Two topless activists interrupted a jazz concert in Germany featuring famed director Woody Allen Tuesday night in protest of Allen’s alleged abuse of his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.
The 81-year-old “Annie Hall” director was playing the clarinet on stage with his New Orleans Jazz Band in Hamburg when the topless pair — sporting flowers on their heads and words written across their torsos — stormed the stage and began shouting. They were quickly dragged off by security.
The women rushed the stage, as seen in video clips uploaded to YouTube, yelling, “Stop the silence!” the New York Times reported.
Their bodies were covered in quotes from an open letter Farrow penned in 2014 accusing Allen of abuse, including a line that read, “Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.”
Allen remained calm and seated throughout the ordeal, and continued playing his instrument as soon as the women left the stage.
Farrow was adopted by actress Mia Farrow shortly after her birth in 1985, and eventually co-adopted by her mother’s partner Allen in 1991.
In the open letter, she detailed Allen’s alleged sexual assault, marking the first time she spoke publicly about the rumors that had dogged the pair since the early ’90s.
Farrow alleged that Allen first abused her when she was 7 years old, and wrote that the fact that he had gotten “away with what he did to (her) haunted” her as she grew up. Allen was never convicted of a crime, and has long denied the allegations, even responding to her letter with one of his own.
“Of course I did not molest Dylan,” he wrote in 2014. “I loved her and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father and exploited by a mother more interested in her own festering anger than her daughter’s well-being.”
Allen is currently married to Soon-Yi Previn, another one of Mia Farrow’s adopted daughters.
The two protesters were members of the Paris-based feminist activist group Femen, according to the group’s Facebook page. Femen members have previously protested in places like the 2012 London Olympics and the Grand Mosque of Paris.
It is unclear if the women were arrested by Hamburg authorities, but local news source SHZ reports that they were handing out flyers at the show’s end. The same source also reports that Allen dismissed the disruption as “stupid.”
