Dylan Farrow, 35, asks for ’empathy’ from viewers who watch never-before-seen home video of her

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Home video footage has been aired of the adopted daughter of Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, as she recounts incidents of alleged abuse when she was just seven-years-old. 

The footage, shot in 1992, was broadcast for the first time on Sunday in a new HBO documentary about the embattled filmmaker. 

In it, her adoptive mother Mia Farrow asks Dylan what her adoptive father did to her while the pair were alone.

Dylan can be heard clearly describing how Allen, allegedly ‘touched her private parts’.   

The video was shot by Mia as proof of the incident, as seven-year-old Dylan claims the Oscar-winning director told her: ‘Do not move, I have to do this,’ as he touched her in the attic of the family’s country home. 

‘I didn’t want him to do it, mama,’ she’s heard telling her mother of the incident. ‘I didn’t like it.’  

The video which has until now not been made public was apparently used as evidence in the 1993 custody battle between Mia and Allen. 

Allen arrived one day at the family’s country home in upstate New York, in August 1992 while Mia was out and went straight to Dylan. 

Suddenly everyone realized that Allen and Dylan were missing and they were not found for 20 minutes.

‘I remember sitting on the steps with him in the country house. There was nobody else around, and he was directing me on how to suck his thumb – telling me what to do with my tongue, and I think that lasted a while. It felt like a long time,’ Dylan says.   

The next day, family friend Casey Pascal told Mia that a babysitter in the house said she saw Dylan sitting on the couch with Allen ‘kneeling on the floor with his head buried in her lap’. 

‘She said she felt she’d walked in on a very adult situation and realized it was a child and she was horrified to the core. She said Dylan was staring off into space and Woody’s face was in her lap,’ Pascal said.  

‘I remembered she [Dylan] had not had any underpants on [afterwards]. She was sitting next to me. I said to her: “Did this happen, did daddy have his face in your lap yesterday?” She said yes,’ Mia added. 

Mia got her video camera out and recorded Dylan as she asked her about what happened. There appeared to have been two incidents, one on the couch and a second in the attic.

While talking about the first incident, Dylan says: ‘He touched [my] privates and then he was breathing on my leg. And then, this [where I mean] he squeezed me too hard that I couldn’t breathe’.

Mia asks: ‘What do you mean he touched your privates? Where did he touch you?’ Dylan, who was lying on her front, then motions toward her behind.

In another portion of the video, Dylan addresses what happened when Allen took her to the attic. 

‘He said: “What about some father-daughter time?” And then I said: “Well, OK.” 

‘We went into your [Mia’s] room and we went into the attic. Then he started telling me weird things. Then he went behind me and touched my privates,’ Dylan says. 

In the video, Mia asks: ‘Which privates did he touch?’

Dylan, who is sitting down on a bed, points to her private parts and says: ‘This part’. 

‘He touched your front part?’ Mia asks again, to which Dylan replies: ‘yeah’.

In another part of the video Mia asks: ‘Do you wanna tell me what things daddy said in the attic when you were in the attic?’

Dylan replies saying he had told her: ‘Do not move, I have to do this.’ 

‘But I wiggled my bum to see what he was doing,’ she says. ‘He said: “Don’t move I have to do this. If you stay still we can go to Paris”.’

Dylan added that Allen told her: ‘Because this way you could be in my movie, if I do this’. 

‘I didn’t want him to do it, mama. I didn’t like it….I don’t want to talk about it,’ the youngster tells Mia. 

Speaking as an adult, Dylan recalls being in the attic with Allen saying: ‘We were in the TV room and he reached behind me and touched my butt and then he told me to come up to the attic with him. I remember laying there on my stomach and my back was to him so i couldn’t see what was going on.

‘I felt trapped. He was saying things like we’re gonna go to Paris together, you’re gonna be in all my movies. Then he sexually assaulted me. I remember just focusing on my brother’s train set and then he just stopped. He was done. And we just went downstairs.

‘I am that little girl on the tape. So… it’s a very vulnerable part of me, and a very… a very hurt part of me. There’s a lot of… that little girl is in a lot of pain,’ she says as she reflects on the video that she has just made public.

After the incident Mia took Dylan to a pediatrician to have it on record what Allen had allegedly done and after the appointment the doctor informed the police.

The Connecticut State Police and child welfare services in New York began investigations but Allen was not prosecuted.

In the Connecticut case, a psychological report prepared by the Yale New Haven Hospital child sexual abuse clinic – which the documentary argues was deeply flawed – said that Dylan was not a reliable witness.

Allen refused to take a polygraph with a police officer and offered up his own, privately done one instead.

Prosecutors found there was probable cause to issue an arrest warrant for 1st and 4th degree sexual assault of a minor

But they decided not to move forward with the case because of Dylan’s mentality fragility and her young age.

