Woody Allen’s Former Teenage Girlfriend Defends Their ‘70s Relationship; He Was 41, She Was 17.

THR's Gary Baum posted an interview-profile about former Woody Allen girlfriend Christina Engelhardt, but more importantly her eight-year relationship with the director, which inspired him to write "Manhattan." Their affair started in 1976 and ended 8 years later in 1984. It was, by all accounts, a very sexual relationship which happened when she was 17 and he was 41. Eventually, Engelhardt would begin partaking in threesomes with Woody and Mia Farrow in the ’80. Baum writes about the menage-a-trois', “Despite the initial shock of jealousy, Engelhardt says she grew to like Farrow over the course of the ‘handful’ of three-way sex sessions that followed at Allen’s penthouse as they smoked joints and bonded over a shared fondness for animals.”

As mentioned, Woody's relationship with Engelhardt inspired  Mariel Hemingway‘s character Tracy in "Manhattan." Of note, Woody biographers also claim Stacey Nelkin, who hooked up with Woody when she was a Stuyvesant High School student in ’77, was the other inspiration. Notice that neither she nor Nelkin have ever characterized their hookups with Allen as anything less than consensual. 

So what gives? Given the context that this relationship with Engelhardt started in the ’70s, which had a whole different set of rules when it came to wrongs and rights in relationships, the notion that you can apply this story in a #MeToo context is a little bewildering and far-reaching. Not to say that Baum does that, but the Twitter hounds have been doing it all day since this story broke by categorizing Woody as a manipulative, privileged, white male that tried to use his fame to snag these women. Engelhardt, on page at least, starts to realize that she needs to say something and refuses to adhere to the witch hunters, “I’m not attacking Woody,” she tells Baum. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”