Soon-yi defends husband Woody
Soon-yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen and the estranged adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, defended her husband against what she contends is unfair treatment in the #Metoo era and attacked her adoptive mother in her first public comments about the relationships in decades.
New York Magazine posted on its website Sunday night an in-depth article about Previn in which she talks of a troubled relationship with her mother and tells how she fell in love in 1992 with Allen, who was Farrow’s boyfriend at the time.
The 47-year-old said she and her mother clashed soon after Farrow adopted her and that her mother many times treated her like a maid. She denies being manipulated into a relationship by Allen.
Previn told the magazine that she decided to speak out now because Dylan Farrow, who is an adopted daughter of Allen, is, in her view, unfairly accusing her husband of abusing her when she was a child.
“I was never interested in writing a ‘Mommie Dearest’, getting even with Mia – none of that,” Previn told the magazine. “But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. (Mia) has taken advantage of the #Metoo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”
She also said of Farrow: “Mia wasn’t maternal to me from the get-go.”
An email sent to Mia Farrow’s agent was not immediately returned.
In separate statements posted on Twitter Sunday night, Dylan and Ronan Farrow say their mother is a good parent and that the New York magazine article is inaccurate and unfair. Dylan also noted that the New York Magazine piece’s author, Daphne Merkin, calls herself a longtime friend of Allen’s.
The director, who faced a wave of backlash earlier this year including several prominent actors vowing not to work with him again, is also quoted in the New York Magazine piece. “I am a pariah,” Merkin quotes the director as saying during a lunch.
“People think that I was Soon-yi’s father, that I married my underaged, retarded daughter.”