The four-time Oscar-winning director has repeatedly denied molesting Dylan. 

Allen has never been arrested or prosecuted over the sexual abuse allegation against Dylan, which was first made in 1993.  

It was investigated at the time by state police in Connecticut where Mia Farrow and her children lived.

Allen also claimed Dylan fabricated the allegations of abuse or that she had been coached by Mia who he claimed was jealous of his relationship with Soon-Yi. 

‘These documentarians had no interest in the truth,’ Allen said in a statement issued last week. ‘Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods.

‘As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place.’ 

Allen also claims those behind the documentary ‘collaborated’ with Mia to produce the ‘hit piece’. 

Hours before Sunday night’s broadcast, Farrow who is now 35, tweeted a lengthy statement about the video that features in the documentary and asked for viewers’ understanding. 

‘I’m writing this, because to be totally honest I have been losing sleep and overcome with anxiety. Tonight’s episode of the Allen v. Farrow docuseries features a video of me as a seven-year-old child disclosing my abuse to my mother,’ she wrote. ‘My mother gave me this video when I became an adult to do whatever I wanted with it. It shows me as I was then, a young, vulnerable child. ‘Little Dylan,’ whom I’ve tried ever since to protect.’

‘Deciding to allow this tape to be viewed now publicly in this way has not been easy. I myself had resisted ever watching it until now. It had been long stored away in a closet. Scared. Buried,’ she continued. ‘I almost didn’t offer it to the filmmakers, because being this vulnerable in public is absolutely terrifying for me. My fear in letting this tape come to light is that I am putting Little Dylan in the court of public opinion.’

Dylan added, ‘While I have been able to take the stones thrown at me as an adult, to think of that happening to this little girl is stomach-churning. But I decided to let them share it in hopes that Little Dylan’s voice might now help others suffering in silence feel heard, understood, and less alone. And that my testimony might also help parents, relatives, friends, loved ones and the world in general understand first-hand how an abused child might speak and interpret these horrific events.’ 

She noted that she has ‘pushed ‘Little Dylan’ away as a coping mechanism’ for ‘decades’ adding that ‘part of my goal in allowing her to now speak is also to try and find some healing for me and my childhood self. It’s an attempt to make them whole again, and find some peace and closure.’

Dylan asks viewers to watch the video ‘with empathy, compassion and an open mind and heart and not use this as an opportunity to attack, turn away, criticize, mock; or to further shun ‘Little Dylan’ and in doing so shame and silence the millions of abused children who are suffering in the world today.’

‘This is the most vulnerable part of who I am. I hope this tape helps us all find ways to allow painful secrets to come safely out of their closets so we all can heal and move forward in strength and peace. No longer ashamed, buried, scared, sad, and silent.’

She ended her message with a note for other survivors writing, ‘please know that your truth is valid and there are those who will listen.’ She included the number to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.  

Allen v. Farrow, which premiered last week, features Mia and Dylan speaking about the longstanding allegations that Allen sexually abused Dylan. 

Recounting the early incidents of abuse, Dylan says she has ‘very vivid snapshots, different places, mostly a window with a feeling attached’. 

‘I remember sitting on the edge of his bed,’ she says. ‘The light in the room, the satin sheets. There were clarinet reeds. I have memories of getting into bed with him. 

‘He was in his underwear, I’m in my underwear cuddling. I remember his breath on me. He would just wrap his body around me, very intimately’.  

‘I would suddenly walk in and there she would be in his bed with him in his underwear,’ Mia says in the series.

‘Sometimes he would also kneel in front of her or sit next to her and put his face in her lap which I caught a couple of times and I didn’t think that was right’.

Tisa Farrow, Mia’s sister, also recounts a chilling instance when Allen allegedly was putting sunscreen on Dylan’s back and his hand went down between her buttocks and ‘kind of lingered’.

‘[His hand] suggestively went between her buttock cheeks with his finger and then came back. Mia saw it too and snatched the sunscreen away,’ she says. 

Allen is also said to have taught Dylan to suck his thumb and when asked about it by a family friend he claimed it ‘calms her down’.

The four-part series which began last Sunday was filmed in secret and features new interviews with other members of the Farrow-Previn family, including Ronan Farrow and Fletcher Previn.

Never-before-seen home footage from Mia Farrow and Woody Allen’s life before they together before they split in 1992 is shown.

Allen is currently married to Soon-Yi, 50. The couple who did not participate in the documentary series share two daughters.

Allen claims that he and his wife were approached about the documentary less than two months ago and given ‘only a matter of days’ to respond.

The documentary’s producer Amy Herdy, however, claims she reached out as early as June 2018. 

The series uses excerpts from Allen’s 2020 memoir as a contrast to the allegations.