EXCLUSIVE This is not in the HBO doc “Allen vs. Farrow,” directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. It’s the forgotten story of Mia’s brother, John Charles Viller-Farrow, convicted child molester who spent 7 years in Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution for abusing two little boys over an 8 year period.
Farrow was given a 25 year sentence, which was turned into 10 years. He served only 7, even though he destroyed the lives of two young men who have to live with what he did to them. He was released on February 12, 2020.
Mia Farrow never acknowledges this happened. Neither does Ronan Farrow. Or any of their defenders. Woody Allen was never formally accused of anything, arrested or charged in the case of his adopted daughter, Dylan.
But Mia’s brother was successfully prosecuted and imprisoned for sex crimes. This fact alone upends the so-called “devastating” documentary that paints Woody as a mastermind criminal.
John Farrow, as you read this, is a registered sex offender in Maryland. He’s on probation. The woman who prosecuted him in 2012, Kathleen Rogers, who still works in Maryland government, told me on Friday that in grooming them, “He took advantage of these boys in a particularly horrible way.”
In “Allen vs. Farrow,” Mia is depicted as Snow White or Mary Poppins, gaily gallivanting from one carefree episode to another. She is one of four children, but only one — Tisa Farrow — is interviewed. Omitted are sisters Prudence and Stephanie. And brother John. Another brother, Patrick, recently committed suicide.
John Farrow committed his crimes between 2000 and 2008, against the two little boys. He had sex with them, repeatedly, which is documented on his charge sheet. In 1992, when the Woody-Mia scandal broke, John Farrow told People magazine: Allen “is going to be indicted, and he’s going to be ruined. I think when all of it comes out, he’s going to go to jail.”
Woody was not ruined and didn’t go to jail, because he did nothing wrong. But John Farrow went to jail, for seven years. He got three years off for “good behavior.”
When he stood trial in 2021, Farrow faced 39 counts of sexual abuse. He was accused of abusing one victim for seven years, beginning when the boy was nine, and abused another boy from the ages of 8 to 13.
A jury was chosen, and the trial began. But immediately, it was stopped when Farrow entered an Alford plea, conceding that there was a preponderance of evidence proving him guilty, but not admitting his guilt.
According to the Baltimore Sun, “charging documents allege Villers-Farrow abused the boys together and alone, showing them pornographic movies and performing oral sex on them.”
At the time, Rogers told the court, Farrow was “every parent’s worst nightmare.”
The judge in the case said Farrow ” sees himself as the victim in this case.”
So when you’re watching “Allen vs. Farrow,” think of those two little boys, now adults, the same ages roughly as Dylan Farrow and her self-righteous brother Ronan. And ask yourself, what else isn’t this documentary telling me?
Plenty.
