The unconscionable manipulations of Mia Farrow
If I am sure of two things, in all seriousness, they are, first, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not murder John Kennedy and, second, that Woody Allen did not sexually molest Dylan Farrow. This one’s going to be about the second.To any observer that has studied the specifics of this allegation, they come to read as patently absurd. I’m not one that came to the story with a pre-conceived notion one way or another, or any motivation to defend Woody Allen. I like his movies fine, a couple of them quite a lot, but I guess I considered myself vaguely in what would be considered the Mia Farrow camp for years. I love Frank Sinatra, and Frank and Mia, after their brief marriage in the late ‘60s, stayed on friendly terms until his death in 1998. (Very friendly, perhaps, which I’ll get to.) The Sinatra daughters have always said they think of Mia as a good friend, as they’re roughly the same age and share the same affection for their father. Mia was always a charming guest on David Letterman also. Everyone seems to have liked Mia. She was supermom. She very specifically created that public image for herself in the news and tabloid media, adopting disadvantaged children from orphanages all over the world.
Her relationship ended with Woody Allen, who had cast her in ten of his movies, when I was 18 years old, in 1992. That was the year the tabloids blew up with the news that Woody had taken nude photos of Mia’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and been romantically involved with her. During the custody hearing involving their shared child (or children, it’s confusing), it was alleged that Allen had recently sexually molested their adopted 7-year-old daughter, a woman we know now as Dylan Farrow. This was all very sordid and did not all cast Allen in a favorable light. His own image on film was one of a nebbish, sex-obsessed neurotic. He was, for lack of a better word, to me, weird. Talented but weird. He famously shunned the social scene, saying it made him uncomfortable. He was absent from the auditorium, at work back in New York, when his film Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar for 1977. If you’re not familiar with these details, and many Midwesterners specifically likely are not, I’ll detail them through the process of addressing them.
Child protection authorities found the accusation of molestation to be baseless already 27 years ago, but the public claims by Mia and now by Dylan, found new light thanks to a television interview by Dylan, a new culture of #metoo, and the unique fact that Dylan’s brother, Ronan (formerly called Satchel), the only biological child of Allen and Farrow, has become a news reporter for NBC and several magazine publications specializing in hunting celebrity sexual predators such as Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing Weinstein.
Here’s a glimpse of the house that Soon-Yi, Dylan, and Ronan grew up in: Mia already had a couple biological children of her own, and then a slew of adopted children. According to Soon-Yi, the mother’s affection for her adopted children ended when the cameras were turned off. She was only interested in what those children did to bolster her reputation as a do-good actress. (Mia has been named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.) Soon-Yi was snatched up from an orphanage in Seoul, South Korea, that she did not want to leave. There was no process in which the mother would attempt to get to know the child before they departed for Manhattan's Upper East Side.
As one of the adopted children in the house, you played second fiddle to Mia’s other children. The adoptees were left to tend to themselves much of the time. They were, at various times, locked by their mother in a closet, thrown down a flight of stairs, or hit with objects like telephones and hairbrushes. The corporal abuse was accompanied by mental cruelty. Soon-Yi was held upside down by her mother when she failed to learn English fast enough for her mother’s taste. Because of the roles played in the home, relatives of Allen visited the house once and thought one of the adopted girls was a maid. A boy with leg braces named Moses was told by his mother that he must wear heavy metal contraptions that go outside the pants, rather than the more comfortable plastic ones inside the pants. This was so that the public could see that he was disabled. An adopted child with spina bifida was sent back only a couple weeks after adoption because he made a favored child, Fletcher, uncomfortable. Thaddeus, a paraplegic from polio, was locked in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for some infraction.
Allen was not around. The director and actress were never married, nor did they ever live together during the 13 years or so that they were ostensibly in a relationship. He lived on one side of Central Park, she and her kids on the other. She would escape the city to a farm upstate with the children between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and Allen, according to all, would visit once or twice during the summer. Two of the adopted children, a girl named Tam and a boy named Thaddeus, would wind up committing suicide before getting past college age. Tam’s death was from a reported heart condition at the age of 21, but a half-brother, Moses, friendly to Allen, says it was actually a purposeful overdose of pills misreported to the media by Farrow. Thaddeus took his own life in 2016. This was the house. And Mia paid particular attention to hiding it from her boyfriend, as she did from the rest of us.
