Woody Allen fired back against allegations that he sexually abused his adopted daughter decades ago in an interview released Sunday — while also saying he doesn’t think she intentionally lied about it.
In the CBS Sunday Morning interview taped last year, the Oscar-winning director responded to the accusation that he molested his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, in the attic of his ex-wife’s Connecticut mansion in 1992.
“It’s so preposterous and yet the smear has remained,” Allen, 85, told reporter Lee Cowan in footage now airing on Paramount Plus. “There’s no logic to it. On the face of it I didn’t think it required any investigation.”
“And they still prefer to cling to if not the notion that I molested Dylan then the possibility that I molested Dylan…Nothing that I ever did could be misconstrued as that,” he said.
Asked about the details of the case — including that Dylan Farrow told a doctor that he touched her in the attic of his ex-wife Mia Farrow’s Connecticut mansion — Allen said he didn’t believe the girl was intentionally lying about the incident.
“I do not believe she’s making it up, I don’t think she’s lying. I believe she believes it,” he said, adding she was a “good kid.”
In 2018, Dyan Farrow told CBS This Morning’s Gayle King that she told her mom, Mia Farrow, as a child that Allen had molested her. Police were called at the time, she said.
Allen, who has directed classic films such as “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” was not ever charged with a crime for the alleged sexual abuse.
He now says he wants to “reach out to talk” to Dylan, who is 35.
The CBS Sunday Morning segment was shot in July 2020 but had not yet aired before Sunday.