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Last week, the Woody/Soon-Yi mess returned to the news when, for the first time, Soon-Yi spoke on the record about her long-ago affair that had once rocked the world.
However, she stirred up more controversy by opting to speak to a decades-old friend of Woody’s, the well-known author, Daphne Merkin.
Soon-Yi didn’t tell Daphne much that was new, except for a couple of things. She described her childhood in greater detail than had been known; namely, that she was an extremely poor and unhappy child in Korea, and that she attributes her adoption by Mia to her having stood out by being somehow more spunky than other children. When they were in a group performing for an audience, the other children stepped off the stage, but Soon-Yi spun around and jumped off, which appealed to the person choosing for Mia.
When she first met Mia, however, Soon-Yi claims there was an instant antipathy between them. Obviously, one can never corroborate that. It’s hard to completely believe that a six-year-old child would harbor such strong feelings since her life with Mia must have been a considerable improvement over what she’d earlier known.
What’s also new, and interesting, is that her first reaction as a ten-year-old to Woody’s appearance in Mia’s large and unusual family, with seven adopted kids and three biological ones, was an instant dislike of him as well. She claims it took some years before her feelings toward him began to thaw. She does repeat Mia’s original claims that she was backwards, which is at odds with what current observers have claimed: she’s very bright, very well-read, and of much above-average intelligence.
In recent years, one of the adopted children who was at the heart of the custody trial, Moses Farrow, the photographer and psychologist, has backed up Soon-Yi’s version of life with Mia. He has denied that Dylan’s allegations of molestation ever took place. He claims as well that Mia was, at times, a very abusive parent, and that she coached Dylan into making her accusation.
The article is also a reminder that at the beginning, their affair was widely viewed as morally, or culturally, transgressive. Observers have thought Soon-Yi was Woody's daughter, or step-daughter. They were wrong. Soon-Yi was Mia's adopted daughter. She was - and remains - the sister of Mia's other biological and adopted children. Woody, thirty-five-years-older than the then 19- or 20-year old Soon-Yi at the time, was surely old enough to have known, regardless of his cinematic attraction to younger women, and whatever the sorry state of his relationship with Mia back then, that just because, as he put it, "the heart wants what it wants," the heart isn't always free to take what it wants. It wasn't up to the then college-age Soon-Yi to tell Woody he was wrong to go ahead and take her.
He was older, and he could have left the relationship had he chosen to do so. But neither of them made that decision. And Dylan's accusation, which followed right after Mia’s discovery of the affair, has been entwined with it ever since.
Nevertheless, the couple has stayed together for twenty years. They've also raised two, by all accounts terrific, daughters. Today, the marriage's success seems to surprised not just Woody and Soon-Yi, but many observers as well. In Daphne’s telling, they still seem fond of each other.
So whatever was wrong in the way the relationship started, it doesn’t seem right that Woody and Soon-Yi should be damned for the rest of their lives, and that his career should be upended because of something that happened a quarter of a century ago. He did break a taboo, but the question is, for how long does society have to judge him guilty, especially given that the two of them have appeared to have made a success of their marriage and their parenting?
The successful marriage notwithstanding, however, Dylan's allegations were a direct result of Mia's discovery of Woody-Soon-Yi initial affair. As Mia threatened soon afterwards: "you took my daughter, now I'll take yours." It's no wonder the two have remained fused in people's minds since then.
I covered the trial for this magazine in 1992-3. I know that Woody Allen was never charged with any crime, and therefore has never been found guilty of any crime. I also heard testimony about how Mia ignored some of her children's problems like their arrests for shoplifting. I read in the judge's decision about Mia’s maniacal adopting all through that period. I also read about how she taught her newcomer handicapped adopted children during that same fraught time to run around chanting, “Woody no Goody!” about the man they'd never known or seen.
Mia's children were raised on unrelenting hatred of the man who did Mia wrong. Fueled by Twitter and Me Too, Mia & Co (the now adult Dylan and Ronan Farrow) are also driven by an unremitting quest for revenge.
But I believe Woody when he says that he was a lifelong phobic, so he would never have been in an attic, sexually abusing a child. Plus, there’s never been another person who has ever accused him of sexual abuse. Even Judge Kavanaugh can’t say that today. Instead, in all these decades, the happily wed Woody has simply continued to cast countless actresses in roles that made them stars.
