Dylan Farrow, the adoptive daughter of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, claims Allen molested her when she was seven years old, something Allen has consistently denied. Now, as the #TimesUp movement has tackled sexual assault and harassment in Hollywood, several celebrities have spoken up in support of Farrow, and others, like Timothée Chalamet, announced they were donating their salaries from their work in Allen's movies to Time's Up and other charities.
She first went public with her story in a 2014 op-ed for the New York Times, published after Allen won the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe for lifetime achievement. Farrow, now 32, spoke to CBS This Morning anchor Gayle King in her first televised interview. "I want to show my face and tell my story," Farrow told King. "I want to speak out. Literally."
Farrow said on the morning show that Allen took her to a small attic crawl space in her mother's country house, told her to lay on her stomach and play with her brother's toy train. Then, according to her account, Allen touched her genitals with his finger.
Farrow told King that she told her mother, who took her to the doctor. But when she went to the doctor, who asked where he touched her, she pointed to her shoulder. Farrow said she then went outside the doctor's office with her mother, Mia. "She said, 'Why didn't you tell the doctor what you told me?' And I told her that I was embarrassed. And then we went back in," Farrow said, adding that when she went back in, she told the doctor what had happened. Allen claims that she must have been coached by her mother, who was upset after finding nude photos of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, in Allen's apartment.
"What I don't understand is, how is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I'm saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?" Farrow told CBS. "Every step of the way, my mother has only encouraged me to tell the truth. She has never coached me."
Allen was never charged with a crime in the case, and New York child welfare investigators and a report from the Yale New Haven hospital found that there was no abuse. In 1993, according to the New York Times, Frank Maco, the Connecticut state prosecutor, said there was probable cause to charge Allen but he thought Farrow was too fragile for a high-profile trial. Maco told CBS This Morning that in his experience, "there was no manipulation by Mia Farrow."
Farrow also talked about how the #MeToo and #Time's Up movement inspired her to share her story again, and called out actors who continue to work with Allen. "I hope that, you know, especially since so many [celebrities] have been vocal advocates of this Me Too and Time's Up movement that, um, they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of – of silence in their industry," she told King.
Allen has responded in a statement to CBS News. You can read it in full below:
"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."