Allen was never Soon-Yi’s adopted father. Obviously that was the child of Mia’s ex, the well-known conductor Andre Previn. Thus, the last name. Yet news articles constantly still claim today that Allen had adopted her. Conversely, he barely knew her. The two kept a cold and distant relationship when Allen would visit the house. She was one of the older children. He felt she was a morose teenager, and she felt he was her mother’s clueless, enabling meal ticket. The romantic relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi did not begin until she was 20 years old, back from college and invited by Mia to attend a Knicks basketball game with Allen. That’s when the two started talking about Soon-Yi’s inner turmoil having grown up in this house-- an experience she judged to have been worse than if she had stayed in an orphanage, the one which had rescued her from a life of poverty on the street.
When Mia found the nude photos, she pushed the red button. This is when we all found out about Woody and Soon-Yi. The passionate relationship with Allen had apparently been over for years, but their formal separation had involved the legal custody of Dylan, adopted by both, and Ronan, their biological son. Shortly after the secret relationship came to light is when we heard the first allegation by Farrow that Allen had molested 7-year-old Dylan.
Now to that day in question. First, Allen was visiting the country house, permitted visitation with Dylan and the 4-year-old Ronan during the custody proceedings. Farrow left the house, but left her friends in the house at the same time. This is when Allen-- mind you, a famous claustrophobe--allegedly took the girl into a grungy, cramped attic space with little more than rodent traps. Though her story has shifted a couple times, Dylan says that she remembers the abuse next to an electric train set, which has caused her to have terrible flashbacks involving toy trains, but her older brother, Moses, says there was never a train track or any toys at all in that attic. Moses is the one that has provided the description of this attic. The kids never played there. Moses was 14 and says there wouldn’t have even been space for a train-- instead, only a steeply gabled roof and open floorboards with exposed nails.
It's additionally quite uncommon for a child molester to have just this one-time accusation lobbed against him, one that was shockingly timed to correspond with this custody case. This is not to say that it could not happen only the one time, but it’s not the nature of the impulse to be one and done, and we see that with predators like Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey. People have made the false jump from Soon-Yi to Dylan for years to try to detect a pattern of behavior, but Soon-Yi was a 20-year-old consenting sex partner, not a helpless 7-year-old child. The relationship between Allen and Previn broke the trust of a relationship, but is not illegal.
According to Moses, Mia repeated this mantra so often that 4-year-old Ronan (then called Satchel) would run around the house shouting, “My sister is fucking my father." Most insultingly, to me, is that Mia then began to publicly cast Soon-Yi as being mentally retarded as a way, seemingly to suggest, that Allen had been grooming her. This daughter she had allegedly abused went on to earn her master’s degree and has worked and raised two children of her own (with Allen) in the proceeding decades-- to say nothing of the maturity and strength that was required to overcome her very difficult upbringing, one that once found her trying to eat a bar of soap out of a dumpster. Allen's sister, Letty, says that Mia called her right after the discovery of the nude photos and proclaimed threateningly, "He took my daughter, now I'll take his." Allen says that a phone call from Mia directly had her ominously declaring, "I have something planned for you."
After two different state investigations were conducted, resulting reports found in 1993 that, not only was there insufficient evidence to suggest that this sexual assault had taken place, but that there was significant evidence to suggest that the child, Dylan, had been coached in her testimony. That’s why this story then disappeared for so long after '93.
And here’s what almost no article rehashing this incident ever includes. When Mia, in the 1970s, was breaking up the marriage of Andre and Dory Previn, ingratiating herself as a presence into the Previn home, Dory, a professional musician like her husband, had written a song called “Daddy in the Attic,” and the lyrics went:
And he’ll play
His clarinet
When I despair
With my Daddy in the attic
Evidently, you can write this plot.
What we also don’t ever read about is that Mia’s older brother, John Villiers-Farrow, another child of Hollywood royalty couple, John Farrow and Maureen O’Sullivan, went to prison for the sexual molestation of two boys in 2014. He currently resides behind bars in Maryland and will until 2024.
The parallel with Woody and Soon-Yi, and their betrayal, must have provided a vivid mirror for Mia. She was 21 years old when she began her relationship with the then-50-year-old Frank Sinatra. The Farrow/O’Sullivan house was another one that lacked parental structure, like Mia’s. Mia and John’s brother, Patrick, committed suicide in 2009. Woody says he had heard the stories during his time with Mia of alleged sexual abuse by John Farrow Sr. of his daughters and of the older Farrow boys getting aggressive with the younger girls. Moses has claimed that his mother admitted to him that she escaped “attempted abuse” within her own family. None of Mia, Dylan, or Ronan have ever expressed any public sorrow or condolence for Uncle John’s victims, and Ronan has made his living of this.
