As “Allen v. Farrow” renewed debate about allegations that Woody Allen molested his daughter Dylan Farrow, it also revived questions about Mia Farrow’s relationship with some of her adopted children, including three who died in tragic ways.
This week, these questions prompted Farrow to issue a statement, proclaiming her love for these three children, while also addressing their deaths.
But Page Six also reported on the curious case of Farrow apparently digitally removing the face of one of those children, Tam Farrow, from a favorite family photo that the actress shared on social media.
Tam Farrow, who was disabled and whom Mia Farrow adopted from Vietnam, died in 2000 at age 17. Mia Farrow said her daughter died of a prescription drug overdose, but her estranged son, Moses Farrow, said Tam died by suicide.
Since “Allen v. Farrow” aired, the HBO docuseries has faced criticism from Allen’s supporters for not adequately addressing the deaths of Tam Farrow and her two siblings. These supporters also alerted Page Six to Tam’s face apparently being digitally removed from the family photo, which Mia Farrow most recently posted to Twitter in 2016 as part of a “Thursday Throwback.”
The photo showed Mia Farrow meeting Hillary Clinton in the mid-1990s. The actress had brought along a young Dylan Farrow and her son, future journalist Ronan Farrow, who is seen shaking Clinton’s hand. “When Dylan and @RonanFarrow met Hillary Clinton,” the caption reads.
But an Allen supporter pointed out to Page Six that Tam also accompanied her mother and siblings to meet Clinton. Tam originally appeared in the shot, standing close to Mia Farrow. But for the 2016 tweet, the photo appears to have been altered to leave Tam obscured by shadow.
Mia Farrow's daughter erased from cherished family photo https://t.co/so2m82bMvh pic.twitter.com/Vs9hSPeKTP
— Page Six (@PageSix) March 30, 2021
As evidence that the photo had been altered, the Allen supporter later this week pointed to a 2012 tweet from Farrow, sharing the original photo with a smiling Tam very much visible.
My son @Ronanfarrrow meets his future boss Hillary Clinton: photo pic.twitter.com/oiVYz1If
— Mia Farrow 🏳️🌈 🌻🇺🇸☘️ (@MiaFarrow) October 12, 2012
Page Six said the digitally altered photo, with the 2016 tweet, were removed this week after its report.
Mia Farrow also issued her statement, in which she decried “some vicious rumors based on untruths” that had appeared online concerning the lives of her three children. She described the “merciless and ceaseless” pain in losing her children. She also explained that she had long been selective in sharing news or photos of her children on social media to respect their desire to have “private lives.”
“To honor their memory, their children and every family that has dealt with the death of a child, I am posting this message,” Farrow wrote.
Farrow said that Tam died from an accidental prescription overdose, related to a heart ailment and “agonizing migraines” she suffered. She said another daughter, Lark, died in 2008 at age 35 from complications of HIV/AIDS, while a son, Thaddeus, died by suicide in 2016 at age 29.
Regarding my children pic.twitter.com/ApiSeBFx9C
— Mia Farrow 🏳️🌈 🌻🇺🇸☘️ (@MiaFarrow) April 1, 2021
Page Six questioned Farrow’s claim about wanting to protect her children’s privacy, as a way to respond to evidence that she has photoshopped Tam out of the family photo. Page Six said the fact that Tam was visible in the original photo Farrow posted in 2012 casts doubt on her privacy explanation.
“We don’t know what changed in the intervening four years, but it makes Farrow’s ‘privacy’ explanation for the photoshopping hard to swallow,” Page Six said.
Farrow has faced accusations before that she treated some of her 14 children more favorably than others. She also has been accused of abusing some of those children.
The accusations first came from Allen, who began a relationship with Mia Farrow since 1980. But their relationship ended in early 1992, when Mia Farrow caught Allen, 56, having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Seven months later, Dylan Farrow, then 7, accused Allen of molesting her in the attic of Mia Farrow’s Connecticut country home.
Allen responded to the molestation allegations by going on a media campaign to defend himself. In interviews with national publications and CBS “60 Minutes,” Allen also justified his love affair with Soon-Yi, who was 35 years his junior, and disparaged Farrow by portraying her as vindictive and cruel. Allen specifically told Time magazine that Farrow had been physically and emotionally abusive to Soon-Yi, whom she adopted from South Korea.
Moses Farrow, one of Mia Farrow’s three children whom she shared with Allen, revived these abuse allegations in a scathing 2018 blog post. The main purpose of Moses Farrow’s blog post was to defend his father against the molestation allegations, but he also described a “dysfunctional” household overseen by his mother and said she had her “own darkness.”
“It was important to my mother to project to the world a picture of a happy blended household of both biological and adopted children, but this was far from the truth,” wrote Moses, who also described Mia Farrow hitting him for minor transgressions and dragging some of his siblings, who were blind or physically disabled, down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or closet.
Tam Farrow was not spared his mother’s irrational anger, Moses Farrow said.
“In fact, Tam struggled with depression for much of her life, a situation exacerbated by my mother refusing to get her help, insisting that Tam was just ‘moody,'” Moses Farrow wrote. “One afternoon in 2000, after one final fight with Mia, which ended with my mother leaving the house, Tam committed suicide by overdosing on pills.”
“My mother would tell others that the drug overdose was accidental, saying that Tam, who was blind, didn’t know which pills she was taking,” Moses Farrow continued. “But Tam had both an ironclad memory and sense of spatial recognition. And, of course, blindness didn’t impair her ability to count.”
After Moses Farrow published his piece, Ronan Farrow tweeted: “Not worth saying much to dignify the repeated campaign to discredit my sister (Dylan), often by attacking our mother.”
He added, “This is all I’ll offer: My mother did an extraordinary job raising us, and none of my siblings with whom I’ve spoken ever witnessed anything but love and care from a single mom who went through hell to keep her kids safe.”
Mia has vigorously denied abusing any of her children, while Allen has vigorously denied the allegation that he molested Dylan.
