Dylan Farrow Tells Gayle King About Childhood Sexual Assault Allegations Against Woody Allen

On Thursday morning, Dylan Farrow sat down with CBS News’s Gayle King for a candid and heartbreaking interview, reiterating her decades-old story that her adoptive father, Woody Allen, molested her when she was seven years old.

Speaking on television for the first time about these allegations, an occasionally tearful Farrow laid out once more how Allen allegedly assaulted her in the attic of her mother’s country house in Connecticut—first in a Vanity Fair story from 1992 and then in a 2014 letter to the New York Times.

Farrow also called out actors who have continued to work with Allen and remained silent as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements continue to gain traction. Many have been quick to denounce the seemingly myriad sexual predators in Hollywood, but actors working with Allen have remained curiously tight-lipped until very recently. Farrow, to her credit, says she has moved past anger and is merely hopeful that people will start to exercise a modicum of self-awareness.

KING: Are you angry with the people, with the celebrities that are starring in his movies, that hold him in high regard and continue to compliment him?

FARROW: I’m not angry with them. I hope that, you know, especially since so many of them have been vocal advocates of this Me Too and Time’s Up movement that, um, they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of – of silence in their industry.

KING: And how are they complicit?

FARROW: Because I have been saying this – I have been repeating my accusations unaltered for over 20 years and I have been systematically shut down, ignored or discredited. If they can’t acknowledge the accusations of one survivor’s how are they going to stand for all of us?

While Farrow’s retelling of her own story is harrowing, it’s worth revisiting Maureen Orth’s 1992 Vanity Fair piece, which opens with a lede that is spares no one: “There was an unwritten rule in Mia Farrow’s house that Woody Allen was never supposed to be left alone with their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan.” Farrow’s story has been out in plain sight for years; it is slightly shameful that it’s taken this long for anyone to actually listen.

Not to be outdone, Allen reared his wizened head after the interview aired, issuing a statement that accuses Farrow of using the “Time’s Up movement” as “revenge.”

“When this claim was first made more than 25 years ago… [investigators] found it likely a vulnerable child had been coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.

It seems to have worked – and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says.

But even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time’s Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn’t make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter – as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”