Woody Allen has rebutted renewed allegations, in the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow, that he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan in 1992, calling the series “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that film-makers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had “spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
They added: “As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place.”
In a TV interview in 2018, Dylan Farrow denied she had been “brainwashed” or “coached” into making allegations against Allen.
Allen v Farrow, which aired its first of four episodes on Sunday on HBO in the US, is described by Ziering and Dick as an investigation into the allegations, which emerged during the custody battle after Allen’s separation from Mia Farrow in 1992. Ziering also denied their film was “a collaboration … with [Dylan Farrow] or the family”.
There has been no response so far from the Farrows regarding the claims made by Allen and Previn about the documentary.
Allen has consistently denied any allegations of sexual abuse against Dylan Farrow, which were investigated in 1992-93 by Connecticut state police, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale New Haven Hospital, and the New York Department of Social Services; none concluded that sexual assault had taken place.
Mia Farrow and her son Ronan appear in Allen v Farrow, while Allen and Previn declined to participate. The statement says Allen and Previn “were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond’. Of course, they declined to do so.” Dylan’s brother Moses, who has defended Allen from the allegations, also reportedly declined to appear in the film. The Guardian spoke to the documentary’s lead investigator Amy Herdy who claims to have reached out to Allen’s team back in June 2018 but “got crickets back”. She added: “I know that they got my requests because I had an assistant on the phone” who said they were getting her emails.
Ziering and Dick have previously worked together on a string of hard-hitting documentaries about sexual abuse, including the Oscar-nominated The Invisible War, which focused on rape in the US military and The Hunting Ground, about sex assaults on university campuses.
