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When Woody Allen was 41 years old, he began an eight-year affair with a 16-year-old named Babi Christina Englehardt. Babi Christina has told her story for the first time to The Hollywood Reporter – you can read the piece here. True story: I’m hopped up on cold medicine and I feel such a bizarre mixture of nausea, disgust and apathy with this story. I know I should be outraged, and maybe I am, but Babi Christina does not come across well in this interview, and it’s skewing any sympathy I would have had for her. She’s 58 years old now, and a mother of two daughters, and she spends the first chunk of her interview trying to explain how she seduced Woody Allen because she was so cool and different and special. Lady, he slept with you because you were 16 and that got him off.

Sixteen, emerald-eyed, blond, an aspiring model with a confident streak and a painful past: Babi Christina Engelhardt had just 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 modeling 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 (and Allen’s personal scandals, including a claim of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow) has turned what had been a melancholic if still sweet memory into something much more uncomfortable. Like others among her generation — she just turned 59 on Dec. 4 — Engelhardt 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.

Time, though, has transfigured what she’s long viewed as a secret, unspoken monument to their then-still-ongoing relationship: 1979?s Manhattan, in which 17-year-old Tracy (Oscar-nominated Mariel Hemingway) enthusiastically beds Allen’s 42-year-old character Isaac “Ike” Davis. The film has always “reminded me why I thought he was so interesting — his wit is magnetic,” Engelhardt says. “It was why I liked him and why I’m still impressed with him as an artist. How he played with characters in his movies, and how he played with me.”

Even with hindsight, though, she’s unwilling to indict Allen, who declined to comment for this story. “What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective,” she offers. “I’m not attacking Woody,” she says. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

I suppose it’s just a sad story, because what this is really about is how an exploitative sexual encounter during your formative teenage years can warp your perspective throughout your entire adult life. It’s bizarre to me that Babi Christina hasn’t done the work in therapy, and that she doesn’t seem to understand that her story isn’t a “love story.” Anyway, in case you needed a reminder – Woody Allen is gross. He’s always been gross. He always liked underage girls. He should be in jail.

Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ muse speaks out on their secret “love story”: “I have no regrets” https://t.co/9L2aPh8Uu9 pic.twitter.com/vFzslJpEQ9

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 17, 2018

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