Inside the mysterious lives of Woody Allen and Soon Yi’s daughters
They’re the daughters of one of the most scandalous and complicated couples in modern history.
But Bechet and Manzie Allen have survived and, by some accounts, thrived, as the children of Soon-Yi Previn, 50, and director Woody Allen, 85 — who was dating Soon-Yi’s mother, Mia Farrow, when he and the then-teenager began their affair.
The couple have now been wed for 24 years. Bechet, 22, adopted from China, is a senior majoring in art history at Bard College. Manzie, 21, adopted from Texas, is a junior at Whittier College in California.
The young women have shunned the spotlight and never given an interview. But they have praised their parents on social media for years.
Bechet and Manzie declare their love for Soon-Yi and Woody, who they call “Pa” or “Pops,” on a regular basis and have defended the two, especially since the damning four-part docu-series “Allen v. Farrow” began airing last month. It focuses on the accusation of sexual abuse by Woody involving Dylan, his then 7-year-old daughter with Mia, as well as his relationship with Soon-Yi — which became known after Mia found nude photos of Soon-Yi in Woody’s home.
“I am proud of my parents,” Bechet posted on Instagram last month. “I consider myself one of the luckiest people on Earth to be adopted by these two wonderful people.”
A family insider said the sisters have some of the same rebelliousness their parents do.
It was on display when Bechet hit back at haters who called her father a “predator” and a “sexual abuser” in comments on a since-deleted post.
“Before you start saying things like this, you should think about whether or not you can back your claims,” she wrote.
“If you’ve read at all about the investigation that happened years ago, you will realize that you don’t have any reason to be commenting on things like this on my Instagram posts … But this is my family and my life and the fact that you think you have any right to express your uninformed opinions on my Instagram, for whatever reason I don’t know, is ridiculous. We should live in a world where we question the validity of the information that is constantly being thrown at us on the Internet and in the media. We need to do better.”
She also spoke out about people posting photos of herself as a child with Woody and assuming it was him with Soon Yi.
“A friendly reminder,” she wrote in a now-deleted post showing a snapshot that had been labeled “Woody Allen and his future wife.” “But no, keep being racists. It’s not your fault you can’t tell us apart, I guess we just all look the same.”
The Post was unable to reach either sister for comment.
In 2018, Manzie posted a photo of herself with Woody and Bechet. “Happy Father’s Day to the best best best dad. You are my hero and I love you more than anything in the world.”
In December she posted a photo of herself with Woody on his birthday, calling him “my favorite person ever. I love you so so so so so so much.”
Soon-Yi gets the same amount of love.
“Happy Mother’s Day to this QUEEN,” Manzie captioned a picture of her mom on a recent Mother’s Day. “Thank you for everything you are.”
The sisters grew up in luxury in a $26 million English country-style townhouse on the Upper East Side, on the same street where Allen shot some scenes for “Annie Hall” in 1977.
Their social media photos show them in jet-set hotspots like Paris, Milan, Venice and Aspen — as well as hanging with friends in New York and Malibu. They both post a lot of childhood photos with Woody and Soon-Yi.
“They’re two very normal girls,” a longtime family friend Told the Post. “I talk to Woody on the phone all the time and when the girls were growing up, he’d always be excusing himself to take them to school or go to some parent-teacher conference.”
Woody is the easygoing parent, the friend said, and “Soon-Yi is the disciplinarian. She’s the boss.”
The family friend said Woody would arrange his yearly filming schedule to accommodate the girls’ vacations when they attended the Brearley School and, later, their colleges to allow them to accompany him on film sets.
In the summer of 2019, for example, Bechet and Manzie were part of the crew in San Sebastian, Spain, for their father’s latest movie, “Rifkin’s Festival.” According to IMDB, Bechet was a “costume trainee” in the costume department and Manzie was a production assistant.
In contrast to the sisters’ low profile, two of Woody’s adopted children with his ex Mia Farrow — Dylan, 35, and Ronan Farrow, 33 — have waged war on their dad for years. Bechet and Manzie have reportedly never met their two half-siblings, who are also their aunt and uncle (through Soon-Yi).
On Sunday night, the last episode of the four-part HBO documentary, “Allen v. Farrow,” will air. At the heart of the series is Dylan Farrow’s long-held accusation that Woody, her father, sexually assaulted her in the attic of Mia’s Connecticut home in 1992, when she was 7.
Woody has always denied the charges. He said in a statement after the first episode that the documentary was a “hatchet job” and “riddled with falsehoods.”
Woody remains the legal father of Dylan and Ronan, but he has reportedly not seen them since Aug. 5, 1992, the day after the alleged abuse happened. Woody has never been charged in the case, after Connecticut State Police investigated the allegations.
“Allen v. Farrow” has also laid bare — again — the unusual origins of Woody’s relationship with Soon-Yi, who is the adopted daughter of Mia and her second husband, conductor André Previn. Woody met her when he started dating Mia in 1980, when Soon-Yi was about 10.
After Mia encouraged Woody to take a teenaged Soon-Yi to watch Knicks games, the relationship between the two began to grow. According to the documentary, Soon-Yi began going to Woody’s apartment, alone, when she was still in high school. But his camp has always said she was about 19, and a freshman at Drew University in New Jersey, when they began a romance.
Woody’s sister and longtime producer, Letty Aronson, who now acts as his spokesperson, did not respond to a call from The Post.
The director’s detractors have described him as a sexual predator who groomed an underage Soon-Yi, accusations that have reached a crescendo with the revelations in “Allen v. Farrow.”
Supporters point out that Woody never lived with Mia and family in her Central Park West apartment, nor was he considered a father to her children with Previn. (Mia is the mother of 14 children altogether but three of her adopted kids, Lark, Tam and Thaddeus, have died, the latter two by suicide.)
Woody is the biological father of Ronan, né Satchel, and adopted the Texas-born Dylan and South Korean-born Moses Farrow after Mia did. Moses, now 43, originally denounced Woody for the alleged abuse of Dylan but later recanted his statements, saying he’d been pressured to lie by his mother.
In 2018, Moses wrote a lengthy blog post, “A Son Speaks Out,” in which he said Mia was an abusive mother and that Woody never sexually abused Dylan. Moses was one of the children present at Mia’s Connecticut country home, Frog Hollow, on Aug. 4, 1992, the day Dylan says Allen assaulted her.
Moses is now an adoption trauma counselor in Connecticut and father of two children. He posts periodic videos on Youtube talking about his late siblings Thaddeus, Tam and Lark. “Adoptees like me, like Thaddeus, like my other siblings, it’s known now we are four times more likely to commit suicide,” he once said. “We are fragile and vulnerable and desperately just want to be seen and heard.”
Moses is now close with Woody again and knows his sisters/nieces Bechet and Manzie, according to an insider.
“[The girls] don’t give a s–t about all that,” the family friend told The Post about the fact that Moses is both their half-brother and their uncle. “They just call him Uncle Moses.”
Nor do Woody or Soon-Yi much care, after all these years, what the outside world thinks of them.
Three different insiders told The Post that they believe that both Woody and Soon-Yi truly love one another.
Bechet once wished her parents a happy 22nd anniversary on Instagram. “Here’s to the strongest love I’ve ever seen,” she wrote.
Family friends claim that Soon-Yi is the dominant partner in the marriage, something presaged in the earliest intimate glimpse of their relationship in director Barbara Kopple’s 1998 documentary about Woody, “Wild Man Blues.”
Soon-Yi was described as “by turns, bossy, maternal, nurturing and insulting” toward Woody in the film. Kopple said at the time that “I really feel she keeps him sane.”
Maybe so, but it’s hard to imagine a more unlikely pair than Woody and Soon-Yi.
Woody grew up in 1930s Brooklyn in a volatile Jewish family. His father was a waiter and a jewelry engraver, and his mother was a bookkeeper at a deli.
Soon-Yi was born in Seoul, South Korea, around 1970 (she has no birth certificate and her approximate age was determined by bone scans) and was found living on the streets at age 5 in 1976, a starving runaway eating out of dumpsters before being adopted by Mia and Previn.
“I remember being extremely poor,” Soon-Yi said in a 2018 New York magazine interview. “You know, no furniture, nothing. Just a bare room and a mother and we had a backyard, kind of with concrete. Then I decided one day to run away. That this couldn’t be for life, that there must be something better out there.”
The two do have something in common however. They both have said their mothers were physically abusive.
Allen tried to make a documentary about his mom, Nettie Konigsberg, and Mia’s mother, actress Maureen O’Sullivan, years ago but never finished it.
He planned to call it “Two Mothers” and he interviewed his own mother for it, asking her why “you would hit me every day when I was a child… You were always slapping me.”
Previn told New York magazine that Mia would slap her across the face or spank her with a hairbrush while calling her “stupid” or “moronic.”
These days, the family friend said Woody and Soon-Yi’s relationship has evolved somewhat now that Allen has severe vision loss in one eye.
“We’ve double-dated with them and it’s very sweet to see how caring Soon-Yi is with him, how they’ve gone from hand-holding to her taking his arm on the street. At the same time she can be very funny and snap at him if he fumbles for his keys one too many times,” the friend said.
The friend aded that Woody was “devastated” back in the 1990s when he stopped seeing his children Dylan and Ronan — forever.
“At the time it was terrible,” the friend said. “But at the end of the day it’s the family he has now that matters to him and it’s the family no one can take away from him.”
COMMENTS