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Woody Allen's affair at 41 with a 17 year old woman ... ( who was not a child by the way )

posted 4 years ago by brux (14840)
3 replies | jump to latest

Woody Allen's Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired 'Manhattan
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/woody-allens-secret-teen-lover-manhattan-muse-speaks-1169782

Sixteen, emerald-eyed, blond, an aspiring model with a confident streak and a painful past: Babi Christina Engelhardt had just caught Woody Allen's gaze at legendary New York City power restaurant Elaine's. It was October 1976, and when Engelhardt returned from the ladies' room, she dropped a note on his table with her phone number. It brazenly read: "Since you've signed enough autographs, here's mine!"
...
The pair embarked on, by her account, a clandestine romance of eight years, the claustrophobic, controlling and yet dreamy dimensions of which she's still processing more than four decades later. For her, the recent re-examination of gender power dynamics initiated by the #MeToo movement (and Allen's personal scandals, including a claim of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow) has turned what had been a melancholic if still sweet memory into something much more uncomfortable. Like others among her generation — she just turned 59 on Dec. 4 — Engelhardt is resistant to attempts to have the life she led then be judged by what she considers today's newly established norms. "It's almost as if I'm now expected to trash him," she says.
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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.)

Even with hindsight, though, she's unwilling to indict Allen, who declined to comment for this story. "What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective," she offers. "I'm not attacking Woody," she says. "This is not 'bring down this man.' I'm talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets."

[–] Orcsquisher (11) 4 years ago

[deleted]

[–] brux (14840) 4 years ago

It's not a popular position to defend a person who has been accused of...anything these days.

LOL, tell me about it. Seriously though, I would rather say ensure an objective evaluation and due process. The best example I can see of media cancelling and rail-roading was the Al Franken thing. That is the case of 0 + 0 + 0 + .... + 0 all adding up to non-zero, and in fact being multiplied and magnified with the media creating a political assassination action against Al - and the really worrying thing was that this was the Conservative and supposed-Liberal media working together to foment and injustice.

I just read in one of the articles about Christina Engelhard that Woody introduced Mia Farrow to her as his girlfriend. So the plot thickens and the story gets deeper and kinkier because the article claimed that she said they had threesomes and that Mia and Engelhard knew and liked each other. If I can find this other article again I will post the link and some excerpts.

If I had to be cold and calculating about it I'd say that a girl, a women, who is 17 about to be 18, and spends a lot of time in NYC and knows what's what enough to pass Woody a note with her number on it. What else is she saying, and how does that get manipulated into headlines that read Woody seduced Engelhard. Engelhard, who said "This made me who I am. I have no regrets".

When I was in high-school, a long time ago people got into mischief. If it was not forced, violent or hurtful it was their decision to make, and their experiences to evaluate.

The attempted cancellation here, looking at the whole possible spectrum of what is claimed and what might be, is about child molestation. Did Woody Allen touch Dylan inappropriately. They use the term grooming, but as far as I know grooming is not a legal term or a crime. Dylan is the person who this has all dumped down on at the age of 7, so I have unending sympathy and empathy for her because this has defined her life in a crappy way. At least it looks like that to me. Assuming the worst possible scenario, does this deserve to be made public and does Woody deserve to be "cancelled" for want of a better word. You can find people all over these boards that defend Roman Polanski for making a deal with an underage girl's mother to drug her, and anally rape her. There is a lot of weird people willing to say anything on the Internet, so I prefer to stick to linear modes of thought.

I think it is overstitching to say that power is being given to those who claim victimhood. That is just not the case ... maybe more accurate to say power is abused by the media. Victims have the right to tell their stories, and the news should report it and responsible editorialists should put it in perspective. That never happened with this story.

This stands out to me because at the time I was disgusted by what I heard in the media and did my own cancelling of Woody, even though he was my moviemaking hero for all his great movies. For years I ignored his movies. Then I stumbled on some articles that talked about the other side of the story. It took a while before I saw there were actually two sides to the story, and much longer to weigh them fairly in my own mind.

A disparity in age between male and female relationships actually makes sense. Because they have a sex-specific criteria for evaluating attractiveness in one another (obviously with some overlap in interests).

I am extremely skeptical of these evolutionary explanations of justifications for human behavior. They seem to change or be updated, and I don't think we are anywhere close to an objective understanding of our evolution with respect to sexuality, consciousness, behavior, etc. Especially today when the problem is not reproducing, it is flooding the planet with too many humans.

Males value youth and beauty, that which indicates fertility and health (even if they don't actually want offspring).

Our behaviors and wiring is something we do not understand and cannot bring to bear in an argument or creating a world view ... at least one that is not provisional and subject to change.

You made a lot of good points.

[–] brux (14840) 4 years ago

One thing I compare this situation too in terms of cold hard logic and not really having an agreed upon viewpoint in society about is drugs. For many years all drugs were legal ... of rather they just did not register as something the law needed to interfere with. Then they started il-legalizing drugs and alcohol and there were more societal problems and more costs. Now we are back to let people make their own decisions as long as they do not put others in danger or create major societal harm, and in fact the history of this was about discriminating against minorities and creating the ability to snoop into people's lives and for the legal system to get at them easier. Responding to your point about - "The females of our species reach sexual maturity around age 16. Not 18."

We are making decisions about ourselves that seem all-important, but without an understanding of what we are doing long term.