Allen vs. Farrow: An HBO Original Documentary

Dylan Farrow has been telling the same story since she was seven years old: One afternoon in 1992, she says her adoptive father, Woody Allen, brought her to the attic of her mother, Mia Farrow’s, Connecticut home and — out of sight of the rest of the family — molested her. In the intervening three decades, her account has not faltered. It has remained consistent since she first shared it with therapists, then police, as a child; when she aired it in a New York Times op-ed in 2014, and in the Los Angeles Times in 2017, in a televised interview with CBS in 2018, and now, in a four-part documentary from HBO: Allen v. Farrow, an exhaustively detailed investigation into the abuse allegations and subsequent custody battle that kneecapped Farrow’s career and have only recently begun to create consequences for Allen.

Allen has always adamantly denied Dylan’s allegations. He did not return interview requests for the documentary and described it after the fact as a “hatchet job riddled with falsehoods” and a “shoddy hit piece.” His public statements have followed the same formula since the early ’90s: He maintains that Farrow, his former partner of 12 years, orchestrated a smear campaign after discovering his affair with her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and coached Dylan through a false allegation of sexual assault. “I never molested my daughter,” he said in the wake of Dylan’s 2018 interview with CBS, “as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”