Warning: Graphic descriptions of alleged child sexual abuse.
As Judge Elliott Wilk, who presided over the shocking custody case between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen in New York State Supreme Court concluded, “We will probably never know what occurred on August 4, 1992.” But the new four-part documentary series Allen v. Farrow makes a thoroughly convincing argument that Allen indeed molested his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, that fateful day in their Connecticut home.
Premiering Feb. 21 on HBO, the shot-in-secret series took three years to make, and comes from the directorial team of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, who most recently helmed On the Record, a powerful documentary highlighting the brave women—Drew Dixon, Sil Lai Abrams, Sheri Sher, and others—who came forward with allegations of abuse against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. Seven years ago, I reported on the findings of the custody case between Farrow and Allen, researching all the documents I could find, and conducted an awkward interview with Allen during the press tour for his film Magic in the Moonlight in which he dodged questions about the Farrow allegations until his publicist threatened to end the interview.
But what Dick, Ziering, and their producing partner Amy Herdy have accomplished here is far more exhaustive, featuring internal documents as well as interviews with Dylan, Mia, and Ronan Farrow, members of the Previn clan, a number of family friends, officials involved in the cases, and childcare experts, all of whom echo the other portion of Judge Wilk’s ruling, “That Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.”
According to then-partner Mia Farrow, it was Allen who’d suggested the family adopt a cute blond girl—and so Farrow adopted six-month-old Dylan in 1985. Almost immediately, Allen is said to have developed an obsession with Dylan. She recalls him constantly “hovering” around her, explaining, “I was always in his clutches. He was always hunting me.” Casey Pascal, a close family friend, would bring her kids over but “there was no point” because Allen would always go off with her; Priscilla Gilman, Dylan’s friend at the time, remembers how Allen “followed Dylan wherever she went,” and would often be caught standing nearby silently watching her. “He would come, and she would run away from the door, and say, ‘Hide me! Hide me! At first, I thought it was like a game, but then I realized she actually sensed this kind of smothering energy from him,” Gilman says in the film.
Around this time, Dylan would start locking herself in bathrooms. Her family describes how a once-effervescent and talkative girl became incredibly withdrawn, resembling “a dead animal.”
Allen’s behavior toward Dylan became increasingly affectionate and, Mia and others maintain, began crossing the line into creepy, as Allen would allegedly cuddle with Farrow in bed in their underwear. “I remember sitting on the edge of his bed. The light in the room, the satin sheets,” says Dylan. “I have memories of getting into bed with him. He was in his underwear, and I’m in my underwear cuddling. I remember his breath on me. He would just wrap his body around me very intimately.”
“The first time that I saw it, I was coming into the room and he was getting out of the bed, and so I saw that he was only wearing underwear,” adds Gilman. “And I just kind of turned around and walked the other way, because I didn’t want him to know that I had seen it.”
Mia Farrow recounts how Allen would “kneel in front of [Dylan] or sit next to her and put his face in her lap, which I caught a couple of times, and I didn’t think it was right.” Her sister Tisa Farrow offers even more damning testimony, revealing that during a visit to their Connecticut country home in the summer, as the young kids were running around naked by the beach, “Mia handed Woody a thing of…
Read More: ‘Allen v. Farrow’ Is a Horrifying Indictment of Woody Allen