My Cruel violent mother Mia
In the 26 years since she stunned her mother Mia Farrow by falling for her stepfather Woody Allen, Soon-Yi has said nothing. Until now ...
from Tom Leonard
For years, Woody Allen had almost nothing to say about his shocking act of leaving Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter, 36 years younger than him.
‘The heart wants what it wants,’ he explained weakly of his deeply unsettling relationship with Soon-Yi Previn.
Even after his personal life was further rocked by bombshell claims that he sexually abused another of the Farrow flock — seven-year-old daughter Dylan, whom Allen had adopted with the actress — the film-maker did little to defend himself.
Apart from a short statement in 1992, Soon-Yi hasn’t uttered a word publicly.
Now, with Allen’s career in tatters thanks to Hollywood’s zero tolerance mood towards sexual misconduct, the softspoken Korean orphan has finally broken her silence — along with Woody.
In so doing, she has provided another extraordinary twist in the most toxic family feud in Hollywood, one that has run for more than 25 years and — judging by her comments — shows no sign of letting up any time soon.
Not only has Previn, now 47, defended Allen against claims he molested her younger sister Dylan, and dismissed allegations that she herself was a victim of his predatory instincts, she also insists it was Farrow, not 82-year-old Allen who was the real monster in their household. She mercilessly portrays Farrow as a cruel, violent and neglectful tyrant whose claims that Allen is a cold, calculating paedophile could not be more wrong.
In an in-depth interview in New York magazine that has incensed the Farrow camp — who strongly deny the startling claims made about the Hollywood actress — Previn says she never regarded Allen as her father and was simply swept away by him, though she hadn’t liked him to begin with.
‘From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him,’ she says.
PrEvIN— plucked from a South Korean orphanage by Farrow and ex-husband Andre Previn when she was seven — repeated Allen’s accusations that Farrow has used Dylan as a pawn in her campaign to destroy the man who so cruelly humiliated her.
‘What’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust,’ she says. ‘[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.’
It was Allen’s pariah status in Hollywood that finally prompted her to speak out, she says.
Though they never married, Allen and Farrow had a 12-year relationship, and she starred in 13 of his films. He adopted two of her adopted children — Dylan and Moses — and they had a son, ronan, together.
But, in 1992, their partnership turned into Hollywood’s most vicious bust- up after Farrow discovered Allen had taken naked photos of Soon-Yi and that they were having an affair. Months later, he was accused of molesting Dylan — an accusation that has hung over Allen’s career.
The scandal did little to deter actors and producers from working with such a celebrated director — until the comparatively recent outcry over Harvey Weinstein and an array of other powerful men ushered in a less forgiving mood in Hollywood.
‘I am a pariah,’ says Allen, in his first comments on the postWeinstein era, revealing that even his donation to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was returned without explanation.
‘People think I was Soon-Yi’s father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter.’
Previn admits she does have a ‘little learning disability’. But she claims that Farrow would try to teach her the alphabet with wooden blocks only to throw them at her if she made a mistake. SHE
also alleges that the actress would tip her upside down, ‘ holding me by my feet, to get the blood to drain to my head’ because Farrow thought it would make her more intelligent.
Previn claims Farrow — whose spokesman strenuously rejected accusations of violence and cruelty — would slap her across the face and smack her with a hairbrush. She once threw a porcelain rabbit at her, she says.
From the beginning — when the Previn family lived in a ‘beautiful’ thatched home in Leigh, Surrey (Andre Previn was principal conductor of the London Symphony orchestra) — she and Farrow were ‘like oil and water’, she says.
Previn recalls her adoptive parents’ ‘ bonechilling tempers’ and Farrow’s favouritism among her children. (Farrow and Andre had three biological children and two adopted from vietnam. Farrow now has 11 children, four biological and seven adopted.)
‘Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blonde hair and blue eyes,’ she says. She also accuses the actress, who again denies she acted in such a manner, of trying to exaggerate her miserable origins by inventing a story that her biological mother had been a street prostitute.
After Farrow divorced Andre, she moved back to the U.S. Previn says she and her sisters were used as ‘domestics’ and Farrow would regularly leave her children alone at night to stay with Allen.
The mother-and-daughter relationship ended spectacularly in 1992 when Farrow discovered Allen’s naked Polaroids of Soon-Yi, then aged 21, on his mantelpiece.
Previn says she’s still shocked that they ever came to be lovers, let alone embarked on a marriage that has lasted 21 years.
And Previn claims they initially loathed each other. Allen wasn’t interested in Farrow’s army of children while Previn says she dismissed him as a ‘major loser’ because he was smitten with such a ‘nasty, mean person’ as Farrow.
She was particularly upset when she overheard Allen tell Farrow the girl was ‘inordinately shy’ and should see a psychiatrist.
However, after she broke her ankle and Allen offered to take her to school, she says she warmed to her mother’s shy, awkward boyfriend. A friendship developed when she was around 16 and Allen took her to basketball games.
She recalls their romance started when she was at university and, after watching a film together, he ‘kissed me . . . we were like two magnets, very attracted to each
other’. Previn claims Allen’s relationship with Farrow was over by then, but she admits she felt guilty as it was a ‘huge betrayal on both our parts, a terrible thing to do, a terrible shock to inflict on [Farrow]’.
She recalls how, on finding the nude photos, her mother rang her. ‘ I picked up the phone and Mia said: “Soon-Yi.” That’s all she needed to say, in that chilling tone of voice,’ she told the magazine.
‘I knew my life was over and that she knew, just by the way she said my name.’ She alleges Farrow went ‘crazy . . . screaming in the night for hours’, and falsely claiming Previn was suicidal then throwing her out of her New York home.
When Valentine’s Day arrived, the actress sent Allen an ‘elaborately gothic collage’ in which she had glued a Farrow family photo on a flower-encrusted, gilded heart — and then stuck skewers through the hearts of the children and a knife through her own heart. Previn says she accepted Farrow had ‘every right’ to be angry but was alarmed by her deranged behaviour:. ‘Mia was so volatile . . . she was like a sinkhole taking down everything with her.’
Farrow reportedly told a psychologist helping the family that Allen was ‘satanic and evil’ and pleaded with her to ‘find a way to stop him’.
Three days later, Allen — who had officially adopted Dylan eight months earlier — allegedly molested the sevenyearold in a tiny attic crawl space in Farrow’s Connecticut country home.
Just over a week after the alleged abuse, Allen sued Farrow for custody of Dylan and two other children, adding in a statement that his reported relationship with Soon-Yi was ‘happily all true’ and that he loved her.
A seven-month inquiry was launched into the molestation claims and no charges were brought. A judge found that it was ‘unlikely that [Allen] could be successfully prosecuted for sexual abuse’ but denied Allen’s custody claim for Dylan as well as visitation rights.
A paediatrician in the investigation suggested Farrow might have coached the girl to accuse Allen. A second official inquiry concluded there was ‘no credible evidence’ Dylan was ‘abused or maltreated’.
However, Dylan is adamant she was ‘sexually assaulted’ as she played with a toy train and Allen sat behind her.
Allen and Soon-Yi wed in 1997 and have two adopted daughters, 19 and 18. Previn says she was never interested in having biological children because ‘I find it the height of vanity and very egocentric’.
She says she and Allen have never spent a night apart since they married and also always eat together.
She speculates the twicemarried Farrow must have been most shocked by the fact that she and Allen have stayed together so long, adding: ‘That is so foreign to her.’