On September 21, 2016, a Wednesday just after midday, a car sat on the shoulder of Route 67 in Roxbury, Connecticut, a two-lane road running through wooded hills about ninety miles northeast of Manhattan. Inside it, Thaddaeus Farrow, twenty-seven years old, was dying of a gunshot wound. Emergency responders arrived, but he did not survive. The Connecticut medical examiner ruled it a suicide.
Thaddaeus had been adopted as a boy from an orphanage in Calcutta. He was paraplegic from polio, unable to walk, and unfamiliar with English when his mother brought him to America, fitted him with braces, gave him therapy and a house in the Connecticut countryside, and watched him learn to drive, live independently, and train toward becoming a police officer. He had survived more than most people survive in a lifetime. His mother was Mia Farrow, and Thaddaeus was not the first child she had buried.
He was the third to die before age forty in a family of fourteen. The public knew this family through scandal: the Polaroids, Woody Allen, the custody war, the allegation. What the public never fully reckoned with was what happened to the children who had to keep living inside the wreckage long after the cameras moved on. Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow was born on February 9, 1945, in Los Angeles, the daughter of John Farrow, an Academy Award-winning director, and Maureen O’Sullivan, the actress best known as Jane in MGM’s Tarzan films.
The household was Catholic, large and connected, but Mia later described a childhood where glamour concealed instability. Her father drank. Money was not always secure. When Mia was nine, she contracted polio and spent weeks in a hospital ward, separated from her family, surrounded by sick children.
She survived and recovered, but the experience left her with an early awareness of vulnerability, institutional care, and the precariousness of safety. Her father died while she was a teenager. She broke through on television in Peyton Place in 1964, and by 1968 she had starred in Rosemary’s Baby, which made her globally famous as the slight, trusting woman surrounded by forces she cannot control. Her first marriage, to Frank Sinatra, lasted two years, ending in 1968 when she wanted to keep working and he wanted a wife who stayed home.
Her second marriage, to composer and conductor André Previn, began as an affair while he was still married, and they wed in 1970. Their biological sons Matthew and Sasha arrived that year, followed by Fletcher in 1974. Between those births, Mia began adopting: Lark Song from Vietnam in 1973, Daisy from Vietnam in 1976, and Soon-Yi from South Korea in 1977. By the late 1970s, the household held six children, three biological, three adopted.
The marriage ended in 1979, and the children stayed with Mia. In 1980, Woody Allen entered the picture. They never married and never lived together; he kept his apartment on the Upper East Side and she kept hers across Central Park, but he was present at dinners, holidays, and the Connecticut house, embedded in the family’s rhythms. Over the next twelve years the family grew.
Mia adopted Moses, a Korean-born boy with cerebral palsy, in 1980. She and Allen jointly adopted Dylan in 1985. Ronan, their biological son, was born in 1987. In the early 1990s, Mia adopted Tam, a blind girl from Vietnam, and Isaiah; after the split from Allen she adopted Thaddeus from India, then Quincy and Frankie-Min.
In total: fourteen children, gathered from four countries across three decades. The years with Allen were the outward peak. Mia appeared in thirteen of his films, including Hannah and Her Sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo. Privately, the household was dense with logistics, school schedules, therapy appointments, and the particular demands of raising children with disabilities.
Fletcher Previn later said that he and his siblings thought of Allen as another father. In January 1992, Mia went to Allen’s apartment for an ordinary errand and found explicit Polaroid photographs of Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of the woman he had been with for twelve years, a young woman who had grown up in the household he had been part of since she was a child. The discovery was a category collapse. The children experienced Allen as a parent, and his relationship with Soon-Yi rearranged every assumption the family operated on.
Soon-Yi did not return to the role of daughter; she remained with Allen. The younger children were suddenly living in a house where the adults were at war, and Fletcher would later describe the discovery as resetting the parameters of what is possible. Allen did not retreat. He maintained that the relationship with Soon-Yi was between two consenting adults, and he moved legally to retain access to Dylan, Moses, and Ronan.
The family was now operating on two fronts: emotional devastation and a public custody war. In August, the stakes changed completely. Dylan, seven years old, told someone that Allen had touched her inappropriately at Frog Hollow. Allen denied it, then and for the rest of his public life, but the accusation transformed the dispute into a criminal investigation.