So now, to Ronan Farrow, a real piece of work. Beyond his silence for the victims of John Villiers-Farrow, he has called his siblings, Soon-Yi and Moses, liars, in defense of his sister, Dylan, yet the older children were undoubtedly abuse victims growing up in the Farrow home. (Moses works today as a family therapist.) When Allen attempted to publish his new memoir, Apropos of Nothing, it was done so through the same publisher as Ronan’s well-received and lucrative investigative book. Ronan made a big public spectacle of his anger when his father's book was about to drop. I won’t bother to list the chicken-livered publishing house in question but the new one is Arcade Publishing. Both Ronan and Dylan have been denied a loving father by their mother, but Ronan seems to be playing his name and bloodline to every advantage.
It’s long past time for Mia and Ronan to come clean on their secret-- the one about Ronan’s paternity. Within weeks of dating Woody Allen, according to him, she talked about having his baby. He was indifferent to the idea (and she had a lot of kids already), but he relented because it was important to her. They tried for months for a biological child. When baby Satchel (named by Allen for the great Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige) came along, he instantly became his mother’s new favorite. Fletcher was pushed aside.
According to Allen’s new book, he was told that Mia slept naked in the bed with Satchel until he was 11 years old. During the boy's infancy, Allen would come across the park for breakfast each morning, to sit with Moses and Dylan, and Mia would be behind closed doors in bed with Satchel, who was also called Harmon, and then Seamus, before becoming Ronan. Woody says that the passionate part of his relationship ended with Mia, by her decision, around the time Satchel was born, as if that’s what she wanted out of him. She never put Allen's name on the birth certificate, leaving the father listing blank. That makes it an odd consideration then a couple years ago when Mia started joking publicly that Satchel/Ronan did not belong to Allen, but actually to the late Frank Sinatra. Mia had already said publicly that she continued to have affairs with Sinatra later in his life, maybe into the 1990s and into the iconic singer’s septuagenarian years.
Frank’s daughter, Nancy, came out shortly after and said Mia was just joking, but was she? We all got a look at the photos side by side. I’ll let you do the work, if you haven't, on the internet. Side by side, there is the shared, famous blue eyes, as well as the nose and chin of Sinatra. Ronan has got his mother’s blonde hair, not looking particularly Italian or Jewish, but I don’t see much, if any, of Woody Allen in that visage. It's a funny thing to be joking about in any case. Why won’t Ronan say anything about it? No denials to be heard, except from Ronan's possible half-sister. Only a wink from Mia Farrow. When Allen’s book comes out, or before that, it was his latest movie on Netflix, Ronan runs to a nearby Manhattan news studio and gives a national interview. Behind the scenes calls get placed to actors and actresses and pressure is applied to keep them from working with the director, using Ronan's clout. And Woody Allen did financially support this child for 18 years, one that may not be his, before the son now sees fit to try to queer his dad’s publishing deal. In the new memoir, when Woody says he believes Ronan is his biological son, it reads more to me like wistfulness for a relationship lost, and not his honest evaluation.
It's hard to know if Dylan is going along with her mother knowingly, or honestly believes now that this something happened. That’s a tragedy too, being the child of this woman in any capacity of ongoing relationship or lack there of. Dylan claims she was never interviewed by authorities as a child, but she actually was nine separate times. Continued attacks, often from Farrow’s media friends, on the pages of magazines like Vanity Fair, are shameful and exclude such vital information that they fail to rise to the level of journalism. Misconceptions about Soon-Yi become misconceptions about Dylan, and that’s exactly how Mia would have it. Okay, you think he’s creepy. As Curb Your Enthusiasm producer Robert Weide has put it in his blog dedicated to the topic, “he (Allen) fell in love with his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, who was of age, and whom he’s still with, (26) years later.”
I admire stars like Diane Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Javier Bardem, Wallace Shawn, Blake Lively, and Scarlett Johansson that continue to publicly support Allen considering the treacherous current climate that exists for those that would. There’s no nuance or understanding applied to so many of the stories on this topic, where the New York Times, “the paper of record,” can casually drop Allen’s name next to that of Weinstein or Cosby. There’s been a complete disregard for the fact that Dylan Farrow was believed. Authorities listened to the child, they believed her, and they investigated. The newscasts led with it every night. I certainly remember that part. Then they dismissed the accusation, in two different states-- first, it was the Yale/New Haven Hospital in Connecticut (a seven-month long investigation) and the New York State Department of Social Services (fourteen months). There were no charges because there was no evidence. That’s how the system works. Saying that this was swept under the rug is like saying COVID-19 has been swept under the rug.
