"One summer day, Mia accused me of leaving the curtains closed in the TV room."

"They had been drawn the day before when Dylan and Satchel were watching a movie. She insisted that I had closed them and left them that way. Her friend Casey had come over to visit and while they were in the kitchen, my mother insisted I had shut the curtains. At that point, I couldn’t take it anymore and I lost it, yelling, 'You’re lying!' She shot me a look and took me into the bathroom next to the TV room. She hit me uncontrollably all over my body. She slapped me, pushed me backwards and hit me on my chest, shouting, 'How dare you say I’m a liar in front of my friend. You’re the pathological liar.' I was defeated, deflated, beaten and beaten down. Mia had stripped me of my voice and my sense of self. It was clear that if I stepped even slightly outside her carefully crafted reality, she would not tolerate it. It was an upbringing that made me, paradoxically, both fiercely loyal and obedient to her, as well as deeply afraid...."

Moses Farrow tells his story in a blog post titled "A Son Speaks Out."

"Satchel" = Ronan Farrow.

"Now that I no longer live in fear of her rejection, I am free to share how she cultivated and brainwashed me."

Said Moses Farrow, quoted in a new biography of Woody Allen, reported by the NYT (which uses a photo of Woody Allen in which his glasses prescription magnifies one of his eyes ridiculously in comparison to the other).

Asked to comment, Ms. Farrow issued a statement: “Moses has cut off his entire family including his ex-wife who was pregnant when he left. It’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up, perhaps to please Woody. We all miss and love him very much.”

ADDED: The photo of Woody got me thinking about the word "cock-eyed," which means "topsy-turvy, absurd, ridiculous" (OED):

1960 M. Spark Ballad of Peckham Rye x. 201 He gathered together the scrap ends of his profligate experience..and turned them into a lot of cock-eyed books....

1942 Chicago Tribune 18 May 12/1 Communists are cockeyed... Today we shall dwell not upon their dangerousness, but upon their cockeyedness.

"I think my sister is missing a great deal in life in not reconnecting with her father, who had always adored her."

"It’s important that she assert her independence from our mother and not go through life with the false impression that she has been molested by my father. I am very happy I have come into my own power, separating from my mother, which has led to a positive reunion with my father."

Says Moses Farrow, defending Woody Allen. Moses is, we're told, a family therapist. He has some things to say about his mother: "From an early age, my mother demanded obedience and I was often hit as a child. She went into unbridled rages if we angered her, which was intimidating at the very least and often horrifying, leaving us not knowing what she would do."

Meanwhile, Mia is tweeting: "A lot of ugliness is going to be aimed at me. But this is not about me, it's about her truth."

I feel like shutting the door on this session of family therapy, but I'll just say "her truth" is a strange expression. The usual concept of truth is that it is simply the truth. When you put a possessive in from of it — this is my truth — it is ordinarily to concede that you are talking about the way things look or feel from your perspective. And it's odd to direct your audience to another individual's truth, as though you need people to think about the question at hand through the eyes of this other person over there. This is her truth. That's what's important. This is not about me. How do I know it's not about you or that "her truth" isn't really your truth? Do we even know that Dylan Farrow wrote her own letter?