In a new interview with CBS News and released on Paramount+ on Sunday, Woody Allen repeated his denial of adopted daughter Dylan Farrow’s “preposterous” accusations that he molested her in 1992 in the midst of a bitter custody battle with his ex Mia Farrow.
“It’s so preposterous and yet the smear has remained,” Allen told CBS’ Lee Cowan in an interview taped last July after the publication of Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.” “And they still prefer to cling to, if not the notion that I molested Dylan than the possibility that I molested her. Nothing that I ever did with Dylan in my life could be misconstrued as that.”
Allen also said that he has not spoken to Dylan since the accusations first surfaced when she was just 7 years old — and that he does not dispute that Dylan’s belief that she was abused. “I do not believe that she’s making it up, I don’t believe she’s lying — I believe she believes that,” he said.
Allen, who was never charged with a crime after two investigations into the accusations, disputes that he would have harmed his daughter. “There was no logic to it on the face of it,” he said. “Why would a guy who was 57 years old, I never was accused of anything in my life, I’m suddenly going to drive up in the middle of a contentious custody fight at Mia’s country home yet — a 7-year-old girl? It just, on the surface of it I didn’t think it required any investigation.”
The new interview was broadcast just weeks after HBO aired a new four-part docuseries, “Allen v. Farrow,” that re-examined the sexual abuse and child molestation accusations against him and included new and previously unseen footage from Dylan Farrow, Mia Farrow and other family and friends that bolstered the case against Allen.
The abuse accusations first surfaced after Allen’s split from his longtime leading lady and partner, Mia Farrow, with whom he had three children — son Ronan Farrow and two adopted children, son Moses and daughter Dylan. Complicating the breakup was that he had embarked on a relationship with another one of Farrow’s adopted daughters, Soon-Yi Previn.
In the CBS interview, Allen noted that he and Soon-Yi, whom he married in 1997, adopted two girls who are now in college. “They don’t give two baby girls to someone that they think is a pedophile,” he said.
Allen also told Cowan that he never felt the need to apologize for his relationship with Soon-Yi. “No, I never felt…” he began. “The last thing in the world that anybody wanted was to hurt anybody’s feelings. What we wanted to do was to eventually make it known that we had a relationship.”
He also said he had no second thoughts about dating his then-partner’s adopted daughter, who was then in her early 20s. “No, it didn’t give me pause because the relationship with Soon-Yi was very gradual. It’s not like I went out with her one night and kissed her.” He added, “There was never a moment that it wasn’t the most natural thing in the world.”
He also suggested that his relationship with Mia Farrow was far from a typical marital partnership. “I never lived with Mia; I never slept at Mia’s house in all the years I went with her,” he said. We had a relationship but it was never going to be a marital relationship. It got to be a relationship of convenience after a while.”
The interview with the filmmaker, conducted by Lee Cowan, was taped last July after the publication of Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” which published by Arcade Publishing after being dropped by Hachette Book Group after an employee protest. It was later released by Arcade Publishing in March 2020.
Along with a report on “controversial artists and their art,” the “CBS This Morning” special also re-aired Farrow’s 2018 interview with “CBS This Morning,” in which she spoke at length about her child molestation accusations against Allen and denied being coached by her mother, Mia Farrow, into making the allegations.
Allen’s interview is available to stream exclusively on Paramount+.
J. Clara Chan contributed to this report.