Christina Engelhardt’s Relationship With Woody Allen in Her Teens Reminds Us How Much Further We Have to Go
Today, The Hollywood Reporter released an interview and profile on Babi Christina Engelhardt, a former model who detailed how, at the age of sixteen, she entered into a relationship with director Woody Allen—or rather, was preyed on by Allen when she was still considered a minor and unable to consent in the state of New York.
Engelhardt might have given Allen her phone number, but Allen was 41 at the time. It goes without saying that he should have known better than to pursue a teenage girl.
The Hollywood Reporter frames her story with the titillating headline “Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired ‘Manhattan.'” The story is more heartbreaking than raunchy, though; Engelhardt comes across as a woman who deserved more, who had no idea what she was getting into, and who was used for eight years until Allen began dating Mia Farrow.
Now a mother of two college-age daughters, Engelhardt is reckoning with her own past. Though she says she is not coming forward to demonize Allen, the result paints him as a monster.
The article details how Engelhardt gave Allen her number, but also told him at the beginning of their relationship that “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.”
Allen knowingly committed statutory rape by sleeping with Engelhardt. There is no other way to describe what happened. Engelhardt’s goal may not have been to trash Allen by coming forward, but the facts speak for themselves.
The story is deeply tragic though, with sections such as this:
“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. (Most experts would contend that such an uneven power dynamic is inherently exploitative.)”
There is no reason for Engelhardt to hold herself responsible for that. She was a teenager who was below the age of consent when this began; Allen was in his forties.
Engelhardt also talks about how she was the influence for the character of Tracy, a teenager who beds Allen’s 42-year-old self insert in Manhattan, saying in the manuscript of her memoirs,
“I cried through most of the movie, the dawning of realization slowly settling in as my greatest fears crept to the surface. 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?”
It’s also worth noting that there is another presumed muse for Tracy: Stacey Nelkin, who dated Allen when she was still seventeen years old, after they met while the director was making Annie Hall. While seventeen is the age of consent in New York, that’s still a highly disturbing age gap and power imbalance.
Engelhardt also touched on the Farrow family; while she did not address allegations of child sexual abuse aimed at Allen, she talked about the times she spent with Mia Farrow and Allen, writing,
“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. 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. While we were together, the whole thing was a game that was being operated solely by Woody so we never quite knew where we stood… “
“I used to think this was a form of mother-father with the two of them,” Engelhardt said to The Hollywood Reporter. “To me, that whole relationship was very Freudian: how I admired them, how he’d already broken me in, how I let that be all right.”
Speaking of Soon-Yi Previn, Allen’s wife and Farrow’s daughter, she says, “I felt sorry for Mia. I thought, ‘Didn’t Woody have enough ‘extra,’ with or without her, that the last thing he had to do was to go for something that was totally hers?’ He had groomed Mia, trained her, to put up with all of this. Now he had no barriers. It was total disrespect.”
As I said above, this story is a tragedy, but with it comes a searing indictment of Allen, although one sadly unlikely to change anyone’s mind. For anyone not convinced of his abusive behavior before, this will likely do little to convince them otherwise, because at this point, anyone who wants Allen’s filmography to remain untarnished has to be more concerned about an artist’s artistic legacy than his actual behavior. When films like Manhattan are so tangled up with his own personal behavior, it’s impossible to fully separate Allen from his work.
Allen’s most recent film, A Rainy Day In New York, which also apparently contained a scene of a teenager flirting with a forty-year-old, has been tabled indefinitely. This story should seal Allen’s exile from Hollywood, and hopefully polite society, but it probably will not work like that. Instead, actors like Javier Bardem or Cate Blanchett will still speak in defense of him. His fans will still praise his work and find ways to discredit those who have spoken against him.
Last week, we wrote about a film coming out that will deal with Harvey Weinstein. I thought that maybe making a film this early, while Hollywood hasn’t solved its abuse problem on the whole, was a bit of a bad move, and this just drives the point home. Until we’re willing to exclude all predators from Hollywood, we have no business celebrating taking one down. Until Allen is gone, we can’t stop calling him out and demanding justice, either.
(via The Hollywood Reporter, image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
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