By: James Pikus
On Sunday, Woody Allen blasted the new documentary series on HBO entitled “Allen v. Farrow”, calling it a “hatchet job” that was “riddled with falsehoods.” The series, which has aired one of four episodes, condemns the Oscar-winner in allegations from Mia Farrow’s daughter, Dylan, that he sexually assaulted her in the family attic in 1992, at the age of seven. Allen had then been Mia’s partner and they had all lived together during Dylan’s youth.
Allen, the 85-year-old Academy Award-winning director, and his current wife accused filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick of having “no interest in the truth” and of “collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers.”
In a statement to the Hollywood reported, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that the decades-old accusations are “categorically false”. “Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place,” the couple’s statement said.
In the docuseries, Dylan, now 35, speaks of the alleged abuse, and shares what is said to be a never-before-released home video taken by Mia, in which 7-year-old Dylan tells her mother that Allen touched her in the attic at the family’s Connecticut farmhouse. “I felt trapped. He was saying things like, ‘We’re gonna’ go to Paris together. You’re gonna’ be in all my movies,’ Then he sexually assaulted me. And I remember just focusing on my brother’s train set. And then… he just stopped. He was done. And we just went downstairs,” Dylan says in the docuseries.
Allen and his wife said in their statement that the HBO series is one sided, and that they were only approached by the documentarians two months ago “and given only a matter of days ‘to respond.’” The couple says, “Of course, they declined to do so”.
The couple accused HBO of possibly being biased, due to its business relationship with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, who is Allen’s estranged son and son of Mia Farrow. Ronan has had a multi-film production deal with HBO since 2018. “It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow,” said the statement from Allen and his wife. “While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.”
