Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow's shocking sexual assault allegations: ‘He touched my labia and vulva with his finger’
“It doesn't matter what's true. What matters is what's believed...” Mia Farrow says in a bone-chilling trailer for HBO's ‘Allen V Farrow’. The four-part documentary series from award-winning investigative filmmakers Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Amy Herdy go behind years of sensational headlines to reveal the private story of one of Hollywood's most notorious and public scandals.
How true was the sexual abuse accusation against director Woody Allen? The sex scandal involved Dylan, his then 7-year-old daughter with Mia; their subsequent custody trial, the revelation of Allen’s relationship with Farrow’s daughter, Soon-Yi Previn and the controversial aftermath in the years that followed. Here's looking at all the allegations made against Allen.
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Never-before-seen videotape
Examining the trauma on the family, the documentary includes a videotaped account that has never before been publicly aired. The controversial clip is characterized by one side as evidence of the allegation's veracity and by the other that she was coached.
Along with new investigative work — pieced together via intimate home movie footage, court documents, police evidence, revelatory videotape and never-before-heard audio tapes — the series includes exclusive interviews on the subject with Mia Farrow, Dylan Farrow, Ronan Farrow, family friend Carly Simon, prosecutor Frank Maco, relatives, investigators and experts.
When was the sexual assault first reported?
For years, the controversial case has been in the limelight with two sides of the story floating in the public. In 1985, Farrow and Allen adopted a baby girl, Dylan O'Sullivan, who was born in Texas and was known as Eliza and Malone for some time. On August 4, 1992, the sexual assault allegations were first made by Dylan — who was seven at the time. Allen was quick to dismiss those accusations and claimed Mia had coached their daughter to take revenge for his relationship with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.
When the allegation was made, Allen and Mia Farrow had been in a 12-year relationship but were not living together or married. On August 13, 1992, seven days after he learned that his seven‐year‐old daughter Dylan had accused him of sexual abuse, Allen sued Farrow to obtain custody of Dylan, their five‐year‐old son Satchel (now known as Ronan Farrow), and their fifteen‐year‐old son Moses. Filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the suit documents were sealed after court orders.
‘You look at her when she’s naked’
It must have been around 1987 when Farrow first became suspicious of Allen's behavior toward Farrow. According to Justice Wilk, it happened “during a trip to Paris, when Dylan was between two and three years old, Ms Farrow told Mr Allen that ‘[y]ou look at her [Dylan] in a sexual way.’”
She said, “You fondled her. It’s not natural. You’re all over her. You don’t give her any breathing room. You look at her when she’s naked.” According to reports, she was suspicious of Allen because he’d read to Dylan in bed while in his underwear and permitted “[Dylan] to suck on his thumb.”
Reports detailed how her longtime friend Casey Pascal told Farrow that Dylan’s babysitter narrated observing Allen in an “inappropriate” position with Dylan. Dr Susan Coates, a clinical psychologist who treated Satchel, also testified saying, “I did not see it as sexual, but I saw it as inappropriately intense because it excluded everybody else.”
Who was in the house that day?
On August 4, 1992, when Allen visited his children at Farrow's country home in Connecticut, Farrow and a friend went shopping with her children, Tam and Isaiah. Once she left, among the ones present in the house were Dylan; Satchel; Farrow's babysitter, Kristie Groteke, the children's French tutor, Sophie Berge, Farrow's friend's three children and Farrow's friend's babysitter, Alison Strickland.
The next day, Strickland reportedly told Casey that she had seen Allen kneel on the floor in front of Dylan with his face in her lap turned toward Dylan's body. After hearing Strickland's description, Farrow was agitated. Not only did she telephone her attorney for guidance but also took Dylan to Vadakkekara Kavirajan, Farrow's regular pediatrician. Much later, when Strickland described the position during the trial, the judge didn't think it was inappropriate or sexual abuse.
‘No evidence of injury to the anal or vaginal area’
When Farrow visited the pediatrician, she told him, “I think she said he touched her, but when asked where, she just looked around and went like this.” Later, Farrow asked Dylan why she didn't speak and she allegedly told her she didn't want to talk about the incident with a stranger. Farrow took her to another doctor, who asked, “There was no evidence of injury to the anal or vaginal area, is that correct?”
Reports detail how Farrow videotaped Dylan answering her questions before the second visit to the pediatrician when Dylan first made the allegations “in fits and starts” and in a way that “set a tone for a child about how to answer.”
‘I was sexually assaulted’
Dylan went on to repeat the accusations several times as an adult — first in an interview with Maureen Orth for Vanity Fair in 2013, an open letter in the New York Times in 2014 after Allen won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes and a Los Angeles Times op-ed in December 2017.
Her most detailed account came in January 2018 on ‘CBS This Morning’ when she said, “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. 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.”
She continued, “As a 32-year-old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger.”
Allen lost the case in June 1993 but the judge agreed that sexual abuse allegations had not been proven. In the recent documentary, Allen was not interviewed but the docuseries includes clips from the audiobook of his 2020 memoir ‘Apropos of Nothing’.
The HBO documentary takes an in-depth look at prominent cultural voices exploring Allen's body of work in a broader context and reflecting on how public revelations about the personal lives of artists can lead to re-evaluations of their work.
The four-part series ‘Allen V Farrow’ is a weekly feature that premieres on February 21 at 9 pm ET/PT on HBO.