Daughter Accuses Woody Allen of Sexual Abuse at Age Seven

Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Woody Allen, has written an open letter about Woody’s alleged sexual abuse, for the first time in a column for the NY Times. “That he got away with what he did to me haunted me as I grew up,” she writes. “Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.”

Dylan Farrow goes into heavy details, describing the alleged encounter between her and her adoptive father.

“What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. 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,” she writes. “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.”

And though Dylan Farrow describes being happily married now, with support from her mother, siblings, and other survivors of sexual abuse she asks why Hollywood keeps defending and working with Woody Allen.

“But others are still scared, vulnerable, and struggling for the courage to tell the truth. The message that Hollywood sends matters for them. What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?”

Farrow’s column in the NY Times comes a few days after director Robert Weide, who made Woody Allen: A Documentary, wrote his own long piece on the controversy, debunking several mistaken pieces of information spreading around the internet.

Source: CNN