Moses Farrow, adopted son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, portrays the former as the abuser in their household in a lengthy blog post. He paints his adoptive father as an innocent smeared as a result of embarking on a distasteful relationship with his lover’s adopted daughter.
Present on the day Allen supposedly molested seven-year-old daughter Dylan, Moses Farrow says it never happened and could not have happened. He presents factual evidence, such as her vivid memories of a nonexistent train set in the attic where the vile act allegedly took place, that contradict the account. He says Mia Farrow relentlessly coached the children into buying into their former father figure being a Luciferian figure. He points to state investigations that affirm Allen’s innocence.
He depicts his mom as a disturbed woman who physically beat him up, threw a vase at his sister, and locked his paralyzed brother in a shed overnight as punishment. He notes that an adopted sister killed herself after a fight with Mia Farrow, a brother committed suicide two years ago, and another died destitute of AIDS.
The dysfunctional family Mia Farrow created through serial adoptions and several marriages mirrored, in its turbulence, the showbiz one in which she grew up. The daughter of an alcoholic and philandering father and the sister of a suicide case and another brother convicted of child molestation, Farrow became a star as a teenager, trading in one surreal existence for another.
Family secrets told normally indict the teller as much as the told on. But given Farrow’s multidecade vendetta against Allen, such rules go out the window here. An anguished Moses Farrow breaks his silence in not some cheap, Mommy Dearest-effort to make a buck or settle a score. He does so to tell the truth in defense of a slandered man.
After he lays down some hard facts, Farrow unleashes some compelling rhetoric.
“To those who have become convinced of my father’s guilt, I ask you to consider this: In this time of #MeToo, when so many movie heavyweights have faced dozens of accusations, my father has been accused of wrongdoing only once, by an enraged ex-partner during contentious custody negotiations,” Farrow writes. “During almost 60 years in the public eye, not one other person has come forward to accuse him of even behaving badly on a date, or acting inappropriately in any professional situation, let alone molesting a child. As a trained professional, I know that child molestation is a compulsive sickness and deviation that demands repetition. Dylan was alone with Woody in his apartment countless times over the years without a hint of impropriety, yet some would have you believe that at the age of 56, he suddenly decided to become a child molester in a house full of hostile people ordered to watch him like a hawk.”
The accuser in the case points to Moses Farrow changing his story since initially supporting her account as a 14-year-old.
“It’s easily disproven, contradicts years of his own statements, is beyond hurtful to me personally, and is part of a larger effort to discredit and distract from my assault,” Dylan Farrow reacted. “My brother is a troubled person. I’m so sorry he’s doing this.”
Many believe the molestation charges against Allen because he looks the part of a pervert and because of his May-December romance, which surprisingly has endured 25 or so Mays and Decembers, with Soon-Yi Previn. If an unconventional relationship such as this convicts one in the court of public opinion of the most disgusting charge imaginable—molesting your own daughter—what does one make of Mia Farrow? She, like her adopted daughter, married a famous fiftysomething in her twenties. She gave birth to Andre Previn’s twins five months before his divorce from his second wife. Dory Previn, Farrow’s former friend, released the song “Beware of Young Girls” after her institutionalization in the wake of the betrayal. The message, apparently, remained lost on Farrow until the early 1990s, when the irony surely was not.
#MeToo conveys the idea of victims standing in solidarity against rapists and molesters. Another related meaning, hammered home by the growing line of women accusing Harvey Weinstein with atrocious and criminal behavior, involves one victim speaking empowering other victims of the same predator to find their voice. As Moses Farrow points out, the woman with the greatest motive to smear Woody Allen accused him of something horrible. Outside of that accusation, listen to the crickets. That silence speaks loudly.
