Even the disgraced film director Woody Allen was creeped out by the presence of “several young women” serving guests at Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse, a report has revealed.
Allen, 89, reportedly wrote a birthday letter to the convicted pedophile in 2016, in which he declared that he and his wife—who is his ex-girlfriend’s adopted daughter—frequented Epstein’s place so often, they influenced how he threw parties.
Still, Allen could not help but notice how Epstein, then a bachelor in his early 60s, always had young women walking around his seven-story townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
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“It’s always interesting and the food is sumptuous and abundant,” Allen wrote of Epstein’s dinner parties, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. “Lots of dishes, plenty of choices, numerous desserts, well served. I say well served—often it’s by some professional houseman and just as often by several young women, reminding one of Castle Dracula, where [Bela] Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.”
That is a reference to the “Brides of Dracula,” who appear in the vampire’s castle at the beginning of the 1931 film Dracula, which Lugosi starred in.
The presence of young women—and Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, which landed him on the sex offender’s list—did not deter Allen from continuing to befriend Epstein, his letter suggests. Allen wrote that they were neighbors and that he “always” accepted an invitation to come next door.
Allen did not respond to a request for comment about the alleged letter. The Times reported that others who wrote to Epstein on his 63rd birthday were the media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman; linguist Noam Chomsky; entrepreneur Joichi Ito; physicist Lawrence M. Krauss; and Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel.
Allen’s alleged correspondence revealed how his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, who is 35 years his junior, persuaded Epstein to upgrade the food for his dinner party guests.
“Dependably a fine dinner,” he said of Epstein’s later parties, “but this was not always the case. In fact, the first time we came over, it was a very different story. We were invited with a list of accomplished types, men and women in journalism, in TV, even royalty. We were ushered up to the living room, where everyone sat around prior to dinner being served and chatted. No drinks were served. You could get one if you asked for one. That should have been the first clue. When the meal was put out downstairs, it was meagre. So meagre, my wife, the one sitting next to her, kept mumbling, ‘Is this it? Is this all we’re getting?’”
Allen’s letter described the dinner parties as eventually improving. His young servers began laying out a platter of food buffet-style. On one occasion, the grub came from a nearby Chinese takeout spot. Eventually, the meals became home-cooked.
The letter continued, “In time, [Previn] bullied him into putting a few flowers in the middle of the table to make it look mildly warm and inviting. This took time and a number of corrections, but his meals have been tweaked into some sense of normal, civil, dining. The large phone and computer at his right hand does take some of the relaxed home-cooking atmosphere out of it, but one can’t have everything—not at Castle Dracula.”
Allen, like Epstein, has faced disturbing sexual abuse allegations against children. In 1992, he was accused of molesting his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, at their Connecticut home—an allegation that emerged as part of a custody battle he ultimately lost with his actress ex-girlfriend, Mia Farrow, who had left the filmmaker after discovering nude photos of Previn, then 21, in his apartment earlier that year.
Allen was never charged with a crime—despite Connecticut State Attorney Frank Maco later stating that there was probable cause to charge Allen—and he has maintained his innocence ever since.
The allegation, and a damning documentary released in 2021, still wrecked much of the filmmaker’s credibility. His marriage to Previn, who was adopted and raised by Farrow, has also been criticized as sordid, given both their age gap and Allen’s 12-year-long relationship with her adopted mother.
