Why Woody Allen Wasn’t Charged: a Timeline of Dylan Farrow’s Accusations

What happened between Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow one afternoon in August 1992 has been in dispute for 25 years.

On Monday, his “Annie Hall” co-star Diane Keaton pledged her support for him – but many others are abandoning the filmmaker. Actors including Timothee Chalamet and “Lady Bird” director Greta Gerwig have distanced themselves from Allen. The New York Times ran a story Sunday with the headline “Can Woody Allen Work in Hollywood Again?”

Dylan Farrow has said actors who continue to work with Allen are “complicit” — but Allen has accused her mother, Mia Farrow, of “relentlessly coaching” Dylan Farrow as a child, to get revenge for his relationship with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn.

Also Read: Diane Keaton: 'Woody Allen Is My Friend And I Continue to Believe Him'

Allen has never been charged, and authorities seemed torn on whether he should be when the accusations against him first came to light. Here is a timeline of the accusations, and the personal and professional fallout for everyone involved.

February 1992: Mia Farrow discovered nude photos of Soon-Yi Previn in Allen’s home. He soon confessed to an affair with Previn, who was roughly 20 at the time. (Her exact age is unknown because of the circumstances of her adoption.)

Also read: Woody Allen Fires Back on Dylan Farrow Molestation Allegations: ‘Untrue,’ ‘Disgraceful’

Aug. 5, 1992: Mia Farrow said Dylan Farrow told her that Allen touched her inappropriately in an attic-like area of their Connecticut house, told her to remain still, and touched her “private part.” The child said he promised to take her to Paris and let her be in a movie, according to a November 1992 Vanity Fair article.

Vanity Fair said Allen and Mia Farrow had been preparing to sign an elaborate child-support-and-custody agreement the next day, Aug.6, which would have given Mia Farrow $6,000 a month for the support of Satchel, their biological child, and their son, 15-year-old Moses. Allen and Farrow had adopted both Moses and Dylan. (Satchel later changed his name to Ronan, and many have speculated — including Allen — that Frank Sinatra could be Ronan Farrow’s biological father.)

Aug. 13, 1992: Allen’s lawyers, notified of the allegation, pre-emptively filed a custody suit against Farrow, accusing her of being an unfit mother.

August 1992-1993: Connecticut police and prosecutors investigated the abuse claims against Allen. Vanity Fair said Dylan Farrow was prepared at the time to take the stand and testify against Allen.

Nov. 22, 1992: Allen gives his side on “60 Minutes,” saying in the interview:

May 1993: During the custody fight, a doctor who led the investigation and interviewed Dylan Farrow nine times said he had doubts about her accusations against Allen. Dr. John M. Leventhal said she has changed key details, like whether Allen touched her vagina, and said her accounts had a “rehearsed quality.”

“We had two hypotheses: one, that these were statements that were made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind,” says Leventhal, according to the New York Times.“And the other hypothesis was that she was coached or influenced by her mother. We did not come to a firm conclusion. We think that it was probably a combination.”

June 1993: In a scathing judgment against Allen, a Manhattan judge ruled that Mia Farrow should receive custody of the children, and that he was not convinced “that the evidence proves conclusively that there was no sexual abuse.” The judge also said psychotherapists who interviewed Dylan Farrow had their judgement “colored by their loyalty to Mr. Allen,” according to the Times.

The judge also blasted Allen for his relationship with Previn, saying it harmed both her and her adoptive siblings. “Having isolated Soon-Yi from her family, he left her with no visible support system,” Justice Elliott Wilk wrote.

September 1993: Connecticut state’s attorney Frank S. Maco announced that while he found “probable cause” to prosecute Allen, he was dropping the case because Dylan was too “fragile” to deal with a trial. Mia Farrow agreed with the decision, he said.

Maco told People that Dylan was “traumatized to the extent that I did not have a confident witness to testify in any court setting, whether that’s a closed courtroom or an open courtroom.”

Allen later condemned Maco as “cowardly, dishonest and irresponsible” for saying he had “probable cause” without releasing his evidence.

Dec. 24, 1997: Allen and Previn married. (They remain together today.)

Feb. 1, 2014: Dylan Farrow spoke out about the alleged abuse on the blog of New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof. The account was strikingly consistent with the one in Vanity Fair more than two decades earlier, including the details about the attic-like space and the promise of a trip to Paris.

On the same day, Maco, the now-retired prosecutor, told The Associated Press that the statute of limitations to bring any charges ran out at least 15 years earlier.

Feb. 5, 2014: Moses Farrow, who was adopted by Allen and Farrow, says that his other coached Dylan Farrow when she was a child: “My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister,” Moses, then 36, told People. “And I hated him for her for years. I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi.”

He adds: “I don t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible.”

Feb. 7, 2014: Allen again denied the accusations, saying the “attic” account was clearly drawn from the 1970 Dory Previn song “With My Daddy in the Attic,” the lyrics of which appear to be about incest.

He noted that Mia Farrow was likely familiar with Dory Previn’s work: “It was on the same record as the song Dory Previn had written about Mia’s betraying their friendship by insidiously stealing her husband, André, ‘Beware of Young Girls,'” he wrote.

May 11, 2016: Ronan Farrow writes about the accusations in a column titled, “My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked.”

Oct. 10, 2017: Ronan Farrow reports on sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein for the New Yorker, days after another explosive Weinstein story in the New York Times. The Weinstein reports help launch the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, which draw new attention to the accusations against Allen.

Jan. 18: Dylan Farrow speaks out to CBS News and shares largely the same account she shared in 2014.

Allen responds: “Dylan’s older brother Moses has said that he witnessed their mother … relentlessly coaching Dylan, trying to drum into her that her father was a dangerous sexual predator. It seems to have worked — and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says.”

Dylan Farrow tells CBS: “What I don’t understand is, how is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?”

Jan. 29: After many of Allen’s past collaborators distance themselves from him, Diane Keaton stands by him.

“Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him,” she tweets. “It might be of interest to take a look at the ’60 Minutes’ interview from 1992 and see what you think.”

Related stories from TheWrap:

Sony Pictures Classics: Woody Allen 'Deserves Our Presumption of Innocence'

It's Time to Shun Woody Allen (Guest Blog)