Ronan Farrow Says Woody Allen Offered to Pay for His College if He Discredited Dylan Farrow

There’s so much about Allen v. Farrow that’s deeply harrowing. Over the course of its four episodes, HBO’s latest true crime docuseries has rewritten the allegations against Woody Allen from a he-said, she-said narrative into a compelling exploration of a gross miscarriage of justice. Yet one of its most shocking details comes from an aside in Episode 4. According to Allen and Mia Farrow’s biological son Ronan Farrow, Allen offered his son financial support on the condition that Ronan Farrow discredit his mother and sister.

Ever since the sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen were made in 1992, a deeply unflattering public image has formed of Mia Farrow as a mother. Allen has repeatedly claimed that Mia Farrow tried to manipulate her children into thinking poorly of him. He claims that manipulation is the cause of Dylan Farrow’s claims. Additionally, two of her children, Soon-Yi Previn, Allen’s current wife, and Moses Farrow, his adopted son, have alleged that Mia Farrow was abusive to them over the years. In the docuseries’ fourth episode several of Mia Farrow’s children come forward to dispute those claims, including renowned journalist Ronan Farrow.

“Our mother did such a good job shielding us from all this. She went above and beyond to never say anything that would be construed as critical of my father or push or think one thing or another. She really just tried to distance us and shield us,” Ronan Farrow says in Episode 4.

“But for all of us growing up, there was always a lot of incentive to be drawn into Woody Allen’s efforts to discredit my sister,” Ronan Farrow adds. “For example, he made funding my college education contingent on me speaking out in his support publicly. The offer always stood that if I were willing to publicly go against my mother and my sister that he would offer financial support, support for my education and perhaps a comfortable life with a powerful, influential guy.”

Ronan Farrow is also outspoken in the series about his initial distancing from his sister’s allegations. “There was a period of time in which my sister was saying, ‘Look I have consistently told this story for years and no one is listening. And I want to go public with it again.’ I said, ‘This is not worth it you are going to make your entire life an identity about this one thing that happened to you as a kid,'” Ronan Farrow recalls. “I hadn’t yet thoroughly interviewed her or looked at the facts. I just wanted to run away from this.”

That changed over the last few years. Ronan Farrow finally agreed to listen to Dylan Farrow’s full account of what happened and look over the court documents, in his words, as an adult, a journalist, and an attorney. “My reaction was, ‘Well holy shit I’ve been turning away from a real miscarriage of justice here,'” Ronan Farrow says. It’s his tweet during the 2014 Golden Globes, which presented Allen with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, that helped bring the accusations against Allen back into public conversation. It was soon followed by Dylan Farrow’s groundbreaking first public account, “An Open Letter from Dylan Farrow” being published in the New York Times. These testimonies have helped spark the public reexamination that we’re in today.

Watch Allen v. Farrow on HBO NOW and HBO Max