Despite her contentious relationship with her ex Woody Allen, Mia Farrow says in a new interview published Wednesday that she has tried to move on.
“I reached a place many years ago where I just don’t care about him,” the actress and activist told Elle magazine in an interview conducted in August.
“It’s not all white or black,” Farrow said of her decade with Allen, which ended in 1992 when she discovered explicit Polaroids he had taken of her then college-sophomore daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. “Otherwise you’d ask yourself what on earth you’re doing with that person for 10 minutes, let alone for 10 years.”
In August 1992, Mia accused Allen of sexually abusing 7-year-old adopted daughter Dylan Farrow (which Allen has vehemently denied) in Farrow’s Connecticut home. Prosecutors did not press charges at the time, and the New York Department of Social Services said it found “no credible evidence” to support the accusation. A brutal custody battle followed, with Allen’s legal team portraying Farrow as a vindictive woman and bad parent.
Farrow’s family tumult was again catapulted into the spotlight in 2014 when Dylan published an open letter in the New York Times restating her sexual assault accusations, and brother Ronan Farrow responding in a Hollywood Reporter column saying: “I believe my sister.”
“Both of them wrote their pieces without telling me,” Mia Farrow told Elle. “Because for me, it’s the sleeping dog that you don’t want to rouse. But I also understand and deeply respect when my daughter decided she needed to do this.”
Farrow also discussed her pride over her son, Ronan Farrow, who earned a Pulitzer Prize this year for his exposé on indie mogul Harvey Weinstein and has followed with reports on sexual misconduct accusations against other Hollywood figures.
Farrow told Elle that she wishes there was digital evidence of the sexual harassment she and other young actresses endured when the were coming up in Hollywood.
“Oh, Lordy, I wish there were tapes,” she said. “The first really awful grope was a very famous head of a studio. I was 17. I was too embarrassed to even tell my mother.”
Ronan Farrow was also present at the Elle photo shoot and told the publication: “[My mother’s] absolutely one of the many women who were the subject of an old-fashioned smearing and blacklisting campaign. None of it would hold up to one iota of scrutiny today. ‘She’s nuts, she’s jealous’ is an old and thin deflection tactic in child abuse cases,” he said via email to the magazine. “But she was in the crosshairs of that at a time when a certain echelon of a powerful man in Hollywood with the right team of publicists really held all the cards. In retrospect I see the parallels to some of the systems that I’ve reported on.”
When Mia was also asked by Elle if given the chance, would she work again with “Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski after he fled the U.S. after pleading guilty in 1977 to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”? “It’s not in the cards. But I don’t think I would,” Farrow replied.
However, she went on to say that the film project she found the most creatively engaging was “Rosemary’s Baby,” which was made in 1968 — the year before the murder of Polanski’s wife and herfriend, Sharon Tate.
“I will say, it’s wonderful working with Roman Polanski,” Farrow said.