Introducing Soon-Yi Previn

Equally controversies tumbled around her, the daughter of Mia Farrow and wife of Woody Allen stayed silent for decades. No more.

Soon-Yi Previn. Photo: Dan Winters

Soon-Yi Previn. Photograph: Dan Winters

Soon-Yi Previn. Photo: Dan Winters

Once, she was seen as a victim, her youth and relative innocence taken advantage of by a powerful, much older man who sucked her into his vortex. Or, alternately, she was a Lolita, a seductress who wittingly betrayed the Female parent Teresa–similar effigy who'd saved her from life in an orphanage. These days, Soon-Yi Previn is seen as an accomplice of sorts, who, in the wake of renewed accusations by Dylan Farrow that Dylan'southward adoptive father, Woody Allen, sexually molested her, has stood past Allen even as his reputation has plummeted and his one time-revered films have been reassessed in the calorie-free of the #MeToo movement. Throughout this time, Soon-Yi herself, the slim Korean-born woman with a curtain of dark hair who showed up occasionally at Allen's side in grainy news images, has said virtually nil, her sphinxlike presence adding to the mystery of what actually took identify. He did what? She's how quondam? And whose daughter?

There is a way in which Before long-Yi's very opaqueness enabled people to project their own fantasies onto her as if onto a blank screen. And, as it turned out, the series of events that came upon the heels of the couple'southward controversial romance quickly took on the aspect of a cosmic lather opera, in which gossip mutated into mythology and mere hunches about someone'due south guilt or innocence calcified into die-hard convictions.

More than a quarter-century after the public learned of the affair that "broke every taboo," in the words of child psychiatrist Paulina Kernberg, the 47-year-old Presently-Yi is ending her silence. She's long believed that her relationship with Allen fueled the inquiry into the allegations surrounding Dylan, but simply recently has she felt compelled to tell her own side of things, to talk nearly what collection her away from her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow — and toward the human who'south now been her husband for twenty years. "I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that," Soon-Yi tells me quietly but firmly. "Simply what's happened to Woody is so upsetting, and so unjust. [Mia] has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan every bit a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about information technology when they shouldn't."

Non for the starting time time volition it occur to me how different Soon-Yi is from the person whom Farrow more than than two decades ago described as tedious, fifty-fifty dim — and who was dismissed as Allen's brainwashed mouthpiece when she did speak up, in August 1992, in a argument to Newsweek: "I'm not a retarded little underage bloom who was raped, molested, and spoiled by some evil stepfather — not by a long shot." Over a series of conversations that began in May and continued intermittently through June and July, Soon-Yi, a voracious reader with a slightly quirky sense of humor, is articulate and self-aware. "Woody says I can make jokes but I don't get them — I'm always looking deeper for the meanings," she says.

Nosotros talk mostly in the couple'south six-story townhouse on 1 of the Upper Eastward Side'southward prettiest blocks, the aforementioned block where Allen shot scenes for Annie Hall 42 years ago. "I am a pariah," he says i day when he joins us for lunch, wearing his usual outfit of a low-cal-bluish push button-downward and rumpled khakis. "People think that I was Soon-Yi's father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter." (As if to underscore his point, he mentions that his and Before long-Yi's contribution to Hillary Clinton'due south last campaign was unceremoniously returned.) Allen, an assiduously healthy eater also equally an unremitting hypochondriac, pokes at his food, while Soon-Yi is ever the attentive hostess, refilling my water drinking glass every bit soon as it'south empty and offering me seconds of lasagna and salad before I've finished the terminal bite of my meal.

After lunch, we go up a flight of stairs to the living room. It has floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on a garden and features drawings by Oskar Kokoschka and John Sloan in addition to a collection of Americana: an assortment of pewter jugs (a favorite of Allen'due south only not of Soon-Yi's), a cradle with quilts, a green leather spa chair from a sanitarium, and a bellows on the wall. Every bit I expect effectually, checking out the very personal bric-a-brac, Soon-Yi declares, "If we get divorced, I get to take the teddy-comport doorstop."

I myself have been friends with Allen for over four decades and take always been somewhat mystified by him, in function because of the almost Aspergian aloneness of the homo and in part because of the genuine diffidence — the lack of a discernible ego — that lies merely beneath both a lifetime's worth of ambitious productivity and his nebbishy film persona. His unwillingness, or peradventure inability, to competition his ongoing vilification — or, when he does take it on, to fan the flames ("I should exist the affiche male child for the #MeToo movement," he recently told Argentine TV. "I've worked with hundreds of actresses, and non a single ane — big ones, famous ones, ones starting out — have always, ever suggested any kind of venial at all") — also contributed to Shortly-Yi's decision to talk publicly.

Farrow's point of view has been well aired, particularly in two lengthy articles by Maureen Orth in Vanity Fair: her oddly bundled relationship with Allen, in which the two kept divide abodes; her loving and committed attitude to her adopted children (who would eventually total ten in number); and Allen's purportedly consuming and, finally, sexually predatory interest in Dylan, who contended equally recently equally January on CBS This Morning that, one afternoon in August 1992, her father touched what she as a 7-year-old called her "individual role." In a statement for this story, Dylan chosen Presently-Yi'due south assertion that she was pushed by her mother to speak out "offensive." "This only serves to revictimize me," Dylan said. "Thanks to my mother, I grew up in a wonderful domicile."

With regard to almost every aspect of life in the Farrow household, Before long-Yi's story, like those of her younger brother Moses and Allen himself, is strikingly different from what'southward put forth by Mia and Dylan every bit well every bit their son and brother Ronan Farrow, the journalist who has written a series of high-profile #MeToo stories over the by year. I tin can't pretend to know what really occurred, of class, and neither can anyone other than Allen and Dylan. Even the approximate who somewhen denied Allen custody of Dylan opined that "nosotros will probably never know what happened on Baronial 4, 1992." All of life is filled with competing narratives, and the burden of interpretation is ultimately on the listener and his or her subjectively arrived-at sense of the truth.

