Moses Farrow – who was adopted by the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ actress and her ex-husband Woody Allen – has penned a lengthy essay titled ‘A Son Speaks Out’, in which he branded his sister Dylan Farrow’s allegations of molestation against the ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ director false, and made a number of claims against his 73-year-old mother.
He said of the actress: “I’m sure my mother had good intentions in adopting children with disabilities from the direst of circumstances, but the reality inside our walls was very different. It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside.
“She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for a minor transgression.”
He also claimed Mia had spent some time “drilling” her children that her husband was “a monster” and “the devil”.
Moses wrote the essay because he “could no longer stay silent as [Allen] continues to be condemned for a crime he did not commit.”
Dylan previously accused her father of sexually assaulting her at their family home when she was seven, on August 4, 1992, and Moses recalled how, on that day, Mia had warned them all not to let the director “out of our sight”.
He wrote: “As the ‘man of the house’ that day, I had promised to keep an eye out for any trouble, and I was doing just that… Not that everybody stayed glued to the same spot, but I deliberately made sure to note everyone’s coming and going.
“I do remember that Woody would leave the room on occasion, but never with Dylan.”
In an open letter written in 2014, Dylan claimed her father sexually assaulted her in the attic after telling her to lay on her stomach and play with her brother’s electric train set, but Moses insisted that could never have happened.
He wrote: “It’s a precise and compelling narrative, but there’s a major problem: there was no electric train set in that attic. There was, in fact, no way for kids to play up there, even if we had wanted to.
“It was an unfinished crawl space, under a steeply-angled gabled roof, with exposed nails and floorboards, billows of fiberglass insulation, filled with mousetraps and droppings and stinking of mothballs, and crammed with trunks full of hand-me-down clothes and my mother’s old wardrobes.”
He accused the ‘Hannah and her Sisters’ star of orchestrating the claims against the 82-year-old filmmaker and alleged she coached Dylan on what to say. He also claimed Mia fired Dylan’s therapist and pressured the family nanny into quitting after she questioned the allegations.
Later in the essay, Moses insisted his sister Tam took her own life, rather than dying from an accidental overdose in 2000, and discussed the 2016 suicide of his brother Thaddeus, as well as the death of his sister Lark, who “wound up on a path of self-destruction, struggled with addiction, and eventually died in poverty from AIDS-related causes in 2008 at age 35”, laying the blame for all three at his mother.
He wrote: “For all of us, life under my mother’s roof was impossible if you didn’t do exactly what you were told, no matter how questionable the demand. Fighting back was not a viable option.”
Moses – who admitted he has “become estranged” from his mother in recent years – directly addressed Dylan in the essay.
He wrote: “Like you, I believe in the power of speaking out. I have broken my silence about the abuse inflicted by our mother. My healing began only after getting away from her. And what she has done to you is unbearable.”
He also suggested his mother will “launch a campaign to discredit” his essay, but insisted that doesn’t worry him.
After the publication of the essay, Dylan made a statement branding her brother “a troubled person”.
She wrote: “As I said when he last made these claims, this is an attempt to deflect from a credible allegation made by an adult woman, by trying to impugn my mother who has only ever been supportive of me and my siblings.
“It’s easily disproven, contradicts years of his own statements, is beyond hurtful to me personally, and is part of a larger effort to discredit and distract from my assault. My brother is a troubled person. I’m so sorry he’s doing this.”
Moses made similar accusations in 2017, which Mia denied at the time.
She said: “Moses has cut off his entire family including his ex-wife who was pregnant when he left. It’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up, perhaps to please Woody. We all miss and love him very much.”