Dylan was interviewed multiple times by multiple professionals, videotaped, and her words became ammunition in legal proceedings. On August 13, 1992, Allen filed for custody of Dylan, Moses, and Ronan. The Yale-New Haven Hospital team concluded that Dylan had not been molested, but their methodology was later criticized, and they had destroyed their notes. Connecticut State’s Attorney Frank Maco announced in 1993 that he had probable cause to prosecute Allen but declined in order to spare Dylan trauma.
The decision left the accusation officially unresolved. Allen was never charged. In the custody case, Justice Elliot Wilk denied Allen custody of all three children, describing his behavior toward Dylan as grossly inappropriate. Allen would have limited supervised visitation.
He had lost. But the ruling did not repair what was broken. The family no longer had a common version of its own history. Some children believed Mia, some came to believe Allen, and some tried to survive without choosing.
Fletcher described the household continuing its ordinary rhythms while some siblings were totally derailed, and the decision to edit Allen out of family photographs and home videos so those who wanted to remember the good years could do so without confronting his face. The same events did not distribute evenly. Lark, the eldest adopted daughter, was later identified by family members as one of the siblings most damaged. She receded.
Moses would eventually take the most explosive position, publicly defending Allen and accusing Mia of physical and emotional abuse; Mia denied the claims, but his defection ensured the war never reached a ceasefire. The younger children, Tam, Thaddeus, Isaiah, Quincy, Frankie-Min, entered a family whose defining trauma had already occurred. The residue of that trauma was simply the water they swam in. Thaddeus, who arrived from Calcutta in 1994, later described the overwhelming strangeness of arrival and the shock of being loved.
The rescue was real, and it was not enough. The public moved on. Allen continued making films and married Soon-Yi in 1997; they adopted two daughters. The children inside the household did not have the luxury of moving on, and the deaths started.
Tam died in 2000 at seventeen; no public explanation was given for years. Lark died on Christmas Day 2008, at thirty-five, in Brooklyn, with no cause publicly released. Thaddeus died in 2016 at twenty-seven by suicide. Three children dead before forty.
It was not until 2021 that Mia publicly stated Tam had died of an accidental overdose of prescription medication, and that Lark had died of complications related to HIV and AIDS contracted from a previous partner. Moses later disputed the account of Tam’s death. Meanwhile the surviving children built divergent lives. Ronan Farrow, four when the family exploded, published a story in The New Yorker in October 2017 detailing allegations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, and became a symbol of trauma transmuted into purpose.
Dylan published an open letter in The New York Times in 2014 describing what she said Allen had done to her when she was seven, and later built a life as a writer, advocate, and mother, publishing the Hush fantasy series and marrying. Moses became a family therapist, writing a lengthy essay in 2018 that defended Allen and described Mia as controlling and abusive. Both accounts could not be entirely true, and the family remained unable to agree on the most basic facts of its shared childhood. In 1997 Mia published her memoir, What Falls Away.
In 2021, HBO released the four-part documentary Allen vs. Farrow, which presented home video, court documents, and interviews with Mia, Dylan, and Ronan, and made the case that the allegation had never been properly adjudicated; it drew criticism from those who felt it ignored contradictory accounts. The Farrow family story had become a cultural text onto which the public projected arguments about abuse, belief, celebrity, and memory. Every few years it resurfaced, and the children were pulled back into a narrative they had not chosen.
The family that exists today is not the family of 1991. Mia Farrow is eighty-one, lives in Connecticut, remains publicly active, received her first Tony nomination in 2025, and continues her humanitarian advocacy. Ronan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Dylan is a writer, married, with a daughter.
Moses works as a family therapist; his website does not mention his mother. Soon-Yi has been married to Allen for twenty-nine years. Fletcher, Matthew, Sasha, and Daisy live more privately. Quincy, Frankie-Min, and Isaiah, the youngest, remain largely invisible; their privacy may itself be a mercy in a family where visibility has so often been indistinguishable from harm.
Tam is gone, Lark is gone, Thaddeus is gone. Lark’s daughter, Sara, now sits in family photographs beside Mia, in the place where her mother used to be. That image is what remains when a family keeps going after losses that should, by any reasonable measure, have been enough to stop it. The public saw a scandal.
The children lived a life. The distance between those two things is where the real story has always been.