Model claims she was Woody Allen’s secret lover at age 16
NEW YORK: This is one new face of the #MeToo movement, but the so-called victim is not seeking damages.
The alleged perpetrator: director Woody Allen, previously slammed for bedding and marrying his stepdaughter.
In 1976, 16-year-old model Babi Christina Engelhardt embarked on a secret eight-year affair with Allen, then 41.
Engelhardt had caught Woody Allen’s gaze at legendary New York City power restaurant Elaine’s. It was October 1976, and when Engelhardt returned from the ladies’ room, she dropped a note on his table with her phone number. It brazenly read: “Since you’ve signed enough autographs, here’s mine!”
Soon, Allen rang, inviting her to his Fifth Avenue penthouse. The already-famous 41-year-old director, still hot off Sleeper and who’d release Annie Hall the following spring, never asked her age. But she told him she was still in high school, living with her family in rural New Jersey as she pursued her modelling ambitions in Manhattan. Within weeks, they’d become physically intimate at his place. She wouldn’t turn 17, legal in New York, until that December.
The pair embarked on, by her account, a clandestine romance of eight years, the claustrophobic, controlling and yet dreamy dimensions of which she’s still processing more than four decades later. For her, the recent re-examination of gender power dynamics initiated by the #MeToo movement has turned what had been a melancholic if still sweet memory into something much more uncomfortable.
Engelhard, now 59, is resistant to attempts to have the life she led then be judged by what she considers today’s newly established norms. “It’s almost as if I’m now expected to trash him,” she says.
Engelhardt and her journey, shared here publicly for the first time, are complicated. She’s proud of her teenage self as an up-by-her-bootstraps heroine who successfully beguiled a “celebrated genius.” Even now, she holds herself largely responsible for remaining in the relationship as long as she did and for the frustration and sorrow that ultimately came with the liaison — one in which, by her description, she never held any agency.
Even with hindsight, though, she’s unwilling to indict Allen, who declined to comment on the allegations. “What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective,” she said. “I’m not attacking Woody. This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”