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 Mother Teresa–like figure 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’s adoptive father, Woody Allen, sexually molested her, has stood by Allen even as his reputation has plummeted and his once-revered films have been reassessed in the light 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 nothing, her sphinxlike presence adding to the mystery of what actually took place. He did what? She’s how old? And whose daughter?
There is a way in which Soon-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’s controversial romance quickly took on the aspect of a cosmic soap opera, in which gossip mutated into mythology and mere hunches about someone’s 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 Soon-Yi is ending her silence. She’s long believed that her relationship with Allen fueled the inquiry into the allegations surrounding Dylan, but only recently has she felt compelled to tell her own side of things, to talk about what drove her away from her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow — and toward the man who’s now been her husband for 20 years. “I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that,” Soon-Yi tells me quietly but firmly. “But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. [Mia] has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”
Not for the first time will it occur to me how different Soon-Yi is from the person whom Farrow more than two decades ago described as slow, even dim — and who was dismissed as Allen’s brainwashed mouthpiece when she did speak up, in August 1992, in a statement to Newsweek: “I’m not a retarded little underage flower 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.
We talk mostly in the couple’s six-story townhouse on one of the Upper East Side’s prettiest blocks, the same block where Allen shot scenes for Annie Hall 42 years ago. “I am a pariah,” he says one day when he joins us for lunch, wearing his usual outfit of a light-blue button-down 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 Soon-Yi’s contribution to Hillary Clinton’s last campaign was unceremoniously returned.) Allen, an assiduously healthy eater as well as an unremitting hypochondriac, pokes at his food, while Soon-Yi is ever the attentive hostess, refilling my water glass as soon as it’s empty and offering me seconds of lasagna and salad before I’ve finished the last bite of my meal.