Woody Allen was accused of abusing his and Farrow's adoptive daughter Dylan when she was just 7 years old.
Like everyone else, actress Mia Farrow also has her own share of regrets in life. If you ask what her biggest one is, she would say it's actor, filmmaker, and her ex-husband Woody Allen.
The actress recently got candid about her relationship with Allen in the new docuseries Allen v. Farrow which also sheds light on their adopted daughter Dylan's sexual abuse at the hands of the director. Farrow without a second doubt admitted that bringing Allen into her family is her biggest regret.
She said, "That's the great regret of my life, that I wasn't perceptive enough. It's my fault. I brought this guy into my family. There's nothing I can do to take that away," reported People. "I get why people can't believe it because who on Earth could believe that of Woody Allen? I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. Everybody admired Woody so much, loved him, and I did too."
The Rosemary's Baby actress was already a mother to seven children when she met Allen. She had twins Matthew and Sascha Previn with her second husband André Previn and then adopted Lark Song Previn, Fletcher Previn, Summer "Daisy" Song Previn, Soon-Yi Previn, and Moses Farrow.
In the documentary, she revealed that she approached the director to conceive a baby of their own to which Allen put a condition that he would come and go as he pleased with no expectations of fatherly duties. When Farrow and Allen couldn't conceive their own child they adopted Dylan.
Allen, according to Farrow, said that "he wanted nothing to do with it. I thought, 'That's fair.' He knew the kind of children that I adopted that were all from different countries with different needs. He said, 'I might be more kindly predisposed if it was a little blonde girl.' I thought if he cares about that I should try to find a little girl like that and maybe he'll love her. I eventually ended up with a little blonde girl and that was baby Dylan."
After the birth of their son Rowan Farrow, the actress claimed that Allen began to show "intense affection" to Dylan to the point where "he didn't want to see the other kids, he wanted to see her. She started running away from him. She started locking herself in bathrooms."
When the actress approached Allen concerning the matter he got angry, "as if I'd accused him of being an ax murderer," she said. "I was crying and I apologized. And sometimes he would say, 'I honestly think you need help.' And I began thinking, 'I must be crazy. He can't be a pedophile.' I wanted to believe that he was not capable of what I feared."
She said the "floodgates opened" when Dr. Ethel Person, a psychiatrist from New York City said that "there was something off" about the way Allen greeted Dylan. The director then agreed to meet a child psychologist who assured Farrow that his behavior was surely inappropriate but not sexual.
Dylan later accused Allen of child abuse in 1992 during Farrow's split from the director. Even though a Connecticut prosecutor said that there could have been a criminal case against Allen, he was not charged because the New York Department of Social Services found "no credible evidence" to support the allegations. Dylan, who was just 7 years old at the time was labeled an unreliable witness due to her age.
The alleged abuse saw the light eight months after Farrow found explicit pictures of her other adopted daughter, Soon Yi-Previn, in Allen's apartment. Previn was just 21 when she began a romantic relationship with the then-56-year-old Allen. While the filmmaker called the accusations "false" and "outrageous," Previn revealed that the two started getting close when Farrow and Allen were no longer together.
Newsweek reported, "When I first got friendly with Woody, he and Mia were finished with their romance. I think Mia would have been just as angry if he had taken up with another actress or his secretary." She said that the allegations were "ridiculous." The two tied the knot in 1997 and have been together since.
35-year-old Dylan said that ever since she spoke about the abuse, she has "been subjected to every kind of doubt and every kind of scrutiny and every kind of humiliation over this." She added, "For the longest time, I've been trying to set the record straight, because no matter what you think you know it's just the tip of the iceberg. This is somebody that I love more than anybody else and it's taken me a long time to reconcile that you can love somebody and be afraid of them."
References:
https://www.newsweek.com/soon-yi-speaks-lets-not-get-hysterical-197958
Cover image source: Getty Images | Photos by (L) Pascal Le Segretain, (R) Diane Freed
