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Woody Allen responds to renewed allegations that he molested adopted daughter Dylan Farrow
Director Woody Allen faces reporters briefly in New York, June 7, 1993, following a judge's ruling ending his attempt to gain custody of children Moses, Dylan and Satchel. The ruling followed a bitter custody battle with former lover actress Mia Farrow.
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Michael Albans/AP
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Woody Allen wrote a New York Times guest column online Friday in response to renewed attention given to allegations that he molested his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, including an open letter in the Times by Dylan Farrow explicitly detailing her alleged molestation and calling out Hollywood celebrities who have worked with Allen. The column is set to be published in Sunday's Times.
Allen, 78, lays out his side of the story in the column, writing that he had found the claims by longtime partner Mia Farrow that he had molested their then 7-year-old adopted daughter "ludicrous" from the beginning and saying that Farrow was vindictive.
"After all, I was a 56-year-old man who had never before (or after) been accused of child molestation. Now, suddenly, when I had driven up to her house in Connecticut one afternoon to visit the kids for a few hours, when I would be on my raging adversary’s home turf, with half a dozen people present, when I was in the blissful early stages of a happy new relationship with the woman I’d go on to marry — that I would pick this moment in time to embark on a career as a child molester should seem to the most skeptical mind highly unlikely."
Allen cites Yale's Child Sexual Abuse Clinic, who investigated and decided that Allen had not abused Dylan, writing that she either was "an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family" or "was coached or influenced by her mother."
He also writes that he believes the custody judge's ruling saying that "we will probably never know what occurred" was "irresponsible" and that the judge was hard on Allen largely due to his relationship with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi.
Mia Farrow's adopted son Moses Farrow's interview in the new issue of People Magazine is quoted by Allen: "Of course Woody did not molest my sister," Moses is quoted as saying in People. "My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister."
For Allen's full Op-Ed essay, click over to The New York Times.
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