Woody Allen calls HBO docuseries a ‘hatchet job with riddled with falsehoods’

Woody Allen released a statement late on Sunday blasting an explosive documentary film that premiered on HBO which delves into his headline-grabbing 1992 split with Mia Farrow amid allegations he sexually abused his young daughter. 

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, a representative for Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, denounced the docuseries, Allen v. Farrow, as a ‘hatchet job’ that was ‘riddled with falsehoods.’

The couple also suggests HBO’s business dealings with his estranged son Ronan Farrow are proof that the documentary is biased in his favor. 

Ronan, an investigative journalist with The New Yorker who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work uncovering sexual assault allegations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein, signed a multi-film production deal with HBO in 2018.

The three-year agreement will have Ronan producing and fronting a series of investigative documentary specials for the cable powerhouse. 

Allen declined to be interviewed for the docuseries about his split with Mia, though excerpts from his 2020 memoir are cited as a contrast to the allegations. The film includes Allen’s voice as he narrates the audio book version of the memoir, Apropos of Nothing.

‘These documentarians had no interest in the truth,’ the statement read.

‘Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods.

‘Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days “to respond.”

Mia Farrow, 76, is seen above during interview with HBO as part of a four-part docuseries Allen v. Farrow. The premier episode aired on Sunday

Farrow recalls her shock at discovering 'pornographic' photos of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn (seen right) taken by her then-boyfriend, Woody Allen (left). Farrow found the photos in Allen's New York City apartment in January 1992, according to the documentary

Farrow recalls her shock at discovering ‘pornographic’ photos of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn (seen right) taken by her then-boyfriend, Woody Allen (left). Farrow found the photos in Allen’s New York City apartment in January 1992, according to the documentary

takes an in-depth look at allegations that the Annie Hall director, 85, sexually abused his daughter, Dylan Farrow (seen above in home video footage obtained by HBO)

takes an in-depth look at allegations that the Annie Hall director, 85, sexually abused his daughter, Dylan Farrow (seen above in home video footage obtained by HBO)

Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, were spotted near their home on Manhattan's Upper East Side on Friday. The couple released a statement late on Sunday blasting the HBO documentary series as a 'hatchet job' that was 'riddled with falsehoods'

Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, were spotted near their home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Friday. The couple released a statement late on Sunday blasting the HBO documentary series as a ‘hatchet job’ that was ‘riddled with falsehoods’

‘Of course, they declined to do so.

‘As has been known for decades, these allegations 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.

‘It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow.

‘While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.’

The new documentary series paints a damning picture of the Oscar-winning director, particularly regarding his alleged sexual abuse of young adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow. 

Allen declined to be interviewed for the docuseries about his split with Mia, though excerpts from his 2020 memoir are cited as a contrast to the allegations. He is seen left with wife Soon-Yi Previn in July 2016

Allen declined to be interviewed for the docuseries about his split with Mia, though excerpts from his 2020 memoir are cited as a contrast to the allegations. He is seen left with wife Soon-Yi Previn in July 2016

On Sunday, Ronan Farrow posted a photo on Instagram showing him and his sister, Dylan Farrow, and her child

On Sunday, Ronan Farrow posted a photo on Instagram showing him and his sister, Dylan Farrow, and her child

'Proud of my sister,' Ronan wrote in the caption attached to the Instagram photo late on Sunday

‘Proud of my sister,’ Ronan wrote in the caption attached to the Instagram photo late on Sunday

Dylan has accused Allen of sexually abusing her in August 1992, when she was only seven years old – an allegation he has always denied.

The documentary draws a line between the alleged abuse of Dylan and Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, who is now his wife.

In the film, Mia said the ‘pornographic’ photos of Soon-Yi that she found in Allen’s Manhattan apartment were so explicit that only Hustler magazine would agree to publish them.

Mia Farrow's life has been fraught with drama and tragedy including the deaths of three of her 14 children - one from suicide and another from HIV. She had four biological children and adopted the rest

Mia Farrow’s life has been fraught with drama and tragedy including the deaths of three of her 14 children – one from suicide and another from HIV. She had four biological children and adopted the rest 

The Rosemary’s Baby actress, 76, also revealed that she regards her 12-year marriage to Allen as ‘the great regret of my life.’

Farrow’s remarks aired on Sunday in the premiere episode of the four-part HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow, which takes an in-depth look at allegations that the Annie Hall director, 85, sexually abused his daughter, Dylan.

FULL STATEMENT BY WOODY ALLEN

‘These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods. 

‘Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days “to respond.” 

‘Of course, they declined to do so.

‘As has been known for decades, these allegations 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. 

‘It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow. 

‘While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.’ 

Allen has vehemently denied any wrongdoing. Authorities in Connecticut and New York looked into the claims and decided not to prosecute Allen.

‘The explosive documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering includes interviews and never-before-seen footage of the family in the years leading up to the couple’s acrimonious split and the famed director’s marriage to Farrow’s adopted daughter.

