Woody Allen's Alleged Former Teen Girlfriend Comes Forward

Woody Allen's alleged teen lover reveals she had an eight-year affair with the director beginning when she was just 16 years old in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Babi Christina Engelhardt, now just Christina Engelhardt, said she decided to come forward after the #MeToo movement put accusations against Woody Allen back into the spotlight, including the claim by his daughter Dylan Farrow that he molested her as a child, as well as growing public discomfort about his marriage to his adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Looking back, Engelhardt is not angry; she's questioning her role in the director's life given everything else we've learned during 2018's reckoning.

"What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective," she explained to THR. "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."

Some notable revelations from her recollections of their relationship, which Engelhardt says began when she left her number for the director at a restaurant in 1976, including an allegation that Allen often organized threesomes with Engelhardt and other teenage girls, as well as threesomes with Engelhardt and his then-wife, Mia Farrow.

"There were times the three of us were together, and it was actually great fun," Engelhardt remembered. "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."

Over time, however, her feelings changed. Growing older made her more cognizant of the power dynamic between the two of them.

"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," she admitted. "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."

When watching Manhattan, one of Allen's films in which he begins a relationship with a teenager, Engelhardt wrote in a manuscript of her unpublished memoir: "I cried through most of the movie, the dawning of realization slowly settling in as my greatest fears crept to the surface.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?"

Throughout her time with Allen, Engelhardt dreamed of success in both the modeling and film industry but noted that Allen refused to help her get a SAG card. Once their affair ended, she went on to work with Federico Fellini, then as a hostess at the executive dining room at Paramount, and now works as an assistant for producer Bob Evans.

Refinery29 has reached out to Woody Allen and Mia Farrow for comment.