Dylan Farrow addresses abuse
FOR the first time on television, Dylan Farrow accused her father, Woody Allen, of molesting her as a child, telling CBS This Morning: “I want to show my face and tell my story.”
“Why shouldn’t I want to bring him down?” Farrow, 32, told Gayle King during a conversation that aired on Wednesday and Thursday. “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?”
Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Allen, had made the allegations before: First, they were investigated in 1992, and detailed in an article in Vanity Fair. This would be the year of a very public and acrimonious split between Mia Farrow and Allen, as well as a bitter custody battle that would dominate headlines.
Dylan Farrow again raised the allegations in a 2014 letter published by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. And on CBS, she went into detail about her experience during a period when Hollywood is reckoning with an industrywide movement against sexual misconduct that has brought down powerful figures in Hollywood such as Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein.
“I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother’s country house in Connecticut by my father,” Farrow said, describing an encounter with Allen that she said occurred in 1992. “He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother’s toy train that was set up. And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted.”
She added: “As a 7-year-old I would say, I would have said he touched my private parts. Which I did say. As a 32-yearold, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger.”
There were other instances, according to Farrow: “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.”
Dr John M Leventhal, the doctor who led the Connecticut investigation into Allen, interviewed Farrow nine times in 1992 and said that he found inconsistencies in her story, even raising the possibility that she may have been coached by her mother.
When pressed by King on whether she had been coached, Farrow said, “How is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?” She said that her mother had never coached her.
At one point, Farrow became emotional as King played a clip from an interview Allen did with 60 Minutes in 1992 vehemently denying the allegations, as he has always done.
“He’s lying and he’s been lying for so long,” Farrow said. “And it is difficult for me to see him and to hear his voice. I’m sorry.”
Allen has always maintained that Farrow’s account is untrue, and he has never been charged with a crime. In a statement to CBS News, he said, “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.”
Recently, more Hollywood stars have begun speaking out against Allen and have expressed support for Farrow, including Jessica Chastain, Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon.
Timothée Chalamet, the star of Call Me by Your Name, a movie that has been receiving Oscar buzz, announced on Tuesday that he would be donating the wages from his work on Allen’s upcoming film A Rainy Day in New York to Time’s Up, the recently established sexual harassment initiative; RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which combats sexual violence; and the LGBT Center in New York.
When asked if she was angry with those in Hollywood who still choose to work with her father, Farrow said: “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 silence in their industry.”