Woody Allen says new documentary ‘riddled with falsehoods’
NEW YORK: Oscar-winning director Woody Allen described a new documentary that details his alleged sexual abuse of his young adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow as “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods.”
HBO broadcast the first episode of the four-part series “Allen v. Farrow” on Sunday.
In it, Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter with actress Mia Farrow, repeats her allegation that Allen sexually assaulted her in August 1992 when she was seven years old.
The 84-year-old director of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” has always denied the abuse and has been cleared of the charges after two separate months-long investigations.
“These documentarians had no interest in the truth,” Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn said in a statement.
“Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods.
“As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken
place,” they added. The statement said that Allen and Previn “were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond,’” which they declined to do.
“While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts,” the statement said.
Many actors have distanced themselves from Allen since the #MeToo movement in 2017 and the publication of a column by Dylan Farrow.
In 2019, Allen settled a multimillion dollar breach of contract lawsuit against Amazon, which cancelled a four-movie deal with him over the long-standing allegations.