What do you call a powerful 41-year-old man seducing a 16-year-old girl?
A. Sexual abuse
B. Statutory rape
C. An “affair” with a “secret teen lover”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, it’s C.
In a lengthy expose detailing Woody Allen’s “clandestine romance of eight years,” it was revealed that Allen began a sexual relationship with Babi Christina Engelhardt when she was just 16. The relationship began when Allen was a 41-year-old titan of Hollywood and Manhattan. At the time, the legal age of consent in New York was 17.
Given Allen’s past personal life and art, this story ought to surprise no one. Not only are age-inappropriate relationships par for the course in Allen’s films, but this is also a man who began an affair with and then married his stepdaughter, and he has been accused of molesting another child, Dylan Farrow.
“The former teenage model Woody Allen allegedly dated in the 70s speaks,” wrote Vanity Fair.
“Model says she had an affair with Woody Allen when she was 16 — but has ‘no regrets,'” recapped NBC News.
The Hollywood Reporter article uncritically frames the entire relationship as salacious and sexy rather than as predatory and exploitative. You have to read paragraphs on paragraphs about threesomes and jet-setting before learning that Engelhardt was previously a victim of multiple rapes.
The Allen story and some of the public reception to it highlight how inadequately our contemporary norms and legal system deal with relationships when victims are manipulated into loving their abusers or dismissed as unworthy of concern and protection by authorities and society.
Consider that serial predator Jeffrey Epstein went to jail for prostitution charges, not pedophilia and sexual assault, even when his victims were as young as 14. Prosecutors tried Cyntoia Brown for murder as an adult, even though the then-16-year-old was a victim of sex trafficking, and she was arguably defending herself from her abuser. And Nancy French has been forced to defend herself from heartless smears that she was capable of consenting to sexual activity with a preacher when she was just 12-years-old.
Consent is often unnecessarily complicated on college campuses, where the debate is most heated. One reason is that we have fostered a cavalier sexual culture that reduces sex to an everyday, pedestrian interaction, divorced from commitment and mutual affection. One consequence is a string of false narratives about middle-aged men’s “affairs,” “prostitution,” “girlfriends,” “teen lovers,” when we’re really talking about their young victims.
