Ronan Farrow has denounced as “shameful” a New York Magazine piece in which his half-sister, Soon-Yi Previn, accuses their mother, Mia Farrow, of abuse.
The Pulitzer Prize winner said in a statement late Sunday he owes everything to Mia Farrow, and called the magazine story a “hit job, written by a longtime admirer and friend of Woody Allen’s.”
Statement on New York magazine, which has done something shameful here: pic.twitter.com/xGeQP341OG
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) September 17, 2018
Mia Farrow and her then-husband, conductor André Previn, adopted Soon-Yi in 1977; two years later, their marriage ended in divorce. Shortly thereafter, she and Allen began a relationship that lasted 12 years. Along the way, he adopted two of Farrow’s children, including Dylan Farrow. She also gave birth to Ronan Farrow, though she has said he was “possibly” fathered by Frank Sinatra, not Allen.
In 1991, Previn, then 21 years old, and Allen, then 56, began an intimate relationship. The affair was discovered after Mia Farrow found nude photographs of her adopted daughter in Allen’s apartment.
In August of 1992, Mia Farrow accused Allen of sexually assaulting Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow, their adopted daughter, in a crawl space of Mia Farrow’s Connecticut home. Dylan Farrow has repeated the accusations.
Prosecutors did not press charges, and the New York Department of Social Services said it found “no credible evidence” to support the accusation.
O’Sullivan Farrow has called the investigation “inaccurate,” saying, “I am credible, and I am telling the truth, and I think it’s important that people realize that one victim, one accuser, matters.”
“As a journalist, I’m shocked by the lack of care for the facts, the refusal to include eyewitness testimony that would contradict falsehoods in the piece, and the failure to print my sister’s responses,” Ronan Farrow wrote, referring to Dylan.
The author of the New Yorker piece, Daphne Merkin, acknowledges in the text that she has been a friend of Allen’s for more than four decades.
In the New York Magazine piece, Soon-Yi Previn said Mia Farrow abused her, and said she had no positive memories of her childhood with Mia Farrow.