Woody Allen's Wife, Soon-Yi Previn, Gives Her First Interview In 26 Years

Shortly after Page Six reported that Soon-Yi Previn, wife to maligned director Woody Allen, would give her first interview in years, Vulture published a lengthy profile of Previn.

Previn, 47, became a tabloid fixture in 1992 when her mother, Mia Farrow, discovered that Previn was having an affair with Farrow's then-boyfriend Allen. Shortly after Farrow discovered this, Allen allegedly molested Farrow's daughter, Dylan Farrow.

Speaking to Vulture, Previn insists that Allen's relationship with her was never paternal, something she stressed in a 1992 statement to Newsweek as well. ("I admit it's offbeat, but let's not get hysterical," Previn said of their relationship.) She also insists that Farrow was a terrible mother, an allegation that both Previn and her brother Moses Farrow have raised before.

"Mia wasn’t maternal to me from the get-go," Previn told Vulture. She was adopted at 7 years old from Seoul, South Korea, where she'd lived in an orphanage. Farrow, Previn says, played favourites with her many children, tending toward the kids that were biologically her own. "There was a hierarchy — she didn’t try to hide it, and Fletcher was the star, the golden child,” Previn added. “Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blond hair and blue eyes.”

Previn later makes the same allegation regarding Satchel Farrow, who eventually started going by his middle name Ronan. (Ronan is the child of Mia and Allen, and, although it is speculated that his father is Frank Sinatra, Allen, 82, told Vulture that he thinks Ronan is indeed his child.)

Previn and Allen began seeing each other when she was in college, a student at Drew University in New Jersey. She tells Vulture that they first kissed after watching The Seventh Hour together. "We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other," she says.

She adds, "Mia was never kind to me, never civil...and here was a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot, retarded if I’d stayed with Mia.” The word "retarded" comes up a few times in the article as something Farrow used to allegedly say about Previn. ("People think that I was Soon-Yi’s father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter," Allen says at one point.)

Previn claims that in the days after Farrow discovered the affair — via a series of nude photos found on Allen's mantle — Farrow told Allen that Previn was "suicidal." Meanwhile, Previn insisted she wasn't. Convinced she was being followed, she called Allen on a pay phone and told him that she was doing fine.

As for their marriage now, Allen says that they fell together thanks to the scandal that followed their relationship. "Our relationship deepened as we went through the barrage of terrible accusations, and the paparazzi forced us to take walks only on my penthouse roof," Allen says.

Previn says that she was always in love with Allen. "I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he first kissed me and I said, ‘I wondered how long it was going to take you to make a move.’ From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him," she says.

Read the full profile over at Vulture.