In whatever event, it'southward Mia et al.'south account of events that has so far carried the day. Actors such as Greta Gerwig, Colin Firth, and Mira Sorvino have recently apologized for accepting roles in Allen's films, while many of his most avid fans take turned against him, everyone from New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott to my media-alert periodontist, who told me on my last visit that he'd never watch another Woody Allen movie.

1980: Mia Farrow with son Moses, age 2, and Presently-Yi, historic period 9, in Fundamental Park. Photo: Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

By Soon-Yi's own account, despite a certain regalness of bearing ("Mia described me equally 'elegant,'  " she says at one bespeak. "Information technology was the merely positive thing she said virtually me") and the upscale life she now lives, complete with a chef and a driver, things oasis't been easy. "I didn't have the luxury of messing up," Before long-Yi says in her youthful voice with its faint, nearly imperceptible trace of a Korean accent. "I fought for my survival since infancy."

She first comes into view in about 1975 as a 5-year-old runaway on the streets of Seoul. (In that location are no extant records of Shortly-Yi'due south early life, just a document signed by both Mia and André Previn, her adoptive father, who declined to comment for this story, has her date of nascence equally October 8, 1970.) "I call back being extremely poor," Soon-Yi tells me in our get-go sit down-down interview in her book-lined living room. "You know, no piece of furniture, nil. Just a bare room and a female parent, and we had a backyard, kind of with concrete. No trees, no leafage. I spent most of my time in the backyard, I don't know why. And then I decided 1 day to run abroad. That this couldn't be for life, that there must exist something amend out there. I don't know how I came to that realization, just it was miraculous." I wonder whether Soon-Yi actually remembers having these thoughts or whether they're in part an adult reconstruction, if simply because they seem too sophisticated for a five-year-old. Just when I press her on information technology later, she insists that this is how she felt. "Yous know," she says, "I was e'er mature for my historic period. I think from being on the streets and stuff."

When Soon-Yi was a girl, she says, Farrow asked her to make a tape about her origins, detailing how she'd been the girl of a prostitute who vanquish her. The asking puzzled her, Presently-Yi says, since she had no retention of anything similar that, then she refused. (Presently-Yi says she'd beloved to find her biological mother, just she assumes she's expressionless; a 23andMe kit she tried didn't turn up any promising matches.) "I had nowhere to go," she says of that menstruation in Seoul, "so I was running effectually the streets, going through the garbage looking for nutrient. And I ate a bar of soap. The lather was the worst-tasting — I could think of it now, it was just disgusting. And then I was looking outside a bakery, you know, because I was starving, and this woman asked if I wanted something to eat. She bought me something, and she was trying to get information from me about where I lived. I wouldn't answer, so she brought me to the police station then the constabulary sent me to an orphanage. I liked it there, and then some people came — and I retrieve hiding under a tabular array — to take me away to a different orphanage."

Soon-Yi'due south tone is affair-of-fact, every bit though information technology'south of import to her to get the details right without sounding cocky-glorifying or -pitying. "She was stiff since she was 5 years old; it must exist genetic in some way," Allen chimes in during one of his appearances (which often prompt Soon-Yi to protest, "You're interrupting me"). And, indeed, I sense early on in our conversations that she has a certain resilience, verging on toughness. She seems determined to look dorsum with dispassion — except, that is, when her adoptive mother enters the picture. It was at the 2d orphanage — run past nuns who Soon-Yi says were "extremely nice" to her despite her beingness "a lilliputian rebellious," going so far one mean solar day every bit to pull off ane of the nuns' habits to satisfy her called-for curiosity every bit to whether at that place was hair underneath — that their paths converged. Kim Wan, whom Presently-Yi met in the orphanage and who was adopted by an American couple at the aforementioned time, has stayed in touch with Soon-Yi over the years. She agrees that the nuns were kind merely the house mothers less so. "If one daughter wet her bed," she tells me, "we all got whipped."

Farrow's emissary, a woman named Connie Boll, who worked for a Connecticut arrangement called the Friends of Children, picked out Soon-Yi from among the children who had been presented 1 by one onstage at the orphanage to an audition of prospective parents. (When Soon-Yi asked Boll many years later why she had called her, Boll said she had been taken by Soon-Yi's "chutzpah." She'd twirled around and leaped off the phase while the other children simply bowed and walked off.) Farrow was married to Previn, with whom she had iii children, and had already adopted 2 Vietnamese infants, Lark and Daisy, in 1973 and 1974. (To adopt Soon-Yi, Farrow challenged federal law, which at the time immune just two international adoptions per family.) She sent dolls and other gifts to the orphanage and and then arrived i day in May 1977, photographic camera in mitt, to pick upwards the now-6-twelvemonth-sometime girl. "I remember the 2nd I laid eyes on her," Soon-Yi says. "At that place was a big excitement and hoopla around her. And she came to me and she threw her arms around me to give me a big hug. I'm standing in that location rigidly, thinking, Who is this woman, and can she get her hands off of me? She didn't ring true or sincere."

From and then on, things got worse, in Soon-Yi's telling, though a family spokesperson refuted all her memories of physical abuse, neglect, or showing favoritism to one child over another. And the custody judge afterward ruled that Farrow was a "caring and loving parent," while five of her children with Previn — forth with Isaiah, Quincy, and Ronan Farrow — said the same in a statement: "None of united states of america ever witnessed anything other than compassionate treatment in our home."

