Woody Allen has always maintained a careful distance from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In recent interviews, the filmmaker has insisted he never witnessed anything inappropriate during the handful of times he crossed paths with the financier. “I never saw any underage girls,” Allen told a podcast host last month. “I barely knew the man. It was social, superficial — nothing more.” The statement is clean, rehearsed, and — to many ears — suspiciously tidy.
Yet the past refuses to stay buried. Over the last year, a series of photographs, some newly digitized from old society archives and others leaked from private collections, have begun circulating again. They show Allen at various Epstein-adjacent events in the late 1990s and early 2000s: a dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, a casual gathering on the financier’s private jet tarmac, even a small birthday celebration at a Palm Beach property. In several of the images, young women — some appearing unmistakably adolescent — stand in the background or sit at the edges of the frame. Their presence is not central; they are peripheral, almost decorative, the way flowers or waitstaff might be. But they are there.
Allen’s defenders argue context: these were large, mixed-age parties where Hollywood, finance, and academia collided. Photographers captured dozens of people in every shot. Absence of visible misconduct, they say, is not evidence of misconduct. Yet the resurfaced images raise a different question: how selective can memory afford to be when the camera was not?
One particularly stark photo, taken around 2002, shows Allen laughing beside Ghislaine Maxwell while two teenage girls linger nearby, holding champagne flutes they appear too young to legally drink. The composition is innocent enough — a candid moment at a high-society soirée — until you remember what that house, that circle, that time period would later reveal. Another image captures Allen on the arm of a much younger companion at an Epstein-hosted screening. The girl’s face is partially turned away, but the age discrