Armchair Analysis of "Allen v. Farrow"

As a clinical and forensic psychologist that conducts custody evaluations of high-conflict, divorcing families, I have regularly dealt with cases of alleged parental abuse and mistreatment and the commonly associated themes of alienation/estrangement and epically warring co-parents.

HBO’s recently released documentary about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, wherein Woody was accused of being sexually inappropriate and abusive by his, at the time, seven-year-old daughter, Dylan, predominately focused on the specific outcome of whether/how precisely Woody abused Dylan, and whether the abuse allegations were legitimate versus fabricated or manipulated.

There’s a useful, albeit over-simplistic playbook for the dysfunctional dynamics common to these sorts of alienation/abuse allegation custody cases.

There’s the IN parent (in this specific case, Mia, the mother) who is highly (often-overly) close to the child. The IN parent is often in high anger-attack mode, and highly invested in keeping the co-parent OUT of the child’s life. The OUT parent (in this case, Woody, the father) has been accused of parental abuse or mistreatment and is on a highly unstable relational ground with the child.

It’s helpful to examine the roles along certain spectrums of risk factors and personality variables.

Regarding Woody, to what degree is he an unfairly framed and reasonably healthy parental figure versus a sexual predator/unfit parent?

Regarding Mia, to what degree is she an alienating manipulator (which, if true, would reasonably constitute abusive and unfit parental behavior) versus a reasonably healthy and proportionately protective parental figure?

In my experience, most cases land somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, a murkier middle ground territory in which the OUT parent is often guilty of poor "social awareness" judgment and at least mildly weird/inappropriate behaviors, and the IN parent is often guilty of poor parental judgment and emotional volatility/dysregulated co-parent anger. Rarely is there clear and compelling evidence to definitively show abusive or parentally unacceptable behavior (on either side).

My takeaways from the limited, somewhat unbalanced documentary were that Woody, at the very least, engaged in a pattern of sexually inappropriate touching (e.g. the thumb-sucking anecdote) with Dylan, if not the more egregiously assaultive “act in the attic.”

And while the documentary showed no clear or compelling information that Mia vindictively cajoled or campaigned Dylan to fabricate or exaggerate claims of abuse against Woody, there are red flags with her as well (e.g. inappropriately open hostility toward Woody, which predated Dylan’s report of abuse, and intensified once Woody’s romance with Mia’s adolescent, adopted daughter became known), and subtle forms of parental disengagement (e.g. when Mia stoically films Dylan’s report of abuse, seemingly more focused on playing the role of case investigation than warmly consoling parental figure).

And, then there’s the child—poor Dylan—caught in the middle, having either suffered actual abuse, or the pressure from a parent to falsely claim abuse on the other parent, or some degree of both, either of which would be pretty distressing, if not traumatic. And while all child reports of mistreatment, if not abuse, likely contain at least some small degree of distortion or misunderstanding, especially in the context of such familial upheaval and internal pressures (e.g. pleasing a mother she knows hates her father) as a high-conflict custody case, Dylan's account of the specific allegations appeared (to the majority of involved professionals) reasonable, consistent, coherent, and credible. Dylan was portrayed as neither distressingly controlled by her mother, nor suspiciously/excessively invested in attacking her father; and there certainly was no clear or compelling information presented by the documentary to verify the sort of fabrication and distortion Woody purported.

Ultimately, the documentary raises more questions than it answers (e.g. even if abuse occurred, did Woody deserve a reunification and rebuild effort that never happened?), but ends on an uplifting note as we see the trajectory of an inevitably overwhelmed and traumatized child appear to achieve a sense of stability and happiness in adulthood.