Soon-Yi says that from the very beginning, she and Farrow were "like oil and water," suggesting that perhaps it was because past the time she was adopted she was as well old to exist shaped to Farrow'southward specifications. "Mia wasn't maternal to me from the first," she says with some vehemence. Shortly-Yi remembers, for instance, the first bath that Farrow gave her, in a Korean hotel room, as traumatic. "I'd never taken a bathroom by myself, because in the orphanage information technology was a big tub and we all got in it. Here, it was for a unmarried person, and I was scared to go far the water by myself. And so instead of doing what you would do with an infant — you know, maybe get into the h2o, put some toys in, put your arm in to evidence that you're fine, it'south not dangerous — she but kind of threw me in."

Soon-Yi's outset home with Farrow was in Surrey, England, in what she describes as "a beautiful, picturesque house with a thatched roof," surrounded by "daffodils every bit far as the centre could see." Theirs was a blended family avant la lettre: André Previn, who adopted Soon-Yi; Daisy and Distraction; Farrow; and the couple's three biological children, the twins Matthew and Sascha, followed by Fletcher. The household included a virtual menagerie featuring a talking parrot, dogs and cats, newts, and a ferret. Despite the pastoral tranquility, Soon-Yi says, she felt achingly unhappy, a state of affairs that was not helped by Mia's and André's "bone-chilling tempers" or by Mia's playing favorites. "There was a bureaucracy — she didn't endeavour to hide it, and Fletcher was the star, the golden child," she says. "Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blond pilus and blue eyes." Soon-Yi had arrived without knowing a word of English, and Mia was impatient with her new daughter's learning curve. "She tried to teach me the alphabet with those wooden blocks. If I didn't get them right, sometimes she'd throw them at me or down on the floor. Who tin learn nether that pressure level?" Shortly-Yi, whom Farrow briefly renamed Gigi (perhaps considering Previn had composed the music for the picture show of the aforementioned name), says she was left wondering if she would fit in better elsewhere. "I'd run into other houses far away in the distance," she says wistfully, "and recall, Oh, maybe they would like a nice Korean girl. Y'all know, a nice little daughter."

1986: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow with their children, from left, Fletcher, Dylan (in Farrow'southward arms), Moses, and Presently-Yi, in New York. Photo: Ann Clifford/DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In 1979, Farrow and Previn divorced, and Farrow moved back to the States with most of her brood (the 9-year-old twins stayed behind with their father). The family first lived on Martha's Vineyard, where Soon-Yi remembers an incident in which she was excluded from playing in a paddling pool with the younger children. She "maneuvered" her fashion in, Soon-Yi says, and when Lark got hurt, "mayhap slipped or something," Farrow rounded on her, yelling, "Look what you've done! You lot never heed! I should send you to an insane asylum!" As Soon-Yi puts it, "I was shaking. I was so scared I thought she was really going to put me in an insane asylum — and I understood what it meant."

In New York, Farrow got a starring role in a play, and the family moved to her mother'south (the actress Maureen O'Sullivan) roomy apartment on Central Park West (Hannah and Her Sisters was filmed there), where Before long-Yi shared a room with Distraction and Daisy. After having been sporadically tutored for nearly a year, mostly by nannies who read to her while Farrow filmed Hurricane in Bora-Bora, she attended a makeshift school "in the basement of a church, backside the Natural History museum, where all we did was swallow Ritz crackers and play with blocks." Soon-Yi was then placed in tertiary grade at the Ethical Civilization Fieldston School, where she was two years older than her classmates. Although this seems to me like one of the few instances Shortly-Yi provides of Farrow'south giving thought to how things might have felt to her daughter, Presently-Yi insists she did it only because of her conviction that Shortly-Yi was "hopelessly astern."

"I do have a niggling learning disability," Soon-Yi says almost bashfully. "I've never spoken about it, because Mia drummed information technology into me to be ashamed about it. Information technology comes out in spelling, and I had to piece of work much harder in school. But I was driven and interested, and I wish I'd had a tutor the way some kids practice for homework." Her learning difficulties — to this twenty-four hours, she admits to having trouble with homonyms, in particular, and spelling ("Thank God for the iPhone! I dictate everything!") — continued to crusade strife with her mother. "Mia used to write words on my arm, which was humiliating, so I'd always wear long-sleeved shirts. She would likewise tip me upside down, holding me past my feet, to get the blood to drain to my head. Considering she thought — or she read it, God knows where she came upwards with the notion — that blood going to my caput would brand me smarter or something." Farrow also resorted, as Soon-Yi describes information technology, to "arbitrarily showing her power": slapping Before long-Yi across the face and spanking her with a hairbrush or calling her "stupid" and "moronic." Sometimes, according to Presently-Yi, Farrow lost it completely, every bit when she threw a porcelain rabbit that her female parent had given her at Presently-Yi ("She never really liked it," Soon-Yi wryly observes. "That's probably why she threw it at me"), smashing it to pieces and startling both of them. "I could see from the expression on her face that she felt she had gone too far. Because it could take really injure me."

Twoscore-year-quondam Moses Farrow, who was ii when he was adopted, in 1980, describes Mia'south mothering similarly, as a "total breakup of your spirit, to ensure that you would do what she wanted y'all to do. It's the honeymoon when you're first adopted, then the veil gets pulled dorsum and you start seeing Mia for who she is."

