This week marks the first time Farrow has appeared on camera to speak about the allegations.
Prior to her interview airing on CBS This Morning, Farrow shared how she was feeling about it on Twitter.
“We as a society expect survivors to fit a very narrow mold,” she wrote. “Sincere but not too frank, eloquent but not too put together, composed but not too rigid.”
Ultimately, though, she says she decided to appear on television as a way to honor the experiences she had as a child.
Experiences which were largely ignored while the man she claims molested her was praised and applauded wherever he went.
“[There’s been] so much silence being broken by so many brave people against so many high-profile people,” she said. “I thought it was important to add my story to theirs.”
While they were up there, Farrow says that Allen instructed her to lay down on her stomach and play with a toy train that was set up. As she played with the train, Farrow claims that Allen sat behind her, touching her labia and vulva.
Farrow told her mother, actress Mia Farrow, what had happened. Mia reported the accusations to Dylan’s pediatrician, who in turn reported to the authorities.
Allen denied the allegations.
In fact, Allen stated — both following the 1992 investigation and Farrow’s open letter in 2014 — that he believed Mia Farrow had actively planted the story in Dylan’s mind. During the CBS This Morning interview, Gayle King asked Farrow asked how she felt about these allegations:
Farrow replied, “What I don’t understand is 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?”
It’s a fair question. Week after week, we’ve seen the world reject producers, directors, actors, and comedians after women come forward against them. While some will always cry “witch hunt,” it seems as though the majority of people have been ready to decry the men being called out as abusers.
But Woody Allen has somehow managed to escape much of the criticism.
Perhaps that’s finally starting to change as more and more actors come forward and state they regret working with Allen. In fact, several actors — including Golden Globe nominee Timothée Chalamet — have decided to donate the money they’ve earned from working in Allen’s films to various charities.
Meanwhile, Dylan Farrow is left wondering why it’s taken so long, and why people only seem to be listening now after multiple other public figures have been revealed to be abusers.
Following Farrow’s interview, Woody Allen sent a response to CBS This Morning…
When this claim was first made more than 25 years ago, it was thoroughly investigated by both the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital and New York State Child Welfare. They both did so for many months and independently concluded that no molestation had ever taken place.
Instead, they found it likely a vulnerable child had been coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.
Dylan’s older brother Moses has said that he witnessed their mother doing exactly that — relentlessly coaching Dylan, trying to drum into her that her father was a dangerous sexual predator. It seems to have worked — and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says.
But 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.
