Woody Allen Gushes About ‘Charming and Personable’ Dinner Host Jeffrey Epstein
The sentence “Woody Allen was having dinner with Prince Andrew at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion” could either be the set-up of an off-color joke or the opening line of a criminal complaint.
Fifteen years ago, there was a real argument to be made that Allen was the most controversial attendee of a New York dinner in honor of the Duke of York hosted by a certain now-infamous and now-deceased financier. Even though Epstein was under house arrest following a plea deal in a child prostitution case when he invited his neighbor Allen to the 2010 event, Epstein was able to hand-wave away his legal trouble with little explanation and less press, and the greatest stain on the guest of honor’s public reputation was his 1996 divorce from Sarah Ferguson, not quite an unprecedented scandal for an English Royal. Meanwhile, Woody Allen was, well, Woody Allen.
As such, Allen was struck by the warmth and generosity of his host, and he resolved to attend as many parties, dinners and black-tie events at the Epstein estate as he could over the following years. In a recent talk with The Times, Allen recalled all the wonderful evenings he spent with Epstein, saying of the sex offender’s behavior, “He couldn’t have been nicer.”
Don't Miss
There are at least 200 women who disagree, but Allen probably isn’t interested in them now that they’re no longer children.
“Someone, a publicist, invited Soon-Yi and me to a dinner at Jeffrey’s house with one of those British royals,” Allen said of his late, beloved neighbor with whom he was on a first-name basis. “I can’t remember the name because I don’t follow the royals with any interest at all,” Allen added, then confirming that the uninteresting royal was, in fact, accused pedophile and Epstein client Prince Andrew.
“Right, Prince Andrew. Soon-Yi wanted to meet him, so we went over for dinner,” explained Allen. “There were about 20 people there, and we knew a lot of them from show business. I don’t want to say who.” As The Times noted, Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Chelsea Handler have all confirmed that they were present at Epstein’s dinner for the Duke.
“We didn’t know Jeffrey at all then, but we see all these people there and they all embraced him, so we figured, ‘Okay, he’s a substantial character,’” Allen explained. “He told us he’d been in jail and that he had been — I can’t remember the word — but that he’d been falsely put in jail in some way.” Allen found the word, “extorted,” one which he took completely at face value.
Allen said that Epstein claimed he was swindled when he pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute after 36 victims came forward, although the host was light on the details and the guest wasn’t asking for any more. Said Allen, “(Epstein) told us he was trying to make up for it now by being philanthropic and giving money to cutting-edge scientists and universities. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
So, over the next few years, Allen became a regular guest at Epstein’s dinners and a friend to the “charming and personable” host. “We would go, and there was always a table of illustrious people, college professors, scientists, Nobel laureates — accomplished people who were fun to listen to,” Allen remembered fondly. “On one occasion he had an evening of comedians and another time it was an evening of magicians. David Blaine was there, and he was swallowing live goldfish and then regurgitating them.”
“We never, ever, saw Jeffrey with underage girls,” Allen claimed.
I suppose he wants us to believe that Blaine made them disappear right before he arrived.
