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. She handed him a note that included her phone number and a message that read, “Since you’ve signed enough autographs, here’s mine!” 
 
 Engelhardt said that Allen, who was 41 at the time, called and invited her to his Fifth Avenue penthouse. But she told him she was still in high school, living with her family in rural New Jersey as she pursued her modeling ambitions in Manhattan. Engelhardt said they began their physical relationship before she turned 17, which would not have been legal in New York. 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. I have no regrets.” 
 
 She added, “It’s almost as if I’m now expected to trash him.” 
 
 In her unpublished manuscript memoirs, however, Engelhardt acknowledges that Allen was in full control of their affair. Time, though, has transfigured what she's long viewed as a secret, unspoken monument to their then-still-ongoing relationship: 1979's Manhattan, in which 17-year-old Tracy (Oscar-nominated Mariel Hemingway) enthusiastically beds Allen's 42-year-old character Isaac "Ike" Davis. “What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective,” she told the publication. "I'm not attacking Woody," she says. This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. Following her time with Allen, she went on to become a platonic muse to Federico Fellini during the auteur's late-life journeys in Rome and Tulum, Mexico, then spent years tending to egos as a hostess in the executive dining room at Paramount before landing her current gig, working as an assistant for producer Bob Evans. Engelhardt, who said she had been a fan of Allen’s work before they met, said, “I was a pleaser, agreeable. "Knowing he was a director, I didn't argue. I was coming from a place of devotion.” 
 
 She said that Allen would bring in other women for threesomes, including Farrow. They operated under two key unspoken rules: There'd be zero discussion about his work, and — owing to the celebrity's presumed necessity for privacy — they could only meet at his place. “I felt sick,” Engelhardt wrote in a manuscript about meeting Farrow. “I didn’t want to be there at all, and yet I couldn’t find the courage to get up and leave. 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.” 
 
 Eventually, she said she and Farrow became friends. “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 wrote. “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.” 
 
 As of Farrow, Engelhardt said, “I always had the impression that she was doing this because he wanted it.” 
 
 Allen was thrust into #MeToo movement scrutiny after estranged son Ronan Farrow rehashed allegations that Allen had molested daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 when she was 7 years old. Engelhardt recalls when the story broke about Allen's relationship with Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn (now his wife of nearly 21 years). The Hollywood Reporter said Allen, now 83, didn’t respond to requests for comment on its story. Engelhardt last heard from Allen in January 2001, when he sent her a letter thanking her for sending him a copy of a documentary she'd appeared in about the making of The Voice of the Moon, Fellini's final film. “I recall our times together fondly,” he wrote. “If you’re ever in New York I would love you to meet my wife — she’d like you. We get out to California every so often. Engelhardt assumed, given their history, that a proposed meeting with Allen and Previn wasn't meant to be platonic.
– A California woman says she was Woody Allen's secret teenage lover—and is telling her story of adoration, disillusion, and threesomes with Woody and Mia Farrow. Babi Christina Engelhardt was apparently just 16 when she dropped a note at Allen's restaurant table in 1976 with her phone number: "Since you've signed enough autographs, here's mine!" Responding to his call, she began an affair at his Fifth Avenue penthouse but played by the 41-year-old's rules: no talk about his work and no meeting outside his place. "Knowing he was a director, I didn't argue," she tells the Hollywood Reporter. "I was coming from a place of devotion." Yet she was shocked four years later to learn he was dating Mia Farrow, who joined Allen and Engelhardt for a "handful" of threesomes. Unfulfilled after eight years, Engelhardt joined filmmaker Frederico Fellini's circle in Rome and later moved to Beverly Hills, where she's now a divorced mother of two daughters. At 59, she has no regrets despite the rise of #MeToo: "This is not 'bring down this man,'" she says. But she was hurt to become "little more than a plaything" and cried when his film Manhattan seemed to portray their relationship as "just a fling." She was also shocked by his marriage to Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn: "Now he had no barriers. It was total disrespect." Allen later offered to visit her with Previn, but Engelhardt declined what seemed like an amorous proposal. "I used to dream of making love to Woody," she says. "Now I'm dreaming of him dying in my arms." Allen is yet to comment on the story, per the Boston Herald. (See what Previn has to say about her husband's controversies.)