Woman says she dated Woody Allen when he was 41 and she was 16

A woman has come forward to allege she had an eight-year sexual relationship with filmmaker Woody Allen beginning when she was underage.

Former model Babi Christina Engelhardt told The Hollywood Reporter Monday that she met Allen and began a relationship with him in 1976. She says they first became intimate when she was 16 years old, under New York's age of consent, which is 17. He was 41 at the time, and Engelhardt says while Allen never asked for her age, she told him she was in high school. This mirrors the plot of Allen's 1979 film Manhattan, in which Allen plays a 42-year-old man who dates a teenager.

Several people, including Engelhardt's friends, brother, and a photographer, confirmed her account to the Reporter. She describes Allen as dictating the terms of the relationship and making her "sick" when he suddenly introduced her to his "girlfriend," Mia Farrow. She says that "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." Engelhardt also says she cried when she saw Manhattan and asked herself, "How was our partnership not something more than just a fling?" Unlike the movie's couple, Allen kept his relationship with Engelhardt very much a secret. "I was kept away," she says.

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While Engelhardt says she has more complicated feelings about the relationship today, she clarified that she's not speaking out to "bring down" Allen but to "provide perspective." Allen has been accused of sexually abusing his daughter, Dylan Farrow, when she was seven years old, an allegation he has denied. He declined to provide a comment in response to Engelhardt's account. Read the full story at The Hollywood Reporter.