Allen says new love will last

WOODY ALLEN is convinced that his relationship with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter will last, and that the media circus camped outside his Fifth Avenue block of flats will go away.

The beleaguered film-maker, who has been accused of abusing one of his adopted children by Farrow, had to wade through a knot of reporters on Saturday as he made his way to a nearby building, where his psychologist is believed to have an office. Wearing an army surplus cap to hide his eyes from the cameras, Allen seemed irritated by the size of the press corps camped out on his doorstep.

In an interview in Time magazine yesterday, Allen, 56, asked whether he believed the relationship with Soon-Yi, 21, would last, said: 'Yes. I'm in love with her. As soon as the reporters go away, we'll do the things we like to do. We'll walk, eat out, go to the movies and baseball games.'

Farrow's spokesman, John Springer, said the nude pictures of Soon-Yi which Farrow found in Allen's apartment last January, were 'much more than just nice, nude, artistic pictures of her daughter'.

'I'm told they were very explicit,' he said. Another family insider told the New York Daily News that the photographs which alerted Farrow to the existence of the affair were 'more than just artistic nudes like those you might see in a high-class photographic magazine or an art museum'. Farrow's discovery of the photographs ended her 12-year affair with Allen and touched off a vicious battle for the custody of their three children, two of whom are adopted. In all Farrow has 11 children.

Asked by Time about the photos of Soon-Yi, Allen says he took them because 'Soon-Yi had talked about being a model and said to me would I take some pictures of her without her clothes on. And at this time, we had an intimate relationship, so I said 'Sure', and I did. It was just a lark of a moment'.

Allen told Time that last Friday Farrow called him five times to ask: 'Can we stop this grotesque publicity circus?'

'I said: 'You have hired a lawyer, you're parading relatives and the kids on television. You leaked this videotape of Dylan unconscionably.' She said: 'Can't we negotiate this?'

'And I said, first you must clear my name unequivocally. And if you do that we can agree to give Dylan some real therapy to get over some of the dreadful scars of this thing and I am part supervisor of that therapy, then OK, we can talk and see if there's a way of toning things down.'