During our many talks, I enquire Soon-Yi several times if she has any positive recollections from her years with Farrow. She unfailingly answers that she doesn't. "Information technology'southward hard for someone to imagine, but I really tin't come up with a pleasant retentiveness." Despite that, I'one thousand unsure whether Before long-Yi has always seen her female parent in such stark terms or whether this is a portrait that has been shadowed over fourth dimension, its darkness inevitably added to by the sharp and almost surreal fashion in which their relationship would come to an end after Farrow discovered some nude Polaroids Allen had taken of Presently-Yi after their affair had begun. Soon-Yi says that she "regrets" that her mother institute the pictures — "I recall it would have been horrible for her" — merely notes that they were taken in the privacy of Allen's abode, for themselves. "You know, nosotros were both consenting adults," she says (she was 21 at the time), before conceding that in that location "could be something very Freudian" near the fact that Allen left a few of them on his mantel.

1992: Allen and the 21-twelvemonth-erstwhile Previn. Photograph: The LIFE Moving picture Collection/Getty Images

Allen offset entered the scene, every bit Farrow'due south boyfriend, when Presently-Yi was 10, and she hated him on sight: "Woody wasn't interested in coming together u.s. children. And the feeling was common; we weren't interested in meeting him. I hated him because he was with my mother, and I didn't empathize why anyone could be with such a nasty, mean person. I idea he must be the same mode." To make matters worse, one twenty-four hours Shortly-Yi overheard Allen tell Farrow that he thought Before long-Yi was "inordinately shy and that I should see a compress. And I'm thinking the most famous neurotic is saying this — and this is how he makes his living, being shy! I hated him before, but I hated him double for maxim this." Her enmity wasn't lost on Allen. "You always await at me every bit if you're going to come at me from behind a cupboard with a knife," he once told her. Soon-Yi laughs equally she recounts this. "He most won me over with that comment because he was so spot-on."

Knowing Allen over the years, as I have, I've come to understand that, despite his artistic gifts and endless years of psychoanalysis, at that place is something oblivious nearly him. He is the opposite of someone "in touch" with his innermost feelings. When I press him i 24-hour interval on what drew him to Farrow, he answers as though reading off a CV: "She was very beautiful. She was smart. She put her best foot forward. She was in the same business as me. What was not to like?" Presently-Yi, who seems far less detached than her husband, adds, "Anything she fix her mind to she was good at … Anything that she shows an interest in she excels at. She'southward an amazing photographer and draws and knits well. She was very, very creative. Information technology's a shame," she says, as if talking to herself. "There are things to admire most her."

In this instance, Farrow's laserlike interest was beamed at Allen (she'd written him, he tells me, a dear letter years before), to whom she proposed spousal relationship several weeks into their relationship and then two weeks afterward told him she wanted to take his child. When Allen recounts this chain of events, Before long-Yi grills him: "And that wasn't a turnoff? Y'all didn't run the other way, run for the hills? This is why I wrote him off equally a major loser," she jokes. When Allen tries to explicate himself, she turns to me as if he weren't in the room: "He's a poor, pathetic thing. He's so naïve and trusting, he was probably putty in her hands. 1 thinks that he's then brilliant … and however on certain things he'due south and then shockingly naïve information technology makes your head spin and you think he'south putting it on. Mia was waaay over his head," she says, and bursts out laughing — not quite at Allen simply at the idea of his susceptibility to Farrow's charms.

Meanwhile, life in the Farrow household — Allen connected to live across the park at his Fifth Avenue address and never slept over at Farrow's Fundamental Park West apartment ("We didn't call up of him as a male parent," Soon-Yi says, "and he didn't even accept wearable at our house, not even a toothbrush") — went on in its harum-scarum mode. "Money was always an issue," Soon-Yi says. "When nosotros moved to Cardinal Park West, nosotros had a big, staticky Telly with antennas, and it was my chore to ask André for a new ane when he called." Farrow originally hired a bodyguard when she stayed over at Allen'south apartment but eventually started leaving the children — Soon-Yi, Distraction, Daisy, Fletcher, and Moses (the concluding four were younger than Soon-Yi) — alone at night, beginning when Shortly-Yi was 12. "Nosotros were non allowed to tell André when she did that," she says pointedly.

Before long-Yi also says she and her adopted sisters were used as "domestics," while Farrow kept busy rearranging the furniture, ordering from catalogues, working on her scrapbooks, and talking to her friends on the phone. "We did the grocery shopping, starting in third grade, for the entire family unit," Soon-Yi says. "Lark and I wrote the list of everything that nosotros needed for the firm, we paid for it, we unpacked it. When I went to Ethical Culture, I had to pick upward my siblings … In Connecticut, Lark cooked, and nosotros cleaned the bathrooms, cleared the dishes, washed upward, and did the sweeping. When Woody started coming up to Connecticut, I ironed Mia's sheets."

When Soon-Yi reached puberty, she was pretty much left to her own devices. "I wish she had taught me how to put on makeup," she says. "I don't know how to do whatsoever of that stuff. Mia never taught me how to employ a tampon, and my babysitter got me my commencement bra." Her all-time friend from fifth grade on, Alexis Clarbour, noticed how cocky-sufficient Shortly-Yi was: "She had to take care of everything herself, including the younger children, from a very young age. She didn't have the guidance about children take from their parents. My mother was much more than maternal to Shortly-Yi than Mia. She was the one, for instance, to accept Presently-Yi for college tours."

