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4.2.12
WC: 191694

In the middle of the meeting, we received notice that Woody’s lawyers, the very ones we were discreetly negotiating with, had publicly filed a lawsuit against Mia, and that Woody was about to hold a press conference in which he was going to accuse Mia of making up stories about him.

I was shocked at this duplicity. I’m not used to dealing with lawyers who mislead their opponents in this way.

Woody Allen’s suit was seeking custody of several of the children Mia had originally adopted, as well as the one biological child they had conceived together. IT was an extraordinarily stupid move on the part of Allen’s lawyers, because at the time he filed the custody suit, Woody Allen barely knew the children and their siblings, had no idea who their friends were, did not know the names of their pediatricians and had virtually nothing to do with their upbringing. Mia Farrow, on the other hand, was a hands-on mother who was deeply involved in every aspect of her children’s lives.

At the trial, Woody’s lawyers pulled off an even more bone-headed maneuver. They claimed that Levett and I, by seeking to resolve the matter quietly, were “blackmailing” Woody into settling the case favorably to Mia. This was a ridiculous claim, as the judge found. Courtroom observers could not believe that Woody’s lawyers would force me to appear as a witness, knowing that I would surely side with Mia in her efforts to maintain custody over her children. But having been falsely accused of trying to blackmail Woody, I had no choice but to testify as to precisely what had transpired. No one could understand why Woody’s lawyers had decided on a tactic that would make me a witness. But I knew something they didn’t know, which led me to conclude that they put me in this position not out of a desire to help Woody, since there was no way my testimony could in any way support his claim. They accused me of blackmail in an effort to hurt me. That, at least, was my assessment, based on what I knew.

Why would they want to hurt me rather than help their own client? Because the senior partner of the law firm representing Woody, a former prosecutor named Robert Morvillo, was seeking revenge against me for my having prevented him from becoming the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That was his dream job and he was about to get it when I exposed his prosecutorial misconduct in a case I was litigating. He had essentially bribed a key government witness with money that was owed to the creditors of a bankrupt corporation. He had arranged for the witness to obtain the bankrupt funds which he knew had been secreted in a Caribbean account. In doing so, Morvillo had committed two serious crimes: bribing a witness and facilitating the stealing bankrupt funds. The federal district judge who presided over the case wrote a scathing opinion condemning Morvillo’s actions. That opinion appeared as a front page story in the Village Voice, thus scuttling any chance Morvillo had of receiving a federal appointment. Morvillo was so angry that he told the Village Voice that if he ever saw me again, he would “deck” me. He never had a chance to throw a punch at me, and so he decided, in my opinion, to use this lawsuit as a way to deck me. I’ll bet that he never told Woody Allen of his hidden agenda.

As any decent lawyer would expect, the ploy backfired. My letter to Woody, coupled with the testimony of other lawyers who were involved in the negotiations, proved that my interest was in protecting the children not in blackmailing Woody. I testified that I was seeking:

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