The timeline and the details of the alleged molestation beggar belief. A critical detail not well publicized before Soon-Yi’s New York interview was that after Mia Farrow learned about the affair in January 1992 , she continued to try to rescue her relationship with Allen. The two made the film Husbands and Wives (1992) together after Farrow’s discovery, and Farrow was under the impression that her daughter and Allen had broken up when, in the summer of 1992, Soon-Yi went off to summer camp in Maine to work as a counselor. She was fired for taking phone calls from Allen and returned home, triggering a renewal of Mia Farrow’s wrath.
On August 1, reports Merkin, Mia called a psychologist named Susan Coates, described Allen as “satanic and evil,” and asked her to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, the molestation of Dylan supposedly took place in Mia’s Connecticut house.
Moses, who was present, finds the accusation absurd. So do I. So should you. In “A Son Speaks Out,” Moses Farrow wrote in May this year:
Along with five kids, there were three adults in the house, all of whom had been told for months what a monster Woody was. None of us would have allowed Dylan to step away with Woody, even if he tried. . . . The narrative had to be changed since the only place for anyone to commit an act of depravity in private would have been in a small crawl space off my mother’s upstairs bedroom. By default, the attic became the scene of the alleged assault.
And what was the attic like? Moses calls it an “unfinished crawl space, under a steeply-angled gabled roof, with exposed nails and floorboards, billows of fiberglass insulation, filled with mousetraps and droppings and stinking of mothballs.” This is the place and time Woody Allen chose to embark upon the one and only act of child molestation of which he has ever been accused? In a 2014 New York Times op-ed, “Woody Allen Speaks Out,” Allen described it as “a tiny, cramped, enclosed spot where one can hardly stand up,” adding, “I’m a major claustrophobe. The one or two times [Mia] asked me to come in there to look at something, I did, but quickly had to run out.” Moses noted that there was no toy-train set in the attic, as Dylan would later claim, though there was one in his brothers’ room.
A nanny, Monica, quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events, according to Moses, who says he witnessed part of the process of Mia Farrow taping a video interview with Dylan, stopping the tape constantly over the course of “two or three days” and badgering Dylan, who “appeared not to be interested.” He writes that “when another one of Dylan’s therapists, Dr. Nancy Schultz, criticized the making of the video, and questioned the legitimacy of the content, she, too, was fired immediately by Mia.”
Mia Farrow’s anger is understandable, but her response to it was unhinged. Keep in mind that losing Allen would for her be tantamount to losing her career; going back many years, her only major film roles had been in his productions. On Valentine’s Day of 1992, she sent Allen a collage in which, Merkin writes, “she’d pasted a family photo on a flower-encrusted, gilded heart and then stuck skewers through the hearts of the images of the children and a real knife through her own heart.” Allen’s sister Letty Aronson says Mia called to say, “‘He took my daughter, I’m going to take his.’” When Aronson said, “Don’t be ridiculous. [Dylan] loves Woody. A child should have a father,” Farrow replied, “I don’t care,” according to Aronson.
