Soon-Yi Previn: everything we learnt from that bombshell interview

Soon-Yi Previn has responded to the abuse allegations levelled at her husband, the director Woody Allen, in a rare interview.

Soon-Yi, 47, has rarely spoken to reporters since her 1992 marriage to Allen, the former partner of her adoptive mother Mia Farrow. But after Farrow's daughter Dylan gave a TV interview repeating her claim of being molested by Allen as a child – a claim the filmmaker has always firmly denied – Soon-Yi agreed to share her version of events with Vulture's Daphne Merkin, a family friend.

"What’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust," she said. "[Mia Farrow] has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”

In a wide-ranging series of conversations, Soon-Yi spoke about her relationship with Allen, her childhood as an orphan in South Korea, and her adoption by Farrow. Here are the most revealing moments:

She ran way from home at five years old

Brought up by a single mother in an impoverished household in Seoul, Soon-Yi ran away from home aged five and soon found herself starving on the city's streets. “I had nowhere to go,” she told Vulture, “so I was running around the streets, going through the garbage looking for food. And I ate a bar of soap. The soap was the worst-tasting – I could think of it now, it was just disgusting. And then I was looking outside a bakery, you know, because I was starving, and this woman asked if I wanted something to eat.

"She bought me something, and she was trying to get information from me about where I lived. I wouldn’t answer, so she brought me to the police station and then the police sent me to an orphanage. I liked it there, and then some people came – and I remember hiding under a table – to take me away to a different orphanage.”

She spent a year at an orphanage run by "extremely nice" nuns, before being adopted by Farrow aged six. According to Merkin, Soon-Yi claimed she was asked by Farrow to make a video about her life in Seoul, saying she was the daughter of a prostitute who beat her – but refused, having no memory of that ever being the case.

Woody Allen isn't convinced Ronan is his son

Satchel Ronan Farrow, the son of Farrow and Allen, has been one of his father's most outspoken critics – and now Allen has admitted he isn't entirely sure that he is his father.

“I think he is, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it," the director said. "I paid for child support for him for his whole childhood, and I don’t think that’s very fair if he’s not mine.

"Also [Mia Farrow] represented herself as a faithful person, and she certainly wasn’t. Whether she actually became pregnant in an affair she had … ”According to Merkin, there is a rumour the real father could be Farrow's first husband, Frank Sinatra.

She says Farrow treated her like a servant

 Soon-Yi claims she and her adopted sisters were treated like “domestics" rather than family members, tasked with carrying out  household work their mother might have been expected to do.

“Lark and I wrote the list of everything that we needed for the house, we paid for it, we unpacked it. When I went to [third-grade school, aged eight or nine], I had to pick up my siblings… In Connecticut, [her sister] Lark cooked, and we cleaned the bathrooms, cleared the dishes, washed up, and did the sweeping. When Woody started coming up to Connecticut, I ironed Mia’s sheets.”

She claims Mia Farrow held her upside down to make her 'smarter'

"Mia was never kind to me, never civil," Soon-Yi claims, accusing Farrow of “arbitrarily showing her power” by slapping her face, calling her a "retard" and on one occasion throwing a porcelain rabbit at her.

"She would also tip me upside down, holding me by my feet, to get the blood to drain to my head," she said. "Because she thought – or she read it, God knows where she came up with the notion – that blood going to my head would make me smarter or something.” 

Soon-Yi told Merkin she has "a little learning disability”, and that Farrow treated her harshly as a result: “I’ve never spoken about it, because Mia drummed it into me to be ashamed about it."

She presents her adoptive mother as a manipulative figure, and says she pitied Allen for falling in love with her. "He’s a poor, pathetic thing. He’s so naïve and trusting, he was probably putty in her hands." 

A spokesman for Farrow's family denied any allegations of abusive behaviour, neglect or favouritism, while five of the actress's other children gave a collective statement to Vulture: “None of us ever witnessed anything other than compassionate treatment in our home."

She denies ever seeing Woody Allen as a father figure

Gossip surrounding Allen's controversial relationship with Soon-Yi has damaged his reputation, the filmmaker says. “People think that I was Soon-Yi’s father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter," he told Vulture, describing himself as a "pariah".

Soon-Yi first met Allen, who is 35 years her senior, when she was 10 years old. Though he was dating Farrow at the time, he lived in a separate apartment and Farrow's children "didn’t think of him as a father,” according to Soon-Yi. "He didn’t even have clothing at our house, not even a toothbrush.”

“I already had a father,” she added. “He was [Farrow's ex-husband] André Previn, and Mia never married Woody, nor did they ever live together. He was my mother’s boyfriend, plain and simple. He was like a separate entity."

Allen told journalists he was in love with Soon-Yi before telling her

Soon-Yi and Allen began a sexual relationship, which Farrow discovered when Soon-Yi was 21, after finding nude photographs Allen had taken of her. 

Their affair only became public when Allen gave a statement to the press about it in 1992.  “I only knew that he loved me when he gave the press conference and said it publicly," Soon-Yi said. "Even then, I wasn’t sure if he meant it. We had never said those words to each other.”

While defending her releationship with Allen, Soon-Yi also expressed a sense of guilt for her actions, calling their affair “a huge betrayal on both our parts, a terrible thing to do, a terrible shock to inflict on [Farrow].”

Soon-Yi hated him, as he made an awful first impression

“Woody wasn’t interested in meeting us children," she said. "And the feeling was mutual; we weren’t interested in meeting him. I hated him because he was with my mother, and I didn’t understand why anyone could be with such a nasty, mean person. I thought he must be the same way.”

She was upset after overhearing him tell Farrow he thought she was in need of psychiatric help. “[He said I was] inordinately shy and that I should see a shrink," she said. "And I’m thinking the most famous neurotic is saying this — and this is how he makes his living, being shy! I hated him before, but I hated him double for saying this.”

She remembers him telling her, “You always look at me as if you’re going to come at me from behind a closet with a knife,” and recalls being amused by it: “He almost won me over with that comment because he was so spot-on.”

They first kissed after a very Woody Allen-ish first date

They bonded over a shared interest in basketball, and regularly went to watch the New York Knicks together, but their friendship changed into something else after a more high-brow kind of entertainment. "I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman movie, which I believe was The Seventh Seal, but I’m not positive," Soon-Yi said.

Ingmar Bergman's bleak, black-and-white film, an existentialist parable about the "silence of God" released in 1958, would not be the average person's idea of a romantic movie. But in this case it clearly was. "We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other.”

She continued: “I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he first kissed me and I said, ‘I wondered how long it was going to take you to make a move.’ From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him."