Not only do I not believe the claim, I don’t believe a reasonable person that has evaluated the facts of the case can be convinced of it. To me, the giveaways are the personal attacks leveled by the Farrow clan. Mia and Ronan didn’t go after Moses’ contention that the toy train set didn’t exist. They still haven’t. They go after Moses personally. He chose sides against them. They announce to the media that Moses "is dead to them." They claim that Dylan was too emotional at the age of 7 to pursue a civil case against Allen, and now Dylan cites the statute of limitations on the allegations, but why did Mia and Dylan not pursue a civil case before the statute expired, when Dylan was, say, 17 years old and much more emotionally mature? Well, one potential piece of evidence on that is the housekeeper at the time that claimed Dylan told her she was crying because her mother told her to lie. We hear from someone on the Farrow team now whenever they have the chance to kill an Allen film or book project. It’s a vendetta, I believe, still born of the Soon-Yi embarrassment that Mia endured, and it’s frankly a wholly-discrediting one for the member of the family that's a prominent journalist.
They are not honest people. Mia says that Woody lured their 7-year old into sex with the promise of a movie role in a production filmed in Paris-- as if that job would have any meaning to a child that had been 7-years old for only a couple weeks, or likewise would a trip to Paris. Mia has never wavered from her claim against her ex, but she chose to fly to France a few years ago and testify in court to the character of her friend, director Roman Polanski, a man who has been jailed for and admitted to sex with an underage girl. What judgement does that show of her, considering the circumstances? Maybe the same that led Mia to still want a part in Allen's latest picture in 1993, even after she leveled the allegations against him.
She lied about the truth of Tam's suicide before they lied about this. Bob Weide, the most prominent Allen defender out there online, and one of the few that works in the industry, says he’s encountered evidence that Ronan did not really walk on crutches and use a wheelchair for years because of a leg infection that was contracted while doing volunteer work in the Sudan, as Ronan has elaborately claimed, but because of numerous leg surgeries that were ordered by Mia and intended to make him taller before a career in politics. A remarkable growth spurt followed, true or not true, and you can find those side-by-side photos next to the Sinatra/Ronan ones.
Sadly, this case has helped to create a field day for right-wing media as a way for them to discredit the entire #metoo movement. When respected commentators lean on emotion and their own “alternative facts," instead of on contradicting empirical evidence, the damage is severe and likely lasting-- not just to Allen. When Ronan says it was weird as a young boy to see his father lying in bed in his underwear with his sister, nobody thinks to ask the great journalist how he remembers something from when he was four years of age and perhaps younger, or when his father didn’t live in the house or spend a single night there. The news media industry is cowed, but in my experience, the comments sections of these stories are always skewed almost exactly the opposite way. People can see the dishonesty and put the pieces together. The climate just seems to require whispers.
Allen, for his part, has done precious little prior to his new book to ever defend himself. He did a 60 Minutes interview back at the time of the allegation, but has since said to friends and supporters like Weide that he stays silent because he holds the trump card of the truth. Journalist Antonella Gambotto-Burke refers to his preternatural calm as the director's "near-Aspergian indifference to the feelings of those he does not love." Of what the rest of us think of him, he simply does not care, and he is now 84 years old. He and Soon-Yi have been together for 28 years, married for the last 23. They have raised two adopted daughters, without fanfare and without scandal. They are a close-knit group. Mia had eleven children, and two of the adopted ones are dead of their own hand. She's alienated from two more.
In an episode of television's Taxi, back in 1983, Marilu Henner's character remarks of Allen's art that he has helped change the way that women think about men, and I would argue that his egalitarian beliefs reflected in his scripts have also assisted in improving the way that men think about women. He has, by his own count in his book, provided 106 leading lady roles in his pictures, and those roles have led to 62 award nominations. After more than 60 years in the public eye, back to New York City cafes on stage in the 1950s, there hasn’t been another single allegation of sexual misconduct against Woody Allen. Not on a film set, and not off. And I’m very certain Ronan Farrow has looked for them.
posted by CM @ 5:36 PM
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