Dylan Farrow Details Woody Allen Abuse in First TV Interview: ‘He Would Follow Me Around, He Was Always Touching Me’
Woody Allen is “lying and he’s been lying for so long,” said Dylan Farrow during an emotional television interview Thursday morning. Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, sat down with “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Gayle King for the segment, which marks her first television interview ever. Farrow spoke at length about her long-held accusation that Allen molested her as a child, allegations which first surfaced in 1993 when Farrow was just seven years old. The rumors have persisted around Allen for years, but the famed filmmaker has yet to pay any discernible price, continuing to make movies to this day.
Farrow recounted in great detail the day that she says she will never forget:
“I was taken to a small attic crawl space… He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother’s toy train that was set up… As I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted… As a 7-year-old I would say, I would have said he touched my private parts,” she said. “As a 32-year-old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger.”
A powerful moment came when King played a clip from “60 Minutes” at the time. It showed Allen insisting, as he always has, that Mia Farrow coached her daughter to lie as part of a bitter custody battle. When it was over, Farrow said through tears: “He’s lying and he’s been lying for so long.”
“I loved my father,” she said. “I respected him. He was my hero. And that doesn’t obviously take away from what he did. But it does make the betrayal and the hurt that much more intense.”
“Why shouldn’t I want to bring him down?” said Farrow in a previously released clip. “Why shouldn’t I be angry? Why shouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t I feel some sort of outrage that after all these years, being ignored and disbelieved and tossed aside?”
Farrow’s story reached heightened relevance in the wake of #MeToo. As growing awareness of rampant sexual abuse in Hollywood ripples throughout the world, Farrow felt the time was right to once again repeat the same story she has been telling since she was seven years old.
Allen issued a lengthy new response for the interview, saying, “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.”
In an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, under the headline “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?.” Farrow wrote: “I have long maintained that when I was 7 years old, Woody Allen led me into an attic, away from the babysitters who had been instructed never to leave me alone with him. He then sexually assaulted me.”
The allegations resurfaced earlier, in 2014, when The New York Times published a powerful open letter from Farrow which opened and closed with the line: “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?”
Read the full transcript here. Watch part 1 of the report on “CBS This Morning” below:
