactly what you were told, no matter how questionable the demand,” he wrote.
While a spokesperson for Dylan Farrow did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment, Dylan Farrow said on Twitter: “As I said when he last made these claims, this is an attempt to deflect from a credible allegation made by an adult woman, by trying to impugn my mother who has only ever been supportive of me and my siblings. It’s easily disproven, contradicts years of his own statements, is beyond hurtful to me personally, and is part of a larger effort to discredit and distract from my assault. My brother is a troubled person. I’m so sorry he’s doing this.”
TheWrap has reached out to representatives for Mia Farrow. Read Moses Farrow’s entire blog post here.
Moses Farrow was adopted from South Korea as a toddler by Mia Farrow and co-adopted by Allen in 1991. He accused Mia Farrow of abuse in a 2017 conversation with author Eric Lax, and Mia Farrow responded at the time, “It’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up, perhaps to please Woody.”
Moses Farrow said Mia Farrow spoke ill of Allen constantly after news broke of Allen’s relationship with another of Mia Farrow’s adopted children, Soon-Yi Previn. Moses Farrow said Mia Farrow told everyone to keep a close eye on Allen, including on Aug. 4, 1992, the day on which Dylan Allen said she was sexually abused by Allen in an attic.
In 2014, Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter saying the filmmaker sexually abused her when she was 7 years old. Allen has denied all allegations, and he has never been charged. What happened between Allen and Dylan Farrow that afternoon has been in dispute for 25 years, but Allen accused Mia Farrow of “relentlessly coaching” Dylan Farrow as a child, to get revenge for his relationship with Soon-Yi.
“For months now, [Mia] had been drilling it into our heads like a mantra: Woody was ‘evil,’ ‘a monster,’ ‘the devil,” and Soon-Yi was ‘dead to us,’” wrote Moses Farrow. This was the constant refrain, whether or not Woody was around. (So often did she repeat it that Satchel would announce to one of our nannies, ‘My sister is f—ing my father.’ He had just turned four.) My mother was our only source of information about Woody – and she was extremely convincing.”
Moses Farrow added: “In short, this was not a happy home — or a healthy one.”
He said that on the day in question — Aug. 4, 1992 — Allen sat in the TV room, where Dylan and Satchel (who now goes by Ronan Farrow) were watching “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” The house was filled with nannies and tutors, and while Allen would leave the room every once in a while, he never went anywhere with Dylan Farrow, Moses Farrow wrote.
“Along with five kids, there were three adults in the house, all of whom had been told for months what a monster Woody was,” he wrote. “None of us would have allowed Dylan to step away with Woody, even if he tried. Casey’s nanny, Alison, would later claim that she walked into the TV room and saw Woody kneeling on the floor with his head in Dylan’s lap on the couch. Really? With all of us in there? And if she had witnessed that, why wouldn’t she have said something immediately to our nanny Kristi? (I also remember some discussion of this act perhaps taking place on the staircase that led to Mia’s room. Again, this would have been in full view of anyone who entered the living room, assuming Woody managed to walk off with Dylan in the first place.) The narrative had to be changed since the only place for anyone to commit an act of depravity in private would have been in a small crawl space off my mother’s upstairs bedroom. By default, the attic became the scene of the alleged assault.”
He added, “Dylan was alone with Woody in his apartment countless times over the years without a hint of impropriety, yet some would have you believe that at the age of 56, he suddenly decided to become a child molester in a house full of hostile people ordered to watch him like a hawk.”
Moses Farrow also said a model train that Dylan Farrow described seeing in the attic was not actually located in the attic, but instead was in the boys’ room downstairs.
“Now, whenever I hear Dylan making a public statement about what allegedly happened to her that day when she was barely seven, I can only think of that imaginary train set, which she never brought up during the original investigation or custody hearing,” Moses Farrow wrote. “Did somebody suggest to the adult Dylan that such a specific detail would make her story more credible?”
“My father continues to face wave after wave of unfair and unrelenting attacks from my mother and her surrogates, questioning why he has been ‘given a pass’ all these years,” he wrote. “But Woody was not given a pass. Quite the opposite. Mia’s accusation was fully investigated by two separate agencies and charges were never brought. Mia reached the end of the legal runway after it was determined that the abuse never occurred. But trial by media thrives on the lack of long-term memory and Twitter requires neither knowledge nor restraint.”
A November 1992 Vanity Fair article said Allen and Mia Farrow had been preparing to sign an elaborate child-support-and-custody agreement on Aug. 6, which would have given Mia Farrow $6,000 a month for the support of Satchel, their biological child, and their adopted son, 15-year-old Moses.
Moses Farrow added, “To those who have become convinced of my father’s guilt, I ask you to consider this: In this time of #MeToo, when so many movie heavyweights have faced dozens of accusations, my father has been accused of wrongdoing only once, by an enraged ex-partner during contentious custody negotiations. During almost 60 years in the public eye, not one other person has come forward to accuse him of even behaving badly on a date, or acting inappropriately in any professional situation, let alone molesting a child.”