NEW YORK: Woody Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Previn, broke a long silence to defend the filmmaker against allegations of sexual abuse brought by his daughter, Dylan, speaking out on the running feud between her mother, Mia Farrow, and her husband.
“What’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust,” Previn said in a rare interview with New York Magazine.
Mia “has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t,” she said.
In the article by Daphne Merkin, a longtime friend of Allen’s, Soon-Yi discusses her difficult childhood relations with her adopted mother, portraying her as dismissive and abusive.
“Mia described me as ‘elegant,’” she is quoted as saying. “It was the only positive thing she said about me.”
Now 47 and married for more than 20 years, Soon-Yi was a 21-year-old college freshman in 1991 when she began an affair with Allen.
Farrow, the director’s long-time partner on screen and off, discovered the affair a year later, causing an angry public break that set the rest of the family against Allen and Soon-Yi.
In a television interview in January, Dylan, Allen’s adopted daughter with Farrow, revived accusations that her father molested her in August 1992 when she was seven years old.
In a statement to New York Magazine, Dylan said it was “offensive” of Soon-Yi to assert that she had been pushed to accuse Allen in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
“This only serves to revictimize me,” Dylan said. “Thanks to my mother, I grew up in a wonderful home, filled with love, that she created.”
After the article’s publication, Dylan also tweeted a statement signed by several of Mia Farrow’s biological and adopted children, attesting that their mother has always been “a caring and giving parent.”
“We reject any effort to deflect from Dylan’s allegation by trying to vilify our mom,” it said.
Ronan Farrow, a son of Mia Farrow and Allen who won a Pulitzer prize for investigative articles in the New Yorker that helped propel the #Me Too movement, denounced Merkin’s article as “shameful.”
“I owe everything I am to Mia Farrow,” he tweeted.
“As a brother and a son, I am angry that New York Magazine would participate in this kind of a hit job, written by a longtime friend and admirer of Woody Allen,” he said, adding, “Survivors of abuse deserve better.”
Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi weighs in on Mia Farrow
Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi weighs in on Mia Farrow
- Mia “has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t,” Soon-Yi said
- Now 47 and married for more than 20 years, Soon-Yi was a 21-year-old college freshman in 1991 when she began an affair with Allen
Parrots rescued as landslide-hit Sicilian town saves pets
- Residents queued up at a fire service command point just outside the high-risk, evacuated “red zone” to be accompanied inside to rescue pets
- Some locals feed their animals but leave them where they are, because they have no place to take them
NISCEMI, Italy: Pino Terzo Di Dio was in tears as firefighters carried his beloved parrots out of his home, which has been cordoned off as his town teeters on a cliff edge.
They were the latest pets to be saved by firefighters from hundreds of homes that were evacuated in the Sicilian town of Niscemi after a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) long stretch of hillside collapsed.
“They are scared,” Di Dio told AFP, his voice breaking as the emergency workers carried the parrots — four cockatiels and a parakeet — out of his house in two cages, buffeted by the wind.
The town, built on unstable terrain, was battered by a powerful storm which hit southern Italy last week.
There were no deaths or injuries from Sunday’s landslide, but experts say the gulf could extend when it rains again.
- ‘Lost everything’ -
Residents queued up at a fire service command point just outside the high-risk, evacuated “red zone” to be accompanied inside to rescue pets or gather belongings from important documents to clean underwear.
Some locals feed their animals but leave them where they are, because they have no place to take them.
Di Dio said his bird feeders were full but one of the parrots “tends to knock the water onto the floor,” and feared they may have been without water for days.
The 53-year-old said he had been moving between friends’ houses since the disaster.
“It’s been four days that I’ve barely washed. I smell like a goat, but that’s fine,” he said.
All his attention was on the yellow and grey birds, aged between seven and 13, and where they will go now.
“Let’s hope that someone with a kind heart will take care of them. The important thing is that they treat them well,” he said.
“I don’t have a home, I’ve lost everything.”
- ‘Help us’ -
Firefighter Franco Turco said emergency workers had rescued “quite a few dogs, cats — and now parrots.”
The team was working out how to rescue horses in fields below the baroque town, where deep fissures caused by the landslide were complicating access.
In the meantime, some 24 firefighters have carried out 80 missions to recover belongings in the red zone, which extends 150 meters from the cliff face.
But not even they enter the 50 meters buffer zone before the edge.
Some residents “have cried, have hugged us,” he said.
In the same building as Di Dio’s parrots, a woman who did not want to be named pulled a shopping trolley and black plastic bags full of belongings out of the house and onto the street.
In her arms she carried a ceramic statue of the Madonna, which had once stood at the foot of her stairs.
“May the Madonna help us,” she said.
