“I loved my father. I respected him. He was my hero. And that doesn’t obviously take away from what he did,” Dylan Farrow began her harrowing retelling of the sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of Woody Allen on “CBS This Morning” on Thursday. “But it does make the betrayal and the hurt that much more intense.”
Farrow, now 32, recounted the sexual assault allegations she first made against her adoptive father in 1993.
“I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother’s country house in Connecticut by my father. He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother’s toy train that was set up,” she said in her first television interview, echoing the same account she gave in her 2014 New York Times op-ed. “And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted. As a 7-year-old I would have said, ‘He touched my private parts.’ As a 32-year-old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his fingers.”
Farrow also accused Allen of following her around, adding, “He was always touching me and cuddling me. If I said I wanted to go off by myself, he wouldn’t let me … He would ask me to get into bed with him when he only had his underwear on or when I only had my underwear on. He wasn’t like this with [brother and Mia and Allen’s biological son] Ronan.”
When host Gayle King inquired where Farrow’s mother, actress and Allen ex Mia Farrow, was during the incident, Dylan replied that she was shopping at the time and that Dylan was scared to tell her mother what transpired.
“She was upset,” Dylan recalled. “My first impulse was that I had done something wrong.”
Mia took Dylan to a pediatrician, where Dylan told the doctor that her father had touched her shoulder. When Mia asked why she lied to the doctor initially, Dylan admitted she was embarrassed, then told the doctor that Allen, now 83, had touched her private parts.
The incident at the pediatrician’s office is often cited by skeptics, as well as Allen and his team, as proof that Mia coached Dylan and fabricated the molestation accusations to get revenge on Allen for leaving her for her own adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. When confronted with that argument, Dylan was steadfast.
“What I don’t understand is how is this crazy story about me being brainwashed and coached is more believable than me being sexually assaulted by my father,” she replied. “Every step of the way, my mother has told me to tell the truth. She has never coached me.”
Dylan broke down in tears when presented with footage of Allen denying the allegations in a 1993 television interview.
“I’m really sorry,” she said between sobs. “I thought I could handle it … 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.”
Law enforcement had previously investigated Dylan’s accusations, as did sexual abuse experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Los Angeles Times reported. A prosecutor in Connecticut, where the assault allegedly occurred, said he had “probable cause” to prosecute in 1993 but declined to press charges, reportedly to spare Dylan the trauma of a trial. She now admits she wished Allen had been prosecuted.
“Honestly, yes, I do wish that they had [filed charges],” she said. “I was already traumatized. Outside a court of law, we do know what happened in the attic that day.”
Dylan was visibly moved by support from stars including Natalie Portman and has been vocal about pointing out the hypocrisy of stars, including Justin Timberlake, Cate Blanchett and Blake Lively, supporting the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements while appearing in Allen’s films.
Several actors, including Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet, have donated their proceeds from his upcoming movie, “A Rainy Day in New York,” in light of the recent Hollywood movements against sexual harassment and assault, and many others, including Mira Sorvino and Greta Gerwig, have renounced their previous work with the director.
However, others, including Alec Baldwin, have continued supporting Allen and even accused Dylan of lying about her alleged sexual assault.
“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,” Dylan said.
In terms of those doubting her, Dylan was diplomatic.
“I’m not angry with them. 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 they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of — of silence in their industry,” she said. “I have been repeating my accusations, unaltered, for over 20 years, and I have been systematically shut down, ignored or discredited.”
She added, “It’s a family matter, but I’m a real person. It’s affected every part of my life. Growing up, I pushed it to the side. I tried to pretend, to convince myself, that this is not something I need to bring with me … It’s affected everything.”
Allen has denied the allegations since they first emerged in 1993 and blames the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements for their resurfacing now.
“When this claim was first made more than 25 years ago, it was thoroughly investigated by both the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital and New York State Child Welfare,” Allen said in a statement to CBS News. “They both did so for many months and independently concluded that no molestation had ever taken place. Instead, they found it likely a vulnerable child had been coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.
“Dylan’s older brother Moses has said that he witnessed their mother doing exactly that — relentlessly coaching Dylan, trying to drum into her that her father was a dangerous sexual predator. It seems to have worked — and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says. 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. I never molested my daughter — as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”