Moses's story of his childhood also paints Mia equally seemingly lackadaisical virtually the ordinary, drudgelike chores of mothering and harsh with some of the adopted children. "It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some bullheaded or physically disabled, dragged down a flying of stairs to exist thrown into a bedroom or a cupboard, then having the door locked from the exterior," Moses, at present a family therapist, recounts in a lengthy blog mail service he published in May. "She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as penalization for a pocket-sized transgression." (Mia denied all her son's claims to the Times.) In 2016, Thaddeus died from a cocky-inflicted gunshot wound, and a decade and a half before that, Tam, the blind orphan from Vietnam, died at xix of heart failure, according to Mia and published reports at the time. But based on what he says Thaddeus told him, Moses insists that Tam'southward death was a suicide caused past an overdose of pills. Lark too died in tragic circumstances. Living in poverty, she was 35 when she died, in 2008, from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Before long-Yi's kickoff friendly encounter with Allen occurred when she broke her talocrural joint playing soccer in 11th grade. Equally she tells information technology, the pain "radiated upward and down my unabridged trunk," but she "limped back to Marymount," the Catholic girls' schoolhouse she'd transferred to in fifth course from Ethical Culture. She didn't telephone call Farrow, considering "information technology was non in my vocabulary to phone call her for assistance ever," just when she got home, Allen took one wait at her bloated ankle and suggested she see a medico.

When she came home from the doctor's, in a cast and on crutches, Allen offered to take her to school. Past that time, he was coming over to Farrow'southward apartment at five:thirty in the morning time to see Dylan (whom Farrow had adopted in 1985) and Satchel (who was born in 1987 and who started going by his middle name Ronan later on Mia and Woody split), and Before long-Yi began to soften toward him: "Yous know, he didn't have to offer. I'd never been nice to him really."

Information technology was later this incident that Allen and Soon-Yi started going to Knicks games together — it was, ironically enough, Farrow's idea, because Allen expressed concern over Soon-Yi'southward seeming introversion, and Farrow knew he was always looking for someone to go to basketball game games with. Presently-Yi gradually began to open up up to Allen, particularly because she sensed that things had soured between him and her mother. "They never went out to dinner anymore or did anything together, and so I knew the relationship was merely because of the kids." While Farrow has repeatedly said the 2 were still a couple at the fourth dimension, Allen echoes Soon-Yi'southward belief that his connection with Farrow was shot: "When Satchel was born, Mia got a breast pump and locked herself in the sleeping room with him. She told me that there were native tribes in Africa or South America who breastfed their kids until 7 or 8 years sometime and that she had every intention of doing that with Satchel. When I'd go over in that location to have dinner with the kids, she would take Satchel into her bedroom and shut the door … She was obsessed with him, completely obsessed." Soon-Yi adds, "She was never able to beloved more than one person at a fourth dimension, I guess, so all her focus when Satchel came went to him. I retrieve she would be in the room with the door closed, nursing Satchel or sleeping with him, and Dylan would be outside the door, crying."

Farrow has said many times that this is the opposite of what happened, that information technology was Allen who was obsessed with Dylan; to the extent that Farrow was in her chamber, the family spokesperson says, it was the result of recovering from a difficult delivery.

I take this opportunity to inquire almost the rumors, not discouraged by Mia, that Ronan is Frank Sinatra'due south son. (She married Sinatra at age 21 — he was 29 years her senior — and they divorced after ii years.) "In my opinion, he'due south my child," Allen answers in his slightly doleful mode. "I think he is, only I wouldn't bet my life on information technology. I paid for child support for him for his whole babyhood, and I don't think that'south very fair if he'due south not mine. Likewise she represented herself as a faithful person, and she certainly wasn't. Whether she really became meaning in an affair she had … "

2018: Previn and Allen at home on the Upper East Side. Photo: Dan Winters

In 1991, Presently-Yi graduated from Marymount. She still has a copy of her yearbook, in which Farrow wrote, "A mom couldn't dream of a better girl. You are a miracle and my pride and joy. I am profoundly grateful for every minute along the way. Congratulations, bravo, and three thank you for our Presently-Yi." Soon-Yi looks on impassively as I study the inscription, and when I enquire her how she feels nigh it, she replies that she's "grateful" to Farrow: "I mean, I'd be a completely terrible person if I didn't feel grateful to her, right?"

On another occasion, Presently-Yi shows me two photo albums that Farrow dropped off later on Soon-Yi'due south matter with Allen had come to light and she was no longer living at home. The photos evidence the budding orphan in diverse sweet frocks, looking incomparably cute, and are accompanied by Farrow'southward handwritten text: "You accept improved me, Soon-Yi, and information technology is a joy." The discrepancy between Farrow's chronicle of events and Before long-Yi's is hard to make sense of. Could things actually take looked so good but in authenticity have been so bad? Is information technology possible the truth lies somewhere in between? Simply when I advise to Soon-Yi that perhaps it was a generous gesture of Farrow's to make the albums in the showtime place and drib them off in the second, she comes right dorsum at me in an email written early one Friday morning in May: "It's because Mia thought that maybe she could win me over and I would look through the albums and experience guilty and run dorsum to her … I'm sure information technology was a calculated motility … Mia was never invested in me. I wish she had been. Still, I'm a very realistic person, and I know this to be correct. The albums were something that she liked to do for her own pleasure. She made them for all the kids. Mia was trying to create a fairy-tale version of reality. I wish she hadn't fabricated the albums and spent some quality fourth dimension with me."

After working over the summer every bit a salesgirl at Bergdorf Goodman, Soon-Yi began her freshman twelvemonth as a driver student at Drew University in Madison, New Bailiwick of jersey, in September 1991; she somewhen majored in art. It was sometime during that fall that her affair with Allen began. Both of them are vague on how and when their friendship turned sexual — "It was 25 years ago," she says — beyond the fact that it was a gradual process. "I think Woody went after me because at that first basketball game game I turned out to be more interesting and amusing than he idea I'd be," Soon-Yi offers. "Mia was always pounding into him what a loser I was." At i bespeak, Soon-Yi sends me an email addressing the inception of their affair: "Nosotros talked quite a fleck," she writes, "and to the best of my retentivity I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman picture, which I believe was The 7th Seal, but I'grand not positive. We chatted about information technology, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I retrieve that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other." In other words, the first stirrings of what would become an enduring romance sounds like a scene straight out of a Woody Allen movie.

