Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of director Woody Allen, has mostly remained quiet over the years about her marriage to the man who was in a long-term relationship with her adoptive mother during her childhood. But she’s broken her silence for a New York magazine profile, published Sunday night, in which she recounts the story of her relationship with the director, who’s faced renewed scrutiny in recent years over allegations from his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow that he sexually assaulted her when she was a child. Allen has denied the allegations, which Farrow first made in the 1990s, repeated in a 2014 open letter in the New York Times, and repeated in a TV interview in January. Farrow’s brother, Ronan Farrow, who believes his sister’s account, kept the story in the news with a guest column in the Hollywood Reporter in 2016, before his reporting on the Harvey Weinstein story made him a household name. In Previn’s account, Dylan’s story is entirely a product of Mia Farrow’s anger at Woody Allen, with whom she was embroiled in a custody dispute at the time of the initial allegations; Dylan herself doesn’t really enter into the equation:

I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia—none of that. 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.

The bulk of the article, however, is an account of Previn’s experiences as Mia Farrow’s adoptive daughter, which, according to Previn, lands somewhere between “miserable” and “psychological and physical abuse.” She says Farrow slapped her, threw things at her, drummed it into her head that she should be ashamed of her learning disability, and on one occasion threatened to send her to an insane asylum, which terrified Previn, who took the threat seriously, having spent time in an orphanage before Farrow adopted her. (A Farrow family spokesperson denied these allegations.) Moses Farrow, who was also adopted by Mia and has disputed Dylan’s allegations while painting a nightmarish portrait of Mia as a mother, shows up to describe her parenting style as a “total breakdown of your spirit, to ensure that you would do what she wanted you to do,” adding, “It’s the honeymoon when you’re first adopted, then the veil gets pulled back and you start seeing Mia for who she is.”

Beyond the horror stories about Mia Farrow’s mothering, Previn gives her version of her relationship with her husband: Disconcertingly enough, the two started getting to know each other when Allen offered to take her to school after she injured an ankle playing soccer in eleventh grade. Their affair began when she was in college; although the precise timeline is hazy, Soon-Yi remembers Allen showing her The Seventh Seal during the trip home from college when the two first kissed. “We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it,” Previn says, later repeating how flattered she was to receive Allen’s attentions given the way Mia Farrow allegedly treated her:

I know this is no justification. But Mia was never kind to me, never civil. And here was a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot, retarded, if I’d stayed with Mia. I wasn’t the one who went after Woody—where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That’s why the relationship has worked: I felt valued. It’s quite flattering for me. He’s usually a meek person, and he took a big leap.

Previn, like Allen, flatly rejects the idea that her relationship with Allen had anything to do with revenge, asking, “Would I be with him for over 20 years to get vengeance at Mia?” But she does concede that there “could be something very Freudian” in Allen’s decision to leave nude Polaroids of Previn out on a mantel where Mia Farrow could find them, leading her to discover their affair. But if you’re expecting the article’s author, Daphne Merkin—who lamented in a New York Times opinion piece in January that the #MeToo movement risked “stripping sex of eros”—to push back too hard on any of this, you’ll be disappointed: She’s been friends with Allen for nearly as long as Soon-Yi has been alive.

Merkin and Allen’s close friendship was the basis for Dylan Farrow’s initial objection to the piece—Page Six reported that she thinks Merkin was hand-picked because her sympathies lie with Allen—and although New York magazine said in a statement that Merkin’s friendship with her subject was “disclosed and is part of the story,” that disclosure, which comes packaged with an appreciation of Allen’s “lack of a discernable ego” and a lament that he is unwilling or unable “to contest his ongoing vilification”—doesn’t give much reason to think Merkin was the best person to weigh competing claims about Allen’s past:

I myself have been friends with Allen for over four decades and have always been somewhat mystified by him, in part because of the almost Aspergian aloneness of the man and in part because of the genuine diffidence—the lack of a discernible ego—that lies just beneath both a lifetime’s worth of ambitious productivity and his nebbishy film persona. His unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to contest his ongoing vilification—or, when he does take it on, to fan the flames (“I should be the poster boy for the #MeToo movement,” he recently told Argentine TV. “I’ve worked with hundreds of actresses, and not a single one—big ones, famous ones, ones starting out—have ever, ever suggested any kind of impropriety at all”)—also contributed to Soon-Yi’s decision to talk publicly.

But even filtered through an admittedly less-than-objective observer, Previn’s perspective has been mostly absent so far, except for a 1992 statement that urged people not to “get hysterical,” and her current thinking is an interesting data point, even though it seems unlikely to change anyone’s mind. In response to the article, Dylan Farrow tweeted out a joint statement from herself and seven of her siblings: Matthew, Sascha, Fletcher, and Daisy Previn and Ronan, Isaiah, and Quincy Farrow:

I'm grateful to my siblings for standing by me and my mother. Statement from Matthew Previn, Sascha Previn, Fletcher Previn, Daisy Previn, Ronan Farrow, Isaiah Farrow, and Quincy Farrow: pic.twitter.com/aBjWFUJjdH — Dylan Farrow (@RealDylanFarrow) September 17, 2018

Meanwhile, Ronan Farrow tweeted a separate statement of his own, calling the article a “hit job” and saying that New York had “done something shameful here:”

Statement on New York magazine, which has done something shameful here: pic.twitter.com/xGeQP341OG — Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) September 17, 2018

Amazon Studios produced Allen’s latest movie, A Rainy Day in New York but have reportedly shelved it; stars Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet both donated their salaries to charity after Dylan Farrow’s television interview in January.