Woody Allen Recalls Having Dinner With Jeffrey Epstein, Says He ‘Couldn’t Have Been Nicer’

Woody Allen recently opened up about dinners he and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, previously had with Jeffrey Epstein and said the disgraced financier “couldn’t have been nicer.”

“There were about 20 people there, and we knew a lot of them from showbusiness. I don’t want to say who. We didn’t know Jeffrey at all then, but we see all these people there and they all embraced him, so we figured, ‘OK, he’s a substantial character,” Allen, 89, told The Times in an interview published on September 13.

Allen added that these dinners were after Epstein — who died in 2019 at the age of 66 — had served a stint behind bars for soliciting prostitution from a minor. (In 2008, Epstein served 13 months of an 18-month jail sentence as part of a plea deal.)

The Annie Hall director said that Epstein told them that he had “been in jail,” but claimed that he’d been “extorted.”

“He told us he was trying to make up for it now by being philanthropic and giving money to cutting-edge scientists and universities,” Allen continued. “He couldn’t have been nicer.”

Allen’s remarks are steeped in controversy considering the scandals of his past. The filmmaker has long faced public scrutiny over allegations made in the early 1990s that he molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, which he has denied. He also drew widespread criticism in the late 1990s when his relationship with Previn, the adopted daughter of his then-partner Mia Farrow, became public.