Soon-Yi Previn breaks silence on adoptive mother Mia Farrow — with devastating results
WOODY Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn has painted a devastating picture of Mia Farrow as a neglectful and abusive adoptive mother.
IT’S one of the most anticipated interviews in Hollywood, and New York Magazine’s sit-down with Soon-Yi Previn — wife of director Woody Allen and adopted daughter of actress Mia Farrow — does not disappoint.
For decades, Ms Previn, who was raised by Farrow as a child but went on to marry Allen, has stood by the controversial director through accusations he molested his daughter Dylan Farrow.
But the 47-year-old has come out swinging in a devastating interview with Daphne Merkin for the magazine’s Vulture website, painting a disturbing picture of life in the Farrow household.
Ms Previn alleges her adoptive mother would go into fits of rage in which she lashed out physically and verbally, and ridiculed her for having a mild learning disability of which she remains ashamed to this day.
But she said she’s not out for revenge — she just wants the world to know the truth.
“I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that,” Ms Previn said in the article.
“But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. (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.”
Ms Previn has always made it clear where her loyalties lie, declaring in a 1992 statement to Newsweek: “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested, and spoiled by some evil stepfather, not by a long shot.”
But this is the first time she has described her fraught relationship with Farrow in such harrowing detail.
Ms Previn said she was filled with foreboding from the moment she met Farrow as a six-year-old at a Korean orphanage in 1977.
Fresh from the success of cult TV series Peyton Place and Roman Polanski’s creepy masterpiece R osemary’s Baby, Farrow was one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood and married to world famous composer Andre Previn.
The couple already had five children, including three of their own; Matthew, Sascha and Fletcher, and two adopted from Vietnam as babies, Lark and Daisy.
“I remember the second I laid eyes on her,” Ms Previn recalls of her first encounter with her adoptive mother.
“She came to me, and she threw her arms around me to give me a big hug. I’m standing there rigidly, thinking, ‘Who is this woman, and can she get her hands off of me?’ She didn’t ring true or sincere.”
As a child who was homeless from the age of five and forced to forage for scraps of food in bins to survive on the streets of Seoul, Ms Previn’s first night in a warm hotel room with her “new mother” should have been a pleasant memory.
“I’d never taken a bath by myself, because in the orphanage it was a big tub, and we all got in it,” she remembers.
“Instead of doing what you do with an infant — you know, maybe get into the water, put some toys in, put your arm in to show that you’re fine, it’s not dangerous — she kind of just threw me in.
“Mia wasn’t maternal to me from the get-go.”
She alleges that only got worse after Ms Previn went to live with Farrow, Previn and her five new siblings in the family home in England.
“There was a hierarchy — (Farrow) didn’t try to hide it, and Fletcher was the star, the golden child,” Soon-Yi Previn recalled. “Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blond hair and blue eyes.”
Ms Previn alleges that in contrast, she, Lark and Daisy were treated like maids by their adoptive mother and subjected to bouts of verbal and physical abuse.
“(Farrow) tried to teach me the alphabet with those wooden blocks,” she said. “If I didn’t get them right, sometimes she’d throw them at me or down on the floor.”
Ms Previn also alleges Farrow called her names like “stupid” or “moronic”, often while slapping her in the face or spanking her with a hairbrush. Once she allegedly threw a porcelain rabbit at her.
“I could see from the expression on her face that she felt she had gone too far,” Ms Previn said. “Because it could have really hurt me.”
When Farrow and Previn divorced in 1979, Farrow relocated most of her family back to the US — the couple’s nine-year old twins stayed in the UK with their father — where they moved into a house at Martha’s Vineyard.
It was here, Ms Previn alleges, that a disturbing incident took place when she and Lark were playing in a paddling pool and Lark hurt herself.
Farrow allegedly went ballistic, yelling at Ms Previn: “Look what you’ve done! You never listen! I should send you to an insane asylum!”
Ms Previn said she remembers feeling terrified and physically shaking.
“I was so scared I thought she was actually going to put me in an insane asylum — and I understood what it meant,” she said.
Farrow was also allegedly cruel in other ways, making fun of Ms Previn’s mild learning disability.
“I’ve never spoken about it, because Mia drummed it into me to be ashamed about it.
“Mia used to write words on my arm, which was humiliating, so I’d always wear long-sleeved shirts. She would also tip me upside down, holding me by my feet, to get the blood to drain to my head. Because she thought — or she read it, God knows where she came up with the notion — that blood going to my head would make me smarter or something.”
Later they moved to New York, where Farrow began dating Woody Allen.
“I hated him because he was with my mother, and I didn’t understand why anyone could be with such a nasty, mean person,” Ms Previn said of her first impression of Allen, who she met at the age of 10.
But they bonded when Ms Previn broke her ankle in the 11th grade and Allen showed a tenderness she hadn’t seen in her adopted mother, driving the teenager to school and to doctor’s appointments.
Ironically, it was Farrow who suggested Ms Previn and Allen spend more time together and the pair grew ever closer until one night in 1991, they shared a kiss while watching a movie together.
“We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me, and I think that started it,” Ms Previn said.
“We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other.”
In January 1992, all hell broke loose after Farrow found nude photos of her adoptive daughter, which Allen had left out in the open by mistake.
She kicked Ms Previn out of the house, severed her university fund and allegedly made false claims to Allen that Ms Previn was suicidal.
“I remember the phone call when she found the photos,” Ms Previn said.
“I picked up the phone and Mia said, ‘Soon-Yi.’ That’s all she needed to say, in that chilling tone of voice. I knew my life was over and that she knew, just by the way she said my name. “When she came home, she asked me about it, and I — survival instinct — denied it. And then she said, ‘I have photos.’ So I knew I was trapped.
“Of course, she slapped me, you know the way of things. And then she called everyone. She didn’t contain the situation; she just spread it like wildfire, and then she was screaming at Woody when he came over.
“Meanwhile, Dylan and Satchel are living under her roof and they are very small, 6 and 4 years old. They hear their mother going crazy, screaming in the middle of the night for hours.”
Months later, Farrow went public with allegations Allen had sexually abused their young adopted daughter, Dylan, when she was seven years old.
The claims made a pariah of the director, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing and claims Farrow fabricated the story out of spite and jealousy, coaching her daughter to tell and retell it until fiction became a genuine memory for the little girl.
My statement on New York Magazine: pic.twitter.com/xml6pdaZqb
— Dylan Farrow (@RealDylanFarrow) September 17, 2018
Both Dylan and her investigative journalist brother Ronan Farrow have today issued separate and strongly-worded statements condemning the Vulture interview and accusing Merkin (who acknowledges her friendship of four decades with Allen in the article) of being “infatuated” with Allen
“Woody Allen molested me when I was seven years old, part of a documented pattern of inappropriate, abusive touching that led a judge to say there was no evidence I was coached and that it was unsafe for me to be in (his) presence),” Dylan said in her statement.
But Ms Previn tells an unsettling story in the article, which leaves the reader wondering if Farrow might well be capable of such a manipulation.
“When Soon-Yi was a girl,” journalist Daphne Merkin writes, “Farrow asked her to make a tape about her origins, detailing how she’d been the daughter of a prostitute who beat her.
“The request puzzled her, Soon-Yi said, since she had no memory of anything like that, so she refused.”
It’s a brief but odd anecdote and perhaps one that appears to support Farrow’s alleged propensity to manipulate the truth to suit her own narrative.
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