Early on, Soon-Yi says, she and Allen had a conversation most how their human relationship might affect Farrow and the family unit if it were discovered — they had planned to go along it secret. Simply neither imagined that what Allen called their "fling" would terminal. "I'd run across someone in college, and that would exist done," Shortly-Yi says. "It only became a relationship actually when we were thrown together considering of the molestation charge." Absent that, she believes, Allen "might just have connected with Farrow for the sake of the kids." Unlike her hubby, still, who famously decreed, borrowing a line from what he tells me is a short story of Saul Bellow's (information technology's actually a line from a letter by Emily Dickinson), that "the centre wants what it wants," Soon-Yi characterizes their affair equally "a moral dilemma." While she says it was clear that things were over between Woody and Mia, information technology was still "a huge betrayal on both our parts, a terrible affair to do, a terrible shock to inflict on her."

"I know this is no justification," she goes on, sitting across from me, her back ramrod straight. ("Posture," she says quietly to Allen whenever he begins to slump. "I married her for her posture," he quips.) "But Mia was never kind to me, never civil. And hither was a hazard for someone showing me affection and being overnice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I'd be a moron and an idiot, retarded" — she pauses here, mindful that this is one of her mother's words for her — "if I'd stayed with Mia." She adds, as if to set the tape directly, "I wasn't the one who went after Woody — where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That'southward why the human relationship has worked: I felt valued. Information technology's quite flattering for me. He'south normally a meek person, and he took a big leap."

All the same, the brazenness of what Presently-Yi and Woody did — the transgressiveness — is at the to the lowest degree disconcerting. It's not surprising that the public at large viewed it as a virtual case of incest, especially since Allen's office in Farrow's family was never clear to begin with. Was he an interloper or an in loco parentis figure? Soon-Yi is adamant that Allen was not a stand-in father to her: "I already had a father," she points out. "He was André Previn, and Mia never married Woody, nor did they ever live together. He was my mother'southward young man, plain and simple. He was like a separate entity. I thought Mia had pulled the wool over his eyes by getting him to believe that she was such a great mother. I felt he was not very observant, non worth getting to know. This is why it's the biggest shock to me that we ended upward together."

Or was she perchance, as some would have it, a kind of eroticized girl for Allen? Certainly Farrow established the grounds for that interpretation by first using the word rape for what went on betwixt Allen and Presently-Yi. That thought was heightened by the Dylan allegations, which fix up a scenario in which Allen could exist seen as harboring pedophilic inclinations.

I can't help but wonder, I tell the couple, whether they got together to take revenge on Farrow, consciously or subconsciously. Allen says the notion doesn't fit for him, while Soon-Yi dismisses it equally "preposterous." "Would I be with him for over 20 years to get vengeance at Mia?"

Spending time with the ii of them, I notice that Allen volition have Presently-Yi's hand and hold it during dinner and that he occasionally ruffles her hair when standing behind her, while she is sweetly solicitous of him when they walk together into a restaurant and he is unsure of his steps. But neither seems big on sweeping expressions of passion. "Nosotros weren't thinking, My God, let'due south get married," Allen says. "Our relationship deepened as nosotros went through the barrage of terrible accusations, and the paparazzi forced the states to take walks simply on my penthouse roof."

Soon-Yi, depending upon the moment, sees it both ways at one time — as a slowly evolving attraction and as a thunderbolt, a insurrection de foudre. "I was madly in dear with him," she announces. Information technology sounds completely heartfelt and as though it merely happened yesterday. "Completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he'd said that I'd meet someone in college, simply I'd already decided. I came to realize how understanding he was and what a sweet person he was. He grew on me." In an email she sends me, she slightly revises the scenario, showing a different side of herself, 1 in which she comes across less equally the vulnerable, virginal girl she was than equally a charming flirt: "I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he start kissed me and I said, 'I wondered how long it was going to have y'all to make a move.' From the start kiss I was a goner and loved him."

West hile waiting for Satchel to finish a psychotherapy appointment at Woody's apartment in January 1992, Mia discovered some of the nude photos he'd taken of Soon-Yi. All hell broke loose. "I remember the phone call when she found the photos," Soon-Yi says. "I picked up the phone and Mia said, 'Soon-Yi.' That's all she needed to say, in that chilling tone of vocalism. I knew my life was over and that she knew, just by the manner she said my name. When she came home, she asked me about it, and I — survival instinct — denied it. And then she said, 'I take photos.' So I knew I was trapped. Of course, she slapped me, y'all know the way of things. And so she called everyone. She didn't incorporate the situation; she just spread it like wildfire, then she was screaming at Woody when he came over. Meanwhile, Dylan and Satchel are living under her roof and they are very modest, 6 and iv years old. They hear their female parent going crazy, screaming in the center of the night for hours."

On January 18, as Farrow recounts in her memoir, What Falls Away , she wrote a group alphabetic character to her children, which began, "An atrocity has been committed against our family unit and it is incommunicable to brand sense of it. Yous know that I share your pain and cliffhanger and anger. But I feel the need to talk and think further with yous." Shortly thereafter, Shortly-Yi says, Farrow threw her out of the Cardinal Park West apartment, and she went to stay at a friend'south house, all the while maintaining contact with Farrow. "I wanted to get back into the house because being out of the house I had no idea what was going on. So she let me come back, and I could hear her talking to Allen on the phone, maxim, 'She regrets everything, she's threatening to commit suicide,' which was a lie." Allen joins in: "I'd become these calls in the heart of the night, saying, 'Soon-Yi is threatening to jump out of the window.' And you know, Mia is an incredibly good actress, and I'1000 thinking, My God!" (The family unit spokesperson maintains that Soon-Yi did talk about suicide and that Mia did "her utmost to shield her children from a trauma" caused by the revelation of the affair.)

