Part 2

Soon-Yi Previn (b. 1970, a. 1978)

The sixth child added to the Previn family, Soon-Yi was adopted by Mia Farrow and André Previn in 1978, just a year before the couple's divorce. Public records, and her passport, indicate that her birthday is October 8, 1970. However, after news of Woody's affair with Soon-Yi became tabloid fodder, Mia and the rest of the Farrow family implied in interviews that Soon-Yi's exact age was not known. In a 1992 interview with Vanity Fair, Mia said that Soon-Yi was "about seven" when she was adopted. In her 1997 memoir, What Falls Away, she claimed that Soon-Yi was five when she was adopted. The ambiguity about her age opened the door to speculation that Soon-Yi was a teenager—or even a minor—when her affair with Woody began, but she was almost 21.

After Mia learned of the affair, she admittedly beat Soon-Yi, reportedly cut up her clothes, and banished her from her home. By the end of 1992, it was revealed that "Soon-Yi is out of the family." André said of his daughter, "She does not exist." Her parents stopped paying her college tuition at Drew, where she was in her sophomore year. Woody then picked up the tab. In the summers home from college she lived separately from Woody in her own apartment on the Upper East Side.

At the time of the scandal, many Farrow-Previn insiders and family members speaking to the press presented Soon-Yi as mentally slow, incapable of making decisions for herself, and therefore a helpless victim who was groomed and raped by Woody. Her aunt, Tisa Farrow, would refer to her as having "a double-digit IQ. It's not like she's a drooling idiot, but she's very naive and very immature." One of the Farrow family tutors told Vanity Fair that Soon-Yi was learning disabled and "very socially inappropriate," and "has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level [and] misinterprets situations."

Soon-Yi resented the implications, which she felt robbed her of any agency. In an interview with Newsweek she said:

"I'm not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I'm a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.

The family said they didn't believe the statement came from Soon-Yi, saying she "doesn't know half those words, what they mean." Despite the questions about her mental capacity Soon-Yi regularly made the dean's list at Drew. She graduated in 1995 and went on to get her masters in special education from Columbia University in 1998. She taught fourth grade at Spence, an exclusive private school in Manhattan.

Soon-Yi and Woody married in Venice, Italy, on December 23, 1997. In 1999 Soon-Yi became a mother when the couple adopted a daughter they named Bechet. They adopted another girl, Manzie, in 2000. She's now a stay-at-home mom living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

More than anyone else in the family, Soon-Yi's name was irrevocably tarnished by the scandal. She was the butt of many late-night TV talk show jokes, and was mocked in crude, sexist and racist sketches on Mad TV, Saturday Night Live and Howard Stern's radio show.

By 1997, while working the interview circuit (Oprah, Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, etc.) in support of her memoir What Falls Away, Mia had shifted her story and stopped portraying Soon-Yi as an innocent who was corrupted by a dirty old man. Now Soon-Yi was described as a near sociopath who had been incapable of forming bonds with her mother and siblings, whom, it was said, she would scratch, bite and sometimes try to kill. Her "emotional problems" were often chalked up to her early childhood, during which Mia said she lived like a stray dog on the streets of Korea after being abandoned by her prostitute mother. (The history of Soon-Yi's biological mother as a prostitute is as pointed as it is confusing. According to Mia, Soon-Yi was found eating out of garbage cans on the streets and spoke "no known language, only gibberish." How then, would anyone know from where or whom she came?)

While promoting her memoir, Mia told Barbara Walters that she never wanted to see Soon-Yi again and holds her responsible for her affair with Woody. An unauthorized biography of Woody Allen, published in 2000, painted Soon-Yi as a shrewd seductress—a description that smacked of the "dragon lady" stereotype—who aggressively pursued her mother's boyfriend and lured him into a relationship because she had decided that she could become successful by marrying a rich, older man.

In 2006, Mia spoke of Soon-Yi in another interview, saying:

"She was on the streets in Korea when she was captured and brought to the state orphanage. And in a way I can see from her perspective—a very limited perspective—that she's improved her situation. She's got the penthouse and the seat at Elaine's [restaurant] or, whatever I had, she has."

Moses Farrow (b. 1978, a.