‘I remember struggling to breathe,’ Farrow said, recalling her reaction after she found a stack of polaroid photos of Previn, who was a 21-year-old college student at the time, inside Allen’s New York City apartment on January 13, 1992.

Allen was 56 years old when he acknowledged having an affair with Soon-Yi. 

‘It was my own child,’ Farrow said of her reaction to seeing the pictures.

After discovering the photos, Farrow said that she was trying to ‘do the buttons’ of the coat that she was trying to put on her four-year-old son, Ronan, but was so emotionally distraught that she struggled.

Farrow said she took the photos and put them in her pocket and left Allen’s apartment.

‘I don’t think I could push the elevator button,’ she recalled. ‘I was just like shaking.’

Farrow said that she went back to her apartment with Ronan. She then saw Soon-Yi at home.

‘I found the pictures,’ Farrow recalled telling Soon-Yi.

‘What pictures?’ Soon-Yi is said to have responded to Farrow.

‘The pictures that Woody took,’ Farrow said she replied.

Farrow said that they both broke down in tears. She tried to reassure her adopted daughter that it wasn’t her fault, according to the documentary.

‘She was just beside herself,’ Farrow said of Soon-Yi.

A friend of Farrow interviewed in the documentary said that the actress was ‘forgiving’ of Soon-Yi because she felt that she was so young she would have ‘no idea how to resist [Allen’s] overtures.’

Soon afterward, Allen arrived at the apartment.

‘Get out, get out!’ Farrow recalled telling her boyfriend. ‘You gotta get out.’

Pictured from left to right: Allen, Dylan, Ronan Farrow, Daisy Previn, Soon Yi Previn, and Moses Farrow with Mia on the far right

Pictured from left to right: Allen, Dylan, Ronan Farrow, Daisy Previn, Soon Yi Previn, and Moses Farrow with Mia on the far right 

The documentary is set to reignite one of the most bitter and public celebrity family scandals that has raged on for the past 30 years. Pictured: Moses Farrow with siblings Dylan and Ronan. Moses has turned against his mother

The documentary is set to reignite one of the most bitter and public celebrity family scandals that has raged on for the past 30 years. Pictured: Moses Farrow with siblings Dylan and Ronan. Moses has turned against his mother 

Farrow said Allen was at the apartment for four hours ‘just talking and talking and talking.’

‘I’m in love with Soon-Yi,’ Farrow recalled Allen telling her. ‘I would marry her.’

Then Farrow said that her boyfriend told her: ‘No, I just said that. It was something I thought of in the car. I thought it would make it better if I said…put it that way.

‘No, I love you.’

Farrow's adopted son Moses (pictured) said in an interview with People magazine that Mia had been abusive to him growing up, which she denied. He has also defended his father against the abuse allegations against him

Farrow’s adopted son Moses (pictured) said in an interview with People magazine that Mia had been abusive to him growing up, which she denied. He has also defended his father against the abuse allegations against him

Farrow said: ‘It was all of that for four hours.’

Allen is said to have told his girlfriend, Mia: ‘I just made a mistake. I lost control.’

‘I didn’t know what to think,’ Mia said. ‘I just needed him to get out.’

Dylan, who was six years old at the time, said that when she came home that day she saw her mother crying while standing in the doorway of Soon-Yi’s bedroom while Soon-Yi was on the floor also in tears.

Mia said that she consulted a therapist who coached her on how to tell her two young children what had taken place.

‘I remember my mom told me and Ronan: “Daddy took naked pictures of Soon-Yi”,’ Dylan said.

‘That was sort of the first instance that I thought, “Oh, it’s not just me”.’ 

Earlier in the episode, Mia told the filmmakers: ‘That’s the great regret of my life, that I wasn’t perceptive enough. 

‘It’s my fault.’

She added: ‘I brought this guy into my family. There’s nothing I can do to take that away.’

Mia also said she understood why many of Allen’s fans find it difficult to believe the explosive claims made against one of Hollywood’s most renowned directors.

‘I get why people can’t believe it because who on Earth could believe that of Woody Allen?’ Mia said. 

‘I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Everybody admired Woody so much, loved him, and I did too.’

Mia adopted Soon-Yi Previn from an orphanage in Korea in 1977 with her former husband, composer André Previn.

Previn was 21-years-old when news broke of the affair and the subsequent family conflict morphed into a media frenzy that topped national headlines. Allen and Previn have now been married more than 20 years.

In 1993, Mia Farrow won custody of the couple’s three children: Dylan, Moses and Ronan.

Allen was denied all visitation rights with Dylan. 

Mia Farrow shot to fame thanks to her performance in Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror movie Rosemary’s Baby.

Two years later, after moving in with Andrew Previn and his wife Dory, she got pregnant with Previn’s twins. 

Mia married Previn and had another son Fletcher Previn.

In total Mia gave birth to four children and adopted 10 for a total of 14 children between 1970 and 1995. 

Three of them have since died. Lark Previn fell into a life of drugs and died of AIDS at 35, and Thaddeus Wilk Farrow committed suicide at age 27 in 2016. 

A third, Tam, who was blind is said to have died of an accidental overdose in 2000, but Mia’s son Moses contends that she too killed herself deliberately.

Dylan, now 35, speaks in detail on camera for the first time about it and in a home video shot by Mia in 1992, the then-7-year-old says Allen told her ‘Do not move, I have to do this,’ as he ‘touched her private parts’ in the attic of Frog Hollow, Farrow’s rambling home in Bridgewater, Connecticut on August 4 1992.

The alleged abuse occurred seven months after Mia had discovered Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi. 

Despite their growing enmity she still let him inside her house and left him with her children and nannies while she went on a shopping spree. 

She even told Moses, her oldest adopted son, to keep an eye on Allen to make sure he didn’t do anything inappropriate.

Moses was 14 at the time.

Farrow’s children are split about what happened. Ronan Farrow – the only biological child of Allen and Farrow – strongly supports his mother. 

Moses turned against her with a scathing essay in 2018, in which he said Mia had drilled into the children’s heads that Allen was ‘evil,’ ‘a monster,’ ‘the devil,’ and Soon-Yi was ‘dead to us.’

‘My mother was our only source of information about Woody — and she was extremely convincing,’ wrote Moses, now 43.

He said Woody and Soon-Yi hardly knew each other until shortly before their affair started in 1991. 

Soon-Yi herself said Woody was never a father-figure, just her mother’s boyfriend. She also accused Mia of having violent rages, even hitting her across the head with a chair, causing her to lose partial hearing. 

Moses wrote: ‘It was my mother who first suggested, when Soon-Yi was 20, that Woody reach out and spend time with her. He agreed and started taking her to Knicks games. That’s how their romance started.

‘Yes, it was unorthodox, uncomfortable, disruptive to our family and it hurt my mother terribly. But the relationship itself was not nearly as devastating to our family as my mother’s insistence on making this betrayal the center of all our lives from then on.’

But Mia she claimed Allen took Dylan to an attic and abused her ‘I didn’t want him to do it, mama,’ Dylan tells her mother in the home movie. ‘I didn’t like it.’

Allen has always maintained his innocence, claiming that Dylan either fabricated the abuse allegation or was coached by Mia because of her jealousy about his relationship with Soon-Yi.

Authorities in Connecticut found there was probable cause to charge Allen with first- and fourth-degree sexual abuse for penetrating Dylan both vaginally and anally but decided against charging him ‘to avoid the unjustifiable risk of exposing a child to the rigors and uncertainties of a questionable prosecution.’

Among the accusations against Allen was that he rubbed lotion between Dylan’s buttocks and he kissed her all over so much that her body was wet with his slobber. 

He allegedly slept in the same bed as her wearing just jockey shorts and would have her suck on his finger.

Dylan is said to have asked her mother: ‘Why does daddy act like a boyfriend to me?’ and when the children were playing a game of Robin Hood, she took the role of Maid Marion but insisted that the boys were all Friar Tuck not Robin because ‘I don’t want any boyfriends or love games.’

Mia tried to warn Woody away from Dylan, sticking a note on his door saying he had ‘molded one daughter and now had his eye on another.’ 

Moses ridiculed his sister’s account that Allen told her to lay on her stomach and play with her brother’s electric train set.

‘Then he sexually assaulted me,’ claimed Dylan. ‘He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies.’

‘I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.’ 

Moses said: ‘It’s a precise and compelling narrative, but there’s a major problem: there was no electric train set in that attic. There was, in fact, no way for kids to play up there, even if we had wanted to. 

‘It was 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, and crammed with trunks full of hand-me-down clothes and my mother’s old wardrobes. ‘The idea that the space could possibly have accommodated a functioning electric train set, circling around the attic, is ridiculous.’

But Ronan takes the exact opposite position to his older brother.

When the Golden Globes honored Allen with a montage of his work in 2014, Ronan tweeted: ‘Missed the Woody Allen tribute — did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?’

Two years later he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter: ‘I believe my sister. This was always true as a brother who trusted her, and, even at 5 years old, was troubled by our father’s strange behavior around her: climbing into her bed in the middle of the night, forcing her to suck his thumb — behavior that had prompted him to enter into therapy focused on his inappropriate conduct with children prior to the allegations.

‘But more importantly, I’ve approached the case as an attorney and a reporter, and found her allegations to be credible. The facts are persuasive and well documented.’

Whatever the truth, Allen’s career has now crashed — although it took years for it to happen. After he was first accused of assaulting Dylan he was nominated for nine Oscars, winning one for best original screenplay for 2012’s Midnight in Paris.

But over the past couple of years, he has found it increasingly difficult to get funding or distribution for his movies and other projects. Amazon pulled out of a $54 million, four-picture deal. Hachette dropped his memoir.

He told The Mail on Sunday last year: ‘I don’t feel vindicated because that is to imply I was concerned and — I don’t wish to seem callous — but I am not. Of course, I am aware I am the subject of gossip and scandal, but I cannot let it bother me. I live my life. I work. I play jazz. I watch sports. I see my friends. I don’t look up and I don’t read anything.’

 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk