Woody Allen’s Son: Here’s How I Know The Accusation Against My Father Is False

In a lengthy blog post Wednesday, Moses Farrow, son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, laid out the reasons he is certain that his sister Dylan’s claim that their father molested her when she was 7-years-old is false.

For years, Dylan and Mia Farrow have claimed that Allen molested Dylan in 1992 in the “dim, closet-like attic” of Mia’s home in Connecticut, an accusation Allen has adamantly denied. A report by investigators at the Yale-New Haven Hospital found no evidence for the accusation, though their conclusion was contested by an expert, as BuzzFeed notes. While a Connecticut prosecutor said he found “probable cause” to charge Allen, he chose not to press charges in order to protect Dylan from having to appear in court, a decision for which he was criticized by a disciplinary panel.

In 2014, Dylan published an account of the alleged incident in The New York Times, and her accusation has received renewed attention and support since the rise of the #MeToo movement.

But her brother Moses, who was 14 at the time of the alleged sexual assault and at the house when it supposedly took place, says his sister’s claims are false, and he can explain why.

One of the reasons he says he is certain that the alleged abuse did not take place is because of the situation and setting: the house was full of people, including himself, then 14, two nannies, a French tutor, another adult, and at least five other children. Everyone there, he says, was on high-alert because of Mia’s warnings about Allen:

August 4, 1992 was a warm, sunny day in Bridgewater, Connecticut, but in our family’s country home, Frog Hollow, there was a chill in the air. My mother, Mia Farrow, was out shopping with her close friend since childhood, Casey Pascal. I was 14 at the time, and home that day with my little sister Dylan, who had just turned seven, my four-year-old brother Satchel (who now goes by the name Ronan) and Casey’s three kids. We were being supervised by our nanny, Kristi, as well as Casey’s nanny, Alison, and our French tutor, Sophie. It was a full house.

There was another grown-up in the TV room that day, sitting on the floor, watching “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” with the rest of us – Woody Allen. On the surface, it was not unlike his previous visits to our country home. But my mother had put all of us on notice not to let him out of our sight. She was understandably furious: seven months earlier she had learned that he was in an intimate relationship with my 21-year-old sister Soon-Yi, after discovering Polaroids of her in Woody’s apartment. For months now, she had been drilling it into our heads like a mantra: Woody was “evil,” “a monster,” “the devil,” and Soon-Yi was “dead to us.”

“As the ‘man of the house’ that day, I had promised to keep an eye out for any trouble, and I was doing just that,” Moses writes. “I remember where Woody sat in the TV room, and I can picture where Dylan and Satchel were. Not that everybody stayed glued to the same spot, but I deliberately made sure to note everyone’s coming and going. I do remember that Woody would leave the room on occasion, but never with Dylan. He would wander into another room to make a phone call, read the paper, use the bathroom, or step outside to get some air and walk around the large pond on the property.”

Along with the “full house” and all the watchful eyes, Moses says that both Dylan’s claims about the electric train set and the attic space were simply impossible: There was not electric train and the attic space was an “unfinished crawl space”:

In her widely-circulated 2014 open letter in The New York Times, the adult Dylan suddenly seemed to remember every moment of the alleged assault, writing, “He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. 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.”

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. One of my brothers did have an elaborate model train set, but it was set up in the boys’ room, a converted garage on the first floor. (Maybe that was the train set my sister thinks she remembers?)

The claim that it happened in the attic, Moses writes, was a shift in the original allegation. One of the nannies there that day, later said that she saw Woody put his head in Dylan’s lap on the couch, but then the location of the alleged abuse shifted, he suggests.

Moses describes a “fatal dysfunction within my childhood home” which he says “had nothing to do with Woody,” but rather “a deep and persistent darkness within the Farrow family” that began with the father of Mia, “a notorious drinker and serial philanderer” and included her uncle, who was convicted of “multiple child molestation charges.” “Mia told me that she was the victim of attempted molestation within her own family,” writes Moses.

That dysfunction, he says, manifested in Mia’s manipulation, control and abuse of the children, himself included, which he said turned into “coaching, drilling, scripting, and rehearsing – in essence, brainwashing,” for the accusations. Citing the Yale-New Haven Hospital investigation of Dylan’s claim, he says that investigators came to the same conclusion about the children’s testimonies: that they had a “rehearsed quality” and that they were “likely coached or influenced by her mother.”

It was [the long-term nanny] Monica [who quit, saying Mia was pressuring her to take her side and support the accusation] who later testified that she saw Mia taping Dylan describe how Woody had supposedly touched her in the attic, saying it took Mia two or three days to make the recording. In her testimony she said, “I recall Ms. Farrow saying to Dylan at that time, ‘Dylan, what did daddy do… and what did he do next?’ Dylan appeared not to be interested, and Ms. Farrow would stop taping for a while and then continue.” I can vouch for this, having witnessed some of this process myself. 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. (My mother, for whom “loyalty” was hugely important, would also fire another long-term caretaker, Mavis, claiming that she was making statements against her.)

During the custody hearing, my mother kept stressing how we needed to stick together as a family. Frightened and beaten down, I, too, played my part. I even wrote a letter condemning Woody, saying that he had done something horrible and unforgivable, and had broken my dreams. I even read the letter for the news media that were now regularly gathered at the end of our driveway, knowing that doing so would earn my mother’s approval. That public denouncement of my father remains the biggest regret of my life.

Moses concludes by directly addressing his sister, expressing sympathy for her suffering at the hands of their mother, which he says he only started to heal from after getting away from her. “I wish you peace, and the wisdom to understand that devoting your life to helping our mother destroy our father’s reputation is unlikely to bring you closure in any kind of lasting way,” he said.

He then addresses his mother, asking her to finally let go of her anger. “But, after all this time, enough is enough. You and I both know the truth. And it’s time for this retribution to end,” he writes.

Dylan has since responded to Moses’ lengthy statement by dismissing it as an attempt to “deflect from a credible allegation made by an adult woman” and “easily disproven.” Her brother, she says, is “a troubled person”: