This morning, Dylan Farrow was interviewed on “CBS This Morning” and spoke about her father, Woody Allen, denying he ever molested her when she was 7 years old.
“He’s lying and he’s been lying for so long. And it is difficult for me to see him and to hear his voice. I’m sorry.”
“He would follow me around. He was always touching me, cuddling me and if I ever said, you know, like ‘I want to go off by myself,’ he wouldn’t let me,” she added. “He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on.”
To those who have contended that Farrow is simply on a mission to knock down her adoptive father, she has a simple answer. “Why shouldn’t I want to bring him down? Why shouldn’t I be angry? Why shouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t I feel some sort of outrage that after all these years being ignored and disbelieved and tossed aside?”
Woody Allen immediately responded:
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. I never molested my daughter – as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.