“I was over the moon happy,” Mia Farrow says about her relationship with Woody Allen in the trailer for Allen V. Farrow, a four-part HBO documentary series (premiering on Feb. 21.) “But, that’s the great regrets of my life. I wish I never met him.” At the heart of this new series is Dylan Farrow’s accusation that, in 1992, Woody allegedly molested her in the attic of Mia Farrow’s Connecticut home. Woody has denied the allegations, and they have never resulted in a conviction for Allen. The trailer for Allen V. Farrow hints that the series will show the video Mia allegedly made of Dylan explaining how Allen allegedly molested her. Seven-year-old Dylan, according to Daily Mail, reportedly says on the tape that Woody told her, “ ‘do not move, I have to do this.’ ”
Allen V. Farrow, according to Variety, “puts forward an exhaustive telling of Dylan Farrow’s story, accompanied by interviews with her mother, various of her siblings, and family friends.” Woody is represented by “an audiobook recording of his 2020 memoir, which consistently does him so few favors as to seem to have been ghostwritten by his worst enemy,” per Variety.
“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,” Dylan, now 35, recalled to Gayle King on CBS This Morning in 2018. “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 say, I would have said he touched my private parts… As a 32-year-old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger.”
Woody Allen issued a statement to the 2018 CBS This Morning interview, saying, “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.”
Dylan re-shared the accusations and her alleged experiences — including the fallout afterward — in Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times’ blog in 2014. “I also didn’t know the firestorm [the accusations] would trigger. I didn’t know that my father would use his sexual relationship with my sister [Soo-Yin Previn] 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.”
“At one point, my mother sat me down and told me that I wouldn’t be in trouble if I was lying – that I could take it all back,” Dylan wrote in 2014. “I couldn’t. It was all true. But sexual abuse claims against the powerful stall more easily. There were experts willing to attack my credibility. There were doctors willing to gaslight an abused child.” She ended her post with this accusation: “Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.”