Former model Christina Engelhardt says in a new profile that she engaged in an eight-year relationship with Woody Allen that began in October 1976 when she was just 16 and the director was 41.
Engelhardt, then Babi Christina Engelhardt, told The Hollywood Reporter that Allen never asked her age, but that she told him she was still in high school. She would not turn 17, then the legal age of consent in New York, until December of that year.
In the piece, Engelhardt says that their relationship was consensual but complicated and she describes having little agency in the relationship.
“I’m not attacking Woody,” Engelhardt told THR. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”
Allen declined to comment to THR. Representatives for Allen did not immediately respond to TheWrap for comment.
Engelhardt also said that she and Allen would engage in threesomes with other young women, including actress Mia Farrow. She says she had been together with Allen for four years when Allen introduced Farrow to Engelhardt as his “girlfriend,” which she says at first made her feel “sick” that she did not leave the relationship, but that she grew to like Farrow over their “handful” of encounters.
“I felt sick. I didn’t want to be there at all, and yet I couldn’t find the courage to get up and leave,” Engelhardt said to THR. “To leave would mean an end to all of this. Looking back now, that’s exactly what I needed, but back then, the idea of not having Woody in my life at all terrified me. So I sat there, patiently, calmly trying to assess the situation, trying to understand why he wanted the two of us to meet.”
“There were times the three of us were together, and it was actually great fun. We enjoyed each other when we were in the moment,” Engelhardt continued to THR. “She was beautiful and sweet, he was charming and alluring, and I was sexy and becoming more and more sophisticated in this game. It wasn’t until after it was done when I really had time to think of how twisted it was when we were together … and how I was little more than a plaything.”
Farrow declined to comment to THR. Farrow did not immediately respond to TheWrap for comment.
Engelhardt also says that she suspects she is in part the inspiration for the teenage character Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway) in Allen’s landmark film “Manhattan” from 1979. She says as part of their relationship, she never discussed Allen’s work and had no idea about the content of the film until she saw it.
“I cried through most of the movie, the dawning of realization slowly settling in as my greatest fears crept to the surface,” Engelhardt wrote in a manuscript about her relationship with Allen obtained by THR, which she says is unpublished and she has kept private. “How could he have felt this way? How was our partnership not something more than just a fling? We had shared such a special bond right from the start, something magical, and now here was his interpretation of me and us on the big screen for all to see in black-and-white. How could he deconstruct my personality and our life together as if it were just some fictional creation for art house fatheads to pore over?”
Read the full profile via THR.