After years in which Woody Allen has been able to continue working despite the shadow of a sexual assault allegation against him by his daughter Dylan Farrow, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have emboldened Hollywood to start speaking out against the filmmaker. Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig, Rebecca Hall, and Timothée Chalamet have all recently expressed their regrets about collaborating with Allen (though the director does have a defender in Alec Baldwin). But now, the filmmaker himself — who rarely addresses the subject directly — has issued a statement regarding the allegation.
This morning, Farrow conducted her first television interview about the alleged incident with “CBS This Morning.” In a candid conversation, Farrow detailed the assault and says that she believes that Allen, who has long denied the allegation, is being completely dishonest.
“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,” she said after watching a clip of Allen defending himself on “60 Minutes.” Additionally, Farrow said that outside the assault, Allen behaved inappropriately with her.
“He would follow me around. He was always touching me, cuddling me and if I ever said, you know, like ‘I want to go off by myself,’ he wouldn’t let me,” she added. “He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on.”
To those who have contended that Farrow is simply on a mission to knock down her adoptive father, she has a simple answer. “Why shouldn’t I want to bring him down? Why shouldn’t I be angry? Why shouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t I feel some sort of outrage that after all these years being ignored and disbelieved and tossed aside?”
In response to the “CBS This Morning” interview, Allen has issued a statement regarding the allegation. It follows below:
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. 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.
Allen’s next film “A Rainy Day In New York” is in post-production, and is currently slated to be released by Amazon. The full interview with Farrow can be viewed below: