Woody Allen's wife, Soon-Yi Previn, broke a long silence to defend the filmmaker against allegations of sexual abuse brought by his daughter, Dylan, speaking out on the running feud between her mother, Mia Farrow, and her husband.
"What's happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust," Previn said in a rare interview with New York magazine published online late Sunday.
Mia "has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn't," she said.
In the article by Daphne Merkin, a longtime friend of Allen's, Soon-Yi discusses her difficult childhood with her adopted mother, portraying her as bad-tempered and abusive.
"Mia described me as 'elegant,'" she is quoted as saying. "It was the only positive thing she said about me."
She recalls Farrow, the star of Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Husbands and Wives," holding her upside down by her feet, believing the blood draining to her head would "make me smarter or something."
"I've never spoken about it, because Mia drummed it into me to be ashamed about it."
"I think it would have been horrible for her," she said. But, she added,
"You know, we were both consenting adults."
"This only serves to revictimize me," Dylan said. "Thanks to my mother, I grew up in a wonderful home." After the article's publication, Dylan also tweeted a statement signed by several of Mia Farrow's biological and adopted children, attesting that their mother has always been a "caring and giving parent."
"As a brother and a son, I am angry that New York Magazine would participate in this kind of a hit job, written by a longtime admirer and friend of Woody Allen's," he said, adding, "Survivors of abuse deserve better."
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