At some point, a psychiatrist who lived across the hall from Farrow suggested it might be helpful for Soon-Yi to see a shrink and recommended a psychoanalyst at Columbia. Soon-Yi says she felt she "had to be careful, considering I wasn't certain if Mia had poisoned him. He told Woody that he had to put coin away for me for college because they were threatening to cut me off financially." (Soon-Yi had seen André Previn before long after the photos were discovered, and he told her he would no longer pay for her didactics.)

In what sounds like a scene straight from Rosemary'southward Baby — the one where a very pregnant Rosemary (played by Farrow), finally aware that she's caught upward in a dangerous plot, darts across the city looking for a phone booth — Soon-Yi recalls that "in that location was some talk that Mia hired someone to follow me. I was constantly nervous. But on 81st and Cardinal Park West I saw a pay phone. I called Woody and said, 'Don't worry, I'k not suicidal. I don't regret anything, and any you need to practice I understand.' Those were my verbal words. I knew he had a lot to handle and the last thing he needed to exercise was worry almost me." Listening to her, I tin't imagine myself remotely possessing such self-possession at that age.

On Valentine'southward 24-hour interval 1992, Farrow sent Allen an elaborately gothic collage, in which she'd pasted a family photo on a flower-encrusted, gilded heart and then stuck skewers through the hearts of the images of the children and a real knife through her own center. Around the aforementioned time, Allen's sister, Letty Aronson, tells me, Farrow called and appear, " 'He took my daughter, I'one thousand going to take his.' I said, 'Don't be ridiculous. [Dylan] loves Woody. A kid should accept a begetter.' She said, 'I don't care.' " All this Sturm und Drang took place, paradoxically, aslope a rather quotidian reality, in which Farrow and Allen connected to see each other, still turbulently, and she continued to act in his latest picture show, Husbands and Wives. "We did not know what was going to happen," Soon-Yi says. "Mia was so volatile. I sympathise she would be angry — don't get me wrong, she had every right to be. But she was like a sinkhole taking everything downward with her."

That summer, Soon-Yi went to work equally a counselor at a campsite in Maine, where Allen called her oftentimes nether the lawmaking name "Mr. Simon." Soon-Yi was fired considering of the constant calls and returned to New York to stay with her friend Alexis. Until this indicate, Farrow had been under the impression that the pair's human relationship was over. On August i, she called Susan Coates, a psychologist who'd been helping the family unit, and described Allen as "satanic and evil" and entreated her to "find a style to stop him." From here on in, the battle betwixt Mia and Woody grew e'er more than heated, with charges and countercharges flight. On August four, the sexual abuse of Dylan, in a small crawl space in Mia'southward house, allegedly took identify. Mia eventually produced a video in which she asks Dylan nigh what occurred, a video that has been the subject of great contention over the years. Mia and her various confederates who are said to accept seen it fence that it's proof Dylan was molested, while Woody and his confederates who are said to accept seen it insist that Dylan was obviously manipulated into accusing her father, equally was played out in the custody action.

A niggling over a week subsequently Dylan'southward alleged abuse, Allen says, two of Mia's lawyers, Alan Dershowitz and David Levett, floated to him the idea of an immediate confidential settlement of $5 million to $7 million. The same day, Allen sued Mia in New York State Supreme Court for the custody of Satchel, Dylan, and Moses, contending that they were unsafe in her hands and were going to be turned against him. Four days later, Allen released a argument confirming his relationship with Soon-Yi, saying it is "real and happily all truthful." He also announced that he loved her, which Before long-Yi says took her past surprise: "I merely knew that he loved me when he gave the printing conference and said it publicly. Even and so, I wasn't sure if he meant information technology. We had never said those words to each other." Maybe, she says, she kept quiet about her feelings to avoid "scaring him away," or perhaps "I didn't want to admit to myself how much I had fallen for him."

On March 18, 1993, after a seven-month enquiry by a squad of three kid-corruption investigators at Yale–New Oasis Infirmary, Allen'south lawyers reported that he had been cleared of molesting Dylan Farrow. Mia'due south lawyers called the confidential written report "incomplete and inaccurate." On May 3, 1993, a sworn statement by John Leventhal, the pediatrician who headed the squad, was released, theorizing that Dylan was emotionally unstable and had been coached by Mia to accuse Allen. Merely a month subsequently, in a 33-page conclusion, Gauge Elliott Wilk questioned the work of the Yale grouping, calling it "sanitized." While Wilk wrote that it was "unlikely that [Allen] could be successfully prosecuted for sexual corruption," he credited Mia's testimony that Allen was "aggressively affectionate, providing [Dylan] with little infinite of her own and with no respect for the integrity of her trunk." Wilk denied Allen'southward custody request, as well equally visitation rights with Dylan; a twelvemonth after, Allen lost an entreatment of that decision. In the meantime, New York Country child-welfare investigators completed a 2d inquiry into the case, concluding that "no credible evidence was plant that [Dylan] has been abused or maltreated."

Roughly iii years after, on December 23, 1997, Woody and Shortly-Yi got married in the mayor's office in Venice, though neither of them, equally they tell me, believes in the institution. "You know, I thought it was a slip of paper," Before long-Yi says. "I find it a silly thing."

