This was on my mind because the Woodster’s in the news for that whole Amerian Apparel thing.
I know we had a thread on this a while back, but I didn’t want to revive it because it’s a few years old. Basically, I was wondering if what he did was really crossing any kind of line? I know it is not known precisely when he started the relationship with her, and she was his partner’s kid, which is kind of ick. And apparently he knew who she was when she was ten. But at the same time, it’s not like he really considered himself a father to her/she considered herself a daughter to him.
Plus she’s been with him now for so many years. So clearly they’re both okay with it which makes it seem a lot less sleazy.
I find it extremely creepy, but I’ve always found Allen to be extremely creepy.
The way he snuck around Mia’s back to fuck her daughter is unforgivable. He didn’t go to her in the beginning and fes up by saying “Look, I’m in love with Soon-Yi and we’re having a relationship.”
In the custody trials (he lost the original and his appeal, and did not have any visitation with his children), he tried to paint Mia as an unfit mother who treated her adopted children like orphans and favored her biological children. The judge ripped him apart for that tactic.
Extremely inappropriate. You just don’t enter into a romantic relationship with the daughter of your ex no matter if she’s been adopted or not. Apparently this has caused a big problem with Woody and Mia’s biological son who can’t fathom why his father would marry his “sister.”
Mia & Woody were still having a relationship when he started in with Soon-Yi. He tried to maintain it after Mia found the nude photos of her daughter.
She had tried to end the relationship in the past, but Woody would not leave. The custody judge noted that her biggest failing as a mother was in not getting rid of Woody sooner.
The night she discovered the nude photos, Allen walked into her apartment at the same time like nothing happened and sat at the dining table where the children were eating dinner, like he always did. The older children, who had been told by Mia what happened, all picked up their plates and went to their rooms.
I think that stuff is skeezy and kind of messed up–but I suppose what I was really wondering most is was he taking advantage of Soon Yi in any way? Like, was what he did borderline sexual abuse?
Even if you defend him by saying “He wasn’t married to Mia and he wasn’t Soon-Yi’s stepfather and she was an adult when he alledges their relationship started” not telling Mia he was fucking her daughter, and then leaving nude photos of her on the mantlepiece when he knew Mia would be dropping their son off is totally, utterly, and completely fucking unforgivable creepy.
According to this story, their relationship started when she was 17. If so, she’d be a legal adult in most places. Whether it’s abuse in the sense of being incest depends on what their relationship was like, and I know nothing about that and don’t want to know anything about it. It’s “borderline” a lot of things.
Of course it crossed a line. But as columnist Richard Cohen noted at the time, it’s a little disingenuous to elevate an ordinary pervert to an Old Testament monstrosity.
Oh, BTW: I think Mia Farrow has gotten kind of a walk on all of this. She’s one of a long line of celebrity serial adopters (Others include Joan Crawford and Josephine Baker; Angelina Jolie and Madonna are a hair’s breadth from joining the club). After the first one or two adoptees, I really think everyone involved would be better off if these ladies would just buy some porcelain dolls and leave those poor orphans alone.
For those who, like me, are asking “What American Apparel thing?,” there’s a summary (with commentary) here.
He lost me as a fan of his movies around the time of Manhattan, when he started taking himself way too seriously. He skeeved me out personally with the Soon-Yi thing and I now consider him a despicable human being in addition to being a self-indulgent filmmaker.
Maybe she and Andre should have just had more biological children rather than trying to help save hard-to-adopt children. Mia wanted a large family (she was one of seven children), and she and Andre agreed that adopting children considered “unadoptable” was better than procreating.
In two separate incidents, Mia paid to have foreign children come to her house and did all the paperwork, only to realize the children were more crippled and retarded than she felt she could handle. Rather than return them like a lamp that doesn’t fit in the decor, she let the adoption agencies give them to couples looking to adopt severely handicapped children, all with no charge or reimbursement.
You kind of have to wonder how stable it was when the adoptive father of the oldest of her kids (including Soon-Yi) was really never around, her teenaged daughter was sleeping with her partner right under her nose and she had no clue, and considering how she played her children with Allen against him in the home and then in court. It seems that there was a lot of emotional weirdness going on in that household.
I think so. He may not have been technically her stepfather, since they had an unconventional family, but he was definitely a father-figure to her during formative years, and was more or less like a husband to her mother. And there is (I think) still some uncertainty about when the relationship started, so it might even have been actual abuse, not “borderline.”
In one of the articles linked above, Allen is quoted as saying, “the heart wants what the heart wants.” I think he referred to the wrong organ.
Maybe that’s why their son Roman O’Farrow turned out so poorly :rolleyes, what with graduating college at 15 and going to Yale Law School at 16.
None of Mia’s other children have been in the news in any negative capacity. Her twin sons are a lawyer and computer analysis, her two oldest daughters are married to brothers and have children. of their own.
