Woody Allen Is Not Sorry About His Friendship With Jeffrey Epstein

The nonagenarian director is taking a slightly different tack than many of the other powerful people associated with the disgraced former financier.

Over the course of the past three months, Woody Allen published his first novel, “What’s With Baum?”; turned 90; mourned the death of his friend and former muse, Diane Keaton; and participated in a rare series of interviews, among them an exchange in which he described Jeffrey Epstein as “charming and personable.”

For several years, the filmmaker and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were regular guests at the Epstein townhouse on the Upper East Side, not far from their own. “Always accept. Always interesting,” he said of these dinners in a letter to his host, on the occasion of Mr. Epstein’s 63rd birthday.

For a while it seemed as if Mr. Allen had emerged from a long period of tempered cancellation, one that began in the 1990s when his former partner, Mia Farrow, accused him of sexually abusing their daughter, Dylan — allegations Mr. Allen has always denied and for which no criminal charges were ever filed.

But to the extent that collective memory of the scandal had faded, the Epstein connection revives and deepens questions about the sexual morality and social judgment of a man who married his girlfriend’s adopted daughter and can count in his prolific, creative output a romantic comedy about a middle-aged writer’s involvement with a 17-year-old girl (to say nothing of his screenplay for “Annie Hall,’’ in which the Tony Roberts character jokes about having sex with 16-year old twins.)

On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a trove of photographs from the Epstein estate, images of him with famous and influential men, Mr. Allen included. In the pictures, the two are seen enjoying each other’s company in settings more intimate than a house party. In one picture, they sit across a table from each other, seemingly lingering after a long meal. There are coffee cups and water glasses between them and the only other person around is an unidentified woman. Mr. Epstein, who is not often photographed wearing glasses, here has on black frames similar to the style Mr. Allen has worn for years.

(Reached for comment about these newly distributed pictures, a representative for Mr. Allen did not respond.)

In another instance, Mr. Allen, seated in a director’s chair with headphones around his neck, looks up at Mr. Epstein who is gazing into his monitor, presumably visiting him on a film set. Still another picture has the filmmaker seated in a private plane next to Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, who was recently revealed to have mined Mr. Epstein for dating advice, in a run of poorly punctuated correspondence, as he pursued a protégé.

After those texts and emails were made public, Mr. Summers expressed shame around his continued communication with Mr. Epstein, which he called “misguided.” But when asked by a reporter for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, in September, about his relationship with the man who officials say killed himself in a federal detention center as he faced sex trafficking charges, Mr. Allen made no similar gesture toward embarrassment or contrition, calling him, instead “a substantial character.” The dinners were full of “illustrious people, college professors, scientists, Nobel laureates — accomplished people who were fun to listen to,” in Mr. Allen's view.

“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,” Mr. Allen said, suggesting a gullibility not often associated with Manhattan’s sophisticate class or, alternately, a sympathy for someone he thought might be a fellow traveler in the world of the wrongfully accused.

“Extorted?” the reporter asked. “Right, extorted,” Mr. Allen said. “He 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.”

The images suggest that the two men, both children of postwar working-class Brooklyn, were better acquainted than previously believed. They also indicate just how taken the culturally privileged can be with the financially extravagant, felony sentencing be damned. By his own account, Mr. Allen began going to the Epstein house in 2010, two years after Mr. Epstein had been sentenced for soliciting sex from teenage girls. What appeared to override any concerns that might have existed about these transgressions was the company, even when the company did not include the faculty of MIT, but rather people like the magician David Blaine, who once showed up “swallowing live goldfish and then regurgitating them.”

Transactional relationships take many forms and a way to regard this one perhaps demands the lens of content. Over his long career, Mr. Allen has made two films — “Crimes and Misdemeanors” in 1989 and “Match Point,” 16 years later — about deceitful men who murder women and get away with it. The evasion of consequence has been an enduring source of fascination. In the end, perhaps Mr. Epstein provided Mr. Allen with something even more valuable than cachet: potential material.

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