The decadeslong animus that has been hurled against the couple has left its mark, making them leery of the public in general and the press in particular. They're too both fatalists with a fatalist'southward wariness about expecting too much from the globe. The fact that their wedlock has lasted two decades seems to accept come as something of a surprise even to them, much less to others looking on. "That's what Mia must be the most shocked by," Soon-Yi says. "That is so foreign to her. She probably can't get her heed around that." I ask Soon-Yi at i point if she thinks she could take handled the affair differently or shouldn't have started information technology to begin with. "No," she says, without elaboration. Allen believes information technology would've probably been the same "if I had gone off with an airline stewardess somewhere and wanted joint custody of the kids or visitation. Sexual practice is always similar Jewish guilt — information technology has a certain dramatic touch on the audience. But it would've been the same thing."

One Monday evening, the 3 of usa talk late into the nighttime, which is unusual because the couple are early on-to-bed-early on-to-ascension types. Shortly before nine, Allen goes off to play with his jazz band at the Carlyle, and when he returns Soon-Yi and I are nonetheless deep in conversation. We've been discussing the years after the affair broke and her decision not to work — she tested out her interest in art the summertime after her sophomore year at Drew by interning at a Gagosian gallery and somewhen got a main's caste in special education at Columbia and volunteered at diverse schools. The couple have 2 adopted children (two judges investigated each adoption, as is routinely done, and okayed them) because of Shortly-Yi's strong convictions virtually the narcissism inherent in having biological children. "I could definitely accept children," she says, "but I was never interested. I observe it the height of vanity and very egocentric. I don't need kids out at that place who accept similar traits to me and look similar to me and Woody. Why is one's Deoxyribonucleic acid then special? Why would i go on on breeding when there are and then many kids out at that place who demand a loving habitation?"

The girls, Bechet, 19, and Manzie, 18 (named for jazz greats Sidney Bechet and Manzie Johnson), were both adopted equally infants, and Soon-Yi says that, thanks to Mia, she knew what kind of female parent she didn't want to exist. She admits that when she first got Bechet, she "felt the whole weight of the responsibility — that here was this human existence who was a blank slate. I thought, Oh my God, she's dependent on me for everything! And suddenly I got scared. Merely with Mia I'd been responsible for the younger ones, and I had done a ton of babysitting, so I actually did know what to practice. Still, I was a little intimidated. And so I said to Woody, 'What practice you call back of her?' and he said, 'She's just perfect.' And all my fears went out the window."

Co-ordinate to friends of Soon-Yi's whose kids accept gone to school with hers, she was a easily-on female parent, intent on taking her girls to museums, Broadway shows, the movies — places she says she'd never once gone with Farrow. "[Soon-Yi's] task was raising these children, being there for Woody, running the firm," says Lorinda Ash, who met Soon-Yi when they worked at Gagosian. "She fabricated sure they got the best tennis lessons, piano, guitar, ballet classes, whatever. She was always researching and asking advice. At the same fourth dimension, she insisted that they practise and do their homework. Their life was very structured."

Now that the girls are grown (Bechet is a sophomore in college, and Manzie just started her freshman year), the couple are more than close-knit — you might call it symbiotic — than ever. Allen describes how they spend their time together as "parallel play," which makes Soon-Yi express joy. "Parallel play," she repeats. "Yep, I call back you're right. We eat breakfast together — we swallow all our meals together, and nosotros've never spent a nighttime apart since nosotros married — and then I work out, either Pilates or my trainer or the treadmill. I also exercise yoga. I read the New York Times and point out pieces for Woody to read. Then we have luncheon, and in the afternoon I'll see a friend and go to a museum or shopping or any." (Although past her own admission Soon-Yi loves clothes, and has an enviable sense of style, she is a careful consumer. "Woody calls me penny-wise and pound-foolish," she cheerfully announces. She frequents sample sales, she says, and buys her flowers and fruit at Costco.) "And then we have dinner," Soon-Yi continues, "commonly with friends." "She fills the social agenda for six weeks in advance," interjects Woody a bit glumly.

Inspired past Alexis Clarbour, who told me her friend has "blossomed" in the years she'south been married to Allen, I ask Soon-Yi whether she thinks she'due south been reshaped past her husband. "Reshaped?" she asks. "I mean, he's given me a whole world, a whole world that I wouldn't accept had access to. So if you mean that way, and so yes." Allen joins in, in instance I've gotten the wrong impression: "She'due south got a large personality. I provided her with material access and opportunity, just it's all her. I'thousand more introverted and nondescript."

I ask what they fight almost, and Before long-Yi answers immediately. "Probably the kids. He feels I'm too harsh, and I feel he'southward too lenient." Woody extends the dissimilarity: "That'southward the bones kids argument, that i is the disciplinarian. Shortly-Yi is and so disciplined in life. Obviously she had to be to survive and control life — and she does it beautifully. I, on the other hand, came from a loving Jewish family" — not that they sound all that loving to me, especially his mother, who he once told me slapped him every solar day, but it'south all relative — "and I give the kids annihilation they want, whenever they want. I want to spoil them, just equally I want to spoil her." To which Soon-Yi responds, laughing, "It's okay if information technology'south directed at me. But I recollect it's skillful that they have a remainder. Information technology'south not a free-for-all with him, either."

It'due south past xi when I finally go up to go. Soon-Yi shuts off the lights and air-conditioning immediately afterward we leave the room, equally she always does, because she is environmentally minded and because she has inherited some of Farrow's frugality (and, she points out, her "French country" taste in decorating). Before I permit myself out, I terminate to spotter the ii of them go upstairs together, holding hands. Later, as I walk home, I find myself wondering whether Soon-Yi'south voice — having finally been heard — volition be listened to, much less change anyone'due south stance. It's a hazard she'due south taken by speaking out, simply then once more, she's never been i to play it safe.

*This article appears in the September 17, 2018, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Subsequently Decades of Silence, Presently-Yi Previn Speaks