Filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering have dedicated their careers to, as they put it, taking on “very powerful institutions in an aggressive, truth-to-power, no-stone-unturned way.” In recent years, the documentarians have exposed the sexual assault epidemic in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), the scourge of sexual assault on college campuses (The Hunting Ground), and the numerous allegations of sexual assault levied against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons in last year’s On the Record. But nothing could have prepared them for the story of Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow—a decades-long saga involving incest, child sexual abuse, misogyny, media and Hollywood complicity, and government corruption.
“It never really was told,” explains Dick. “We thought it was told, but we’d only heard one version told over and over and over again, and that version never really told the truth.”
And that version was Woody Allen’s, who has long claimed that his then-partner Mia Farrow coached their adopted 7-year-old daughter Dylan into lying about him molesting her in the attic of their Connecticut country home on Aug. 4, 1992, because she was incensed after catching him in a sexual relationship with her other adopted daughter that they’d raised together from a young age, Soon-Yi. As Dick and Ziering’s four-part HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow persuasively argues, the facts appear to overwhelmingly support Dylan and Mia Farrow’s version of what happened—that on Aug. 4, 1992, Allen sexually assaulted Dylan in the attic, and that it was the culmination of years of disturbing behavior Allen had shown toward Dylan, and which Allen had seen a clinical psychologist about in 1990, two years prior to the alleged incident.
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