At home celebrity Flashback: Mia Farrow adopted a child with special needs in 1995 and named …

I reported this back in January 1995 for the Intelligencer of New York Magazine. Mia Farrow, fresh out of her custody case with Woody Allen, adopted another child. This was a child with special needs whom she named Gabriel Wilk Farrow. The Wilk was a tribute to the judge in the custody case with Woody Allen named Elliot Wilk. (He died in 2002.)

When I called the judge to ask what he thought about it, he replied, “Why don’t you call him Gabriel Farrow Wilk?” Mind you, this was the judge still handling custody issues between Woody and Mia, but Mia sucked right on him and he loved it. Last year, Woody remembered in his memories the photographer Lynn Goldsmith telling him that Wilk had once come to her house drunk and tried to sleep with her.

Mia changed Gabriel’s name to Thaddeus, but kept the Wilk. The sad part is that Thaddeus Wilk Farrow committed suicide in 2016. He was one of three of Mia’s adopted children who died, two of them suicides. Thaddeus, paralyzed with polio, was found in his car suffering from a life-threatening injury along Route 67 in Roxbury, Connecticut – not far from his own home and Mia’s Bridgewater farm.

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Roger Friedman started his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years at Fox News where he wrote the Fox411 column. He wrote the Intelligencer column for NY Magazine in the mid-1990s, covering the OJ Simpson trial as well as for the real Parade magazine (when it was owned by Conde Nast) and writing for the New York Observer, Details, Vogue, Spin, the New York Times, NY Post, Washington Post, and NY Daily News among many publications. He is the author and co-producer of “Only the Strong Survive”, a selection from the Cannes, Sundance and Telluride film festivals directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

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