A Full Timeline of Dylan Farrow's Sexual Assault Accusations Against Woody Allen
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For decades, Dylan Farrow has alleged that her father Woody Allen sexually assaulted her in the attic of her mother Mia Farrow’s Connecticut home on August 4, 1992. Nearly 30 years after the initial accusations, footage of a 7-year-old Dylan recounting the assault the day after it allegedly took place has been released for the first time as part of HBO's new documentary series Allen v. Farrow, which premiered February 21.
The Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering-directed series digs into one of the film industry's most infamous cases. The four-part docuseries is a comprehensive look at the relationship between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen and its dissolution that began in January of 1992 when Farrow discovered nude photographs of her 21-year-old daughter Soon-Yi Previn in Allen’s apartment. Later that year, Mia Farrow and Allen’s 7-year-old daughter Dylan accused Allen of sexual assault. Woody Allen has always denied the allegations, arguing that Dylan was brainwashed by Mia, who was scorned when she learned of his affair with her eldest daughter Previn.
Thorough and solemn, Allen v. Farrow is guided by Dylan and Mia Farrow’s firsthand accounts, as well as interviews with family, friends, officers, and agents familiar with the events. This is the full timeline of the nearly three decade-long saga:
In 1977, Mia Farrow and her husband André Previn adopted Soon-Yi from South Korea, who was about 7 years old. The couple divorced in 1979, the same year Farrow met Woody Allen at Elaine’s, a Manhattan restaurant. They began what would become a 12-year-long relationship, during which they collaborated on 13 films including The Purple Rose of Cairo and Crimes and Misdemeanors.
In 1985, after six years with Allen, Farrow adopted Dylan, an infant born in Texas. In HBO’s documentary, Mia Farrow asserts that Woody Allen specifically asked for a little blonde girl during the adoption process. Two years later, in 1987, Allen and Farrow had a baby boy named Satchel, now known as Ronan. Over the years, his parentage has been called into question—in a 2013 Vanity Fair interview Mia Farrow answered “possibly” when asked if Frank Sinatra was Ronan’s father, as no DNA tests had been done.
In December of 1991, Woody Allen, 56, adopted Dylan as well as Moses Farrow, another one of Mia’s sons, who was 13 at the time. Allen later testified that he began an affair with Farrow’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn during this month, too, and on January 13, 1992, Mia Farrow discovered nude photographs of Soon-Yi in Allen’s apartment, causing a major rift in the family.
Although no longer in a relationship with Mia, Woody Allen was still granted permission to visit his adopted children following the outing of his relationship with Soon-Yi. It was during one of these visits to Mia Farrow’s Connecticut home on August 4, 1992 that Dylan Farrow alleged that Woody Allen assaulted her. Mia Farrow was not home at the time, and according to the HBO documentary, Dylan’s babysitter, who would later testify in court during the custody hearing, could not locate Woody or Dylan in or around the home for twenty minutes.
On August 5, 1992, family friend Casey Pascal’s babysitter, who was at Farrow’s home at the time of the alleged assault, told Pascal that she witnessed what she deemed an inappropriately intimate physical interaction between Woody Allen and Dylan in the living room. According to the documentary, Mia asked Dylan about what had occurred the previous day, and Dylan recounted her assault while Mia recorded her. The video footage of this is seen by the public for the first time in Allen v. Farrow. On CBS This Morning in 2018, Dylan explained: “I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother’s country house in Connecticut by my father. He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother’s toy train that was set up. And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted.”
On August 13, 1992, Woody Allen sued Mia Farrow for custody of their three children Moses, Dylan, and Ronan Farrow in New York State Court. Four days later, on August 17, the Connecticut State Police announced they had opened an investigation regarding molestation allegations against Woody Allen. That same day, Allen released a statement regarding his romantic relationship with Farrow’s 21-year-old daughter Soon-Yi Previn, which had until that point been kept secret: “It's real and happily all true.” He gave a public press conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where he called the abuse allegations against him “false” and “outrageous," stating that Farrow had coached Dylan due to the custody dispute going on.
The following month, on September 18, 1992, Allen and Farrow released their final film together. Husbands and Wives features Allen and Farrow as a couple whose marriage falls apart as the husband, a professor, begins to fall for one of his students.
In November of 1992, Vanity Fair published “Mia’s Story,” a long piece which offered Mia’s perspective on the allegations and her family. She had previously been reluctant to involve the press in the affair. In response, Woody Allen went on 60 Minutes later that month to defend himself.
On March 18, 1993, after a seven month inquiry, Woody Allen’s lawyers stated that he had been cleared of the assault allegations by a team of investigators at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The report, which was commissioned by Connecticut law enforcement, was never released to the public in full, but the documentary reveals that 7-year-old Dylan was interviewed nine times by social workers who concluded that her story contained “inconsistencies.” The notes taken during the interviews were allegedly destroyed following the report’s completion—a practice that experts interviewed in the HBO documentary deem extremely unusual.
