Woody Allen addresses allegations in first interview in 30 years
Woody Allen has spoken out for the first time in 30 years about the allegations against him as well as his relationship with his wife Soon-Yi Previn.
Allen, 85, spoke with CBS Sunday Morning for his first in-depth on-camera interview in three decades.
He addresses the allegations brought against him by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow who claims that Allen molested her when she was seven years old.
Allen denied there being truth to the claims but he doesn't think Dylan is lying either.
“I believe she thinks it,” Allen says (via Deadline). “She was a good kid. I do not believe that she’s making it up. I don’t believe she’s lying. I believe she believes that.”
Allen has implied in the past that Dylan has been misled to believe something happened when Allen says it didn't as the claims came out during a heated custody battle with his ex Mia Farrow in 1992.
“It’s so preposterous, and yet the smear has remained,” Allen says in the interview.
“And they still prefer to cling to, if not the notion that I molested Dylan, the possibility that I molested her.
“Nothing that I ever did with Dylan in my life could be misconstrued as that.”
He continues: “There was no logic to it, on the face of it. Why would a guy who’s 57 years old and never accused of anything in my life, I’m suddenly going to drive up in the middle of a contentious custody fight at Mia’s country home (with) a 7-year-old girl. It just – on the surface, I didn’t think it required any investigation, even.”
The interview also discussed his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, which has been controversial since it began. The pair met when Soon-Yi was the adoptive daughter of Mia Farrow and the pair began a relationship despite their 35-year age difference.
“I would say, the many women I’ve dated in my life — many women — they were all what the appropriate police would call appropriate, age-appropriate,” he explained.
“Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, (second wife), Louise Lasser, my first wife … until Soon-Yi, which is unusual for me.
“If you had told me that I was going to wind up married — happily married — to an Asian woman, much younger than me, not in show business, I would have said, ‘Well, the odds of that are very slim. I don’t think you’re going to be right.’ But that’s what happened.”
He addressed that the way they met was unusual but said that they came together in a less scandalous way than people think.
“I never slept at Mia’s house in all the years I went out with her,” Allen told Cowan.
“We had a relationship but there was never gonna be a marital relationship … It got to be a relationship of convenience after a while.”
He noted that “the last thing in the world that anybody wanted was to hurt anybody’s feelings.”