Dylan Farrow spoke to CBS This Morning’s Gayle King in her first television interview to detail the allegations she previously made against her adoptive father, Woody Allen.
“I loved my father,” Farrow, who was adopted by actress Mia Farrow when Dylan was an infant, said in the interview that aired on Thursday, January 18. “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.”
She went on to detail alleged events from August 4, 1992, the day she says her father brought her into an attic crawl space in their Connecticut home. “He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother’s toy train that was set up. He sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted. As a 7-year-old, 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 fingers.”
When King played a clip for Farrow of Allen denying her claims on a past 60 Minutes interview, Farrow began to cry. “He’s lying and he’s been lying for so long,” she said.
Farrow also pointed out why she decided to finally do a televised interview about the topic.
“With so much silence being broken by so many brave people against so many high profile people, I felt it was important to add my story to theirs because it’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time and it was … It was very momentous for me to see this conversation finally carried into a public setting,” she added.
Allen, 82, has always denied Farrow’s claims. Following the CBS This Morning interview, he released the following statement to Us Weekly:
“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,” the director said.
“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,” he continued. “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.”
