Pretty vicious ... according to Soon-Yi Previn her adopted daughter

Article on Soon-Yi
Introducing Soon-Yi Previn As controversies tumbled around her, the daughter of Mia Farrow and wife of Woody Allen stayed silent for decades. No more.
By Daphne Merkin Photographs by Dan Winters
https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/soon-yi-previn-speaks.html

Here are some excerpts of this interview:

“I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that,” Soon-Yi tells me quietly but firmly. “But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. [Mia] has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”

“I[Woody] am a pariah,” he says one day when he joins us for lunch, wearing his usual outfit of a light-blue button-down and rumpled khakis. “People think that I was Soon-Yi’s father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter.” (As if to underscore his point, he mentions that his and Soon-Yi’s contribution to Hillary Clinton’s last campaign was unceremoniously returned.)

“I remember being extremely poor,” Soon-Yi tells me in our first sit-down interview in her book-lined living room. “You know, no furniture, nothing. Just a bare room and a mother, and we had a backyard, kind of with concrete. No trees, no foliage. I spent most of my time in the backyard, I don’t know why. And then I decided one day to run away. That this couldn’t be for life, that there must be something better out there. I don’t know how I came to that realization, but it was miraculous.”

When Soon-Yi was a girl, she says, Farrow asked her to make a tape about her origins, detailing how she’d been the daughter of a prostitute who beat her. The request puzzled her, Soon-Yi says, since she had no memory of anything like that, so she refused.

Farrow’s emissary, a woman named Connie Boll, who worked for a Connecticut organization called the Friends of Children, picked out Soon-Yi from among the children who had been presented one by one onstage at the orphanage to an audience of prospective parents. (When Soon-Yi asked Boll many years later why she had chosen her, Boll said she had been taken by Soon-Yi’s “chutzpah.” She’d twirled around and leaped off the stage while the other children just bowed and walked off.)

From then on, things got worse, in Soon-Yi’s telling, though a family spokesperson refuted all her memories of physical abuse, neglect, or showing favoritism to one child over another. And the custody judge later ruled that Farrow was a “caring and loving parent,” while five of her children with Previn — along with Isaiah, Quincy, and Ronan Farrow — said the same in a statement: “None of us ever witnessed anything other than compassionate treatment in our home.”

Soon-Yi says that from the very beginning, she and Farrow were “like oil and water,” suggesting that maybe it was because by the time she was adopted she was too old to be shaped to Farrow’s specifications. “Mia wasn’t maternal to me from the get-go,” she says with some vehemence. Soon-Yi remembers, for instance, the first bath that Farrow gave her, in a Korean hotel room, as traumatic. “I’d never taken a bath by myself, because in the orphanage it was a big tub and we all got in it. Here, it was for a single person, and I was scared to get in the water by myself. So instead of doing what you would do with an infant — you know, maybe get into the water, put some toys in, put your arm in to show that you’re fine, it’s not dangerous — she just kind of threw me in.”

The household included a virtual menagerie featuring a talking parrot, dogs and cats, newts, and a ferret. Despite the pastoral tranquillity, Soon-Yi says, she felt achingly unhappy, a state of affairs that was not helped by Mia’s and André’s “bone-chilling tempers” or by Mia’s playing favorites. “There was a hierarchy — she didn’t try to hide it, and Fletcher was the star, the golden child,” she says. “Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blond hair and blue eyes.” Soon-Yi had arrived without knowing a word of English, and Mia was impatient with her new daughter’s learning curve. “She tried to teach me the alphabet with those wooden blocks. If I didn’t get them right, sometimes she’d throw them at me or down on the floor.

The family first lived on Martha’s Vineyard, where Soon-Yi remembers an incident in which she was excluded from playing in a paddling pool with the younger children. She “maneuvered” her way in, Soon-Yi says, and when Lark got hurt, “maybe slipped or something,” Farrow rounded on her, yelling, “Look what you’ve done! You never listen! I should send you to an insane asylum!” As Soon-Yi puts it, “I was shaking. I was so scared I thought she was actually going to put me in an insane asylum —