Former model Babi Christina Engelhardt has claimed she had a secret eight-year affair with Woody Allen which began when she was 16.

If the story is completely true, she was legally underage when the affair began, which means the director committed statutory rape.

Describing herself as a willing participant, Babi claims her affair with the controversial film director began when she was just 16-years-old and he was 41, back in 1976.

But why has she decided to reveal all now?

“What made me speak is I thought I could provide a perspective,” Babi Christina Engelhardt says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m not attacking Woody. This is not ‘bring down this man’. I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”

In 1976, 16-year-old model Babi Christina Engelhardt embarked on a hidden 8 year affair with Woody Allen. Now, amid the #MeToo reckoning and Allen’s personal scandals, she looks back with mixed emotions on their relationship and its unequal dynamic https://t.co/GHiLjheOuR

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 17, 2018

Babi even says she made the first move. “I was a pleaser, agreeable. Knowing he was a director, I didn’t argue. I was coming from a place of devotion," she recalled.

She describes their relationship as being exactly like the fictional one between Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in his 1979 film, Manhattan. It tells the story of a affair between a 40-something-year-old man and a 17-year-old teenage girl.

“It was why I liked him and why I’m still impressed with him as an artist. How he played with characters in his movies, and how he played with me,” she said about the film.

“It wasn’t until after it was done when I really had time to think of how twisted it was when we were together,” Babi Christina Engelhardt said of her relationship with Woody Allen. https://t.co/GlxL4tfoIv

— HuffPost Ent (@HuffPostEnt) December 18, 2018

But Babi said the film brought her to tears when she first watched it because it made her realise “our partnership" was "just a fling” as far as Woody Allen was concerned.

In retrospect, Babi believes she was "little more than a plaything" for Woody Allen.

She revealed sections of a unpublished memoir to The Hollywood Reporter. In one excerpt, Babi wrote: "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.

“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.”

She decided to leave Woody and the two have not spoken in almost two decades. Babi says she now has bittersweet memories of their affair.

“I used to dream of making love to Woody. Now I’m dreaming of him dying in my arms," she told The Hollywood Reporter.