The highly publicized custody trial, at which both Allen and Mia Farrow testified, began on March 19, 1993 and lasted 20 days and 7 weeks. At it, a child psychiatrist testified that the Yale-New Haven report was “seriously flawed,” and on June 7, 1993, Mia Farrow won custody of all three children she and Allen shared. Woody Allen was denied visitation rights with Dylan, and presiding Justice Elliott Wilk of the State Supreme Court called Allen a “self-absorbed, untrustworthy and insensitive” father and Farrow “a caring and loving mother who has provided a home for both her biological and her adopted children” in his ruling. The Farrow family moved to Connecticut full-time in an attempt to heal and relinquish the spotlight following the custody trial.
Later that year, in September of 1993, Frank Maco, the Connecticut state attorney at the helm of the investigation into the assault allegations, announced that he would not press charges against Woody Allen. Although he said he had probable cause to prosecute and believed Dylan had been assaulted, he stated that he wished to spare Dylan the trauma of taking the stand as the lead witness at a high-profile trial. Woody Allen was never prosecuted or charged in connection with the alleged molestation.
In January of 1994, Allen filed an appeal to the custody case. It was rejected by the New York State appeals court that May, and he was ordered to pay an estimated $1.2 million dollars in Mia Farrow’s legal fees.
Three years later, in December of 1997, then 62-year-old Woody Allen and 27-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, who was no longer in contact with her family, were married in Venice, Italy.
In November 2013, Vanity Fair published a long reported feature on Mia Farrow, in which Dylan Farrow, then 28, went on the record for the first time about the alleged abuse.
Woody Allen received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes in January 2014, and two weeks later, on February 1, 2014, Dylan Farrow penned an open letter on a New York Times blog, recounting the alleged assault and her experience in detail for the first time. Dylan’s brother and Woody Allen’s son Moses Farrow defended Allen and refuted Dylan’s allegations in an interview with People later that week on February 5 in response, stating that “of course Woody did not molest my sister.” On February 7, Woody Allen denied the allegations personally as well in the Opinion section of the New York Times.
In October 2017, the #MeToo hashtag went viral when the Times and Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker published articles regarding allegations of sexual harassment and rape against film mogul Harvey Weinstein. In response, Woody Allen told the BBC that he felt “sad for Harvey,” and stressed the importance of avoiding “a witch hunt atmosphere.” He later clarified that “when I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man.”
In December 2017, Dylan Farrow wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times entitled “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” Many actors who had previously worked with Allen, including Colin Firth, Greta Gerwig, and Timothee Chalamet, made statements in support of Dylan or donated their salaries from his films to charity, though Allen has continued to make celebrated feature films in the decades following the allegations against him.
On January 18, 2018, Dylan Farrow gave her first television interview with Gayle King on CBS This Morning, in which she recounted her assault allegations. Woody Allen denied them again in a statement to CBS, calling Dylan a “vulnerable child...coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.” “It seems to have worked,” the statement reads, “and, sadly, I'm sure Dylan truly believes what she says.”
Later that year, in September of 2018, New York Magazine published a long interview with Soon-Yi Previn, the then 47-year-old wife of Woody Allen. It was the first time she’d spoken publicly on her marriage or the fallout of her family, and in it she defended Allen, with whom she has two children, and disparaged her estranged mother Mia Farrow’s parenting. The writer of the piece openly states she is a longtime friend of Woody Allen herself.
In February of 2019, Amazon backed out of a $68 million four movie deal with Woody Allen due to the renewed publicity surrounding Dylan Farrow’s abuse allegations. Allen sued Amazon, and they settled in November of that year.
On March 2, 2020, Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing imprint announced the April publication of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing. Dylan Farrow tweeted a statement condemning Grand Central, which also published Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill” about his reporting of the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. On March 5, many Hachette employees staged a walkout in protest of the book, and the following day, Hachette announced it would no longer publish Apropos of Nothing. A few weeks later, on March 23, 2020, Woody Allen’s memoir was published by Arcade Publishing. In the book, he again denies the allegations that he sexually assaulted Dylan. Excerpts from the audio recording of his book, particularly those in which he describes his relationship history with Mia, are featured in HBO’s Allen v. Farrow.
After the first episode of Allen v. Farrow aired on February 21, the publisher of Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing released a statement that the “unauthorized” use of clips from the audiobook were “clear, willful infringement under existing legal precedent,” alluding to a potential lawsuit forthcoming. In response, a spokesperson for HBO stated that “The creators of Allen v. Farrow legally used limited audio excerpts from Woody Allen’s memoir in the series under the Fair Use doctrine.”
The first episode of Allen v. Farrow is the first time recorded footage of Dylan Farrow at age 7 detailing her assault has been made public, and the following three episodes, which air Sunday nights, are equally troubling. “It’s crazy that for some people, the idea that I was brainwashed is somehow easier to swallow than child sexual abuse,” Dylan said in a February ELLE profile. Woody Allen released a statement after the first episode calling the documentary “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods.”
Dylan Farrow, who has not gone by Dylan since she was eight years old but prefers to keep her name private, using Dylan as a pen name instead, recently published a young adult fantasy novel called Hush. The writer resides in Connecticut near her mother Mia with her husband and four-year-old daughter Evangeline.
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