Mia Farrow brainwashed our son Ronan, says Woody Allen

Woody Allen claims Mia Farrow was ‘unnaturally obsessed’ with their son and brainwashed him to hate his father.

Mia Farrow in New York in 2017. Picture: AFP

Woody Allen claims Mia Farrow was “unnaturally obsessed” with their son, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, and brainwashed him to hate his father.

Farrow, 32, found fame three years ago when his reporting in The New Yorker helped to topple Harvey Weinstein and bring about the MeToo movement. When his parents separated in 1992, he was four and, in Allen’s ­account, a pawn in his mother’s “vindictive” quest for revenge: she had discovered Allen’s affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn.

The director’s bitter portrait of Mia Farrow’s “nutsy” personality features strongly in his auto­biography, Apropos of Nothing, published quietly this week.

Acknowledging that he is now a “pariah”, Allen accuses Farrow, 75, of demanding “cult-like obedience” from all her offspring while subjecting her adopted children, including Ms Previn and Moses Farrow, to cruel indifference and bouts of violence (he ­alleges she beat Ms Previn with a phone after learning of the affair).

“Mia enjoyed adopting, loved the excitement, like one buys a new toy; she liked the saintly reputation, the admiring publicity, but she didn’t like raising the kids and didn’t really look after them,” he writes.

The memoir was due for a more prominent release but the original publishers, Hachette Book Group, pulped it this month after a walkout by staff, and protests by Ronan Farrow and his elder sister Dylan, who claims Allen, 84, sexually abused her when she was seven. The twin scandals of Allen’s ­affair and the molestation claim that followed have tainted his reputation for almost three decades. He now finds himself outcast from Hollywood.

Early on, Mia Farrow told Ronan and Dylan that “I’d raped her underage, retarded daughter”, Allen alleges. Ms Previn, who has been married to Allen for 23 years, was actually in her early 20s and would go on to earn a master’s from Columbia University.

Allen alleges Dylan Farrow was “perhaps coached by her mother” to make the molestation accusation. Two investigations at the time exonerated Allen but a custody hearing then denied him visitation rights with Dylan and gave him only supervised meetings with Ronan.

A source familiar with the Farrow family told The New York Post on Tuesday: “The family’s not going to comment on yet ­another rehash of Woody Allen’s lies that attempt to deflect him from credible allegations of abuse backed up by court decisions, evidence, witnesses and Dylan’s first-hand, unwavering account.”

The Times