Woody Allen is facing allegations from Babi Christina Engelhardt, inset. Photos / Getty Images
Woody Allen is facing allegations from Babi Christina Engelhardt, inset. Photos / Getty Images
An actress and model claims she had an eight-year affair with Woody Allen that began when she was just 16.
The affair included threesomes with the director and Mia Farrow, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Babi Christina Engelhardt, now 59, told the publication it all started in 1976 when she saw Allen at a restaurant and slipped the then-41-year-old her number.
Woody Allen is facing new allegations. Photo / Getty Images
They became physically intimate a few weeks later. She wouldn't turn 17 — the legal age of consent in New York — until two months later.
"I was a pleaser, agreeable. Knowing he was a director, I didn't argue. I was coming from a place of devotion," she told THR.
"The curtains were always drawn. The view must have been spectacular. I wasn't there for the view."
Two of Engelhardt's close friends from that time said they were aware of the affair, and her younger brother Mike recalled Allen calling their parents' home.
"I'd holler out, 'Babi, it's Woody!' My brain didn't think something romantic; I was 11 or 12 and a huge fan. I mean, 'Bananas'?!" he said.
About a year into their affair, Allen began introducing other woman for threesomes and after about four years, he introduced her to his "girlfriend" Farrow.
"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 wrote in her private memoir, according 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. 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.
Babi Christina Engelhardt in 2006. Photo / Getty Images
"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," she wrote. "I used to think this was a form of mother-father with the two of them. 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."
The affair ended when Engelhardt was no longer satisfied with the arrangement and left New York.
"I thought I was special, and then I realised he's a big person and he's got a big life — I'm in his life. It's a rainbow with many colours, and I'm one of them."
However she says she's not making her experience public in order to "attack" Allen, but rather, simply to tell her own story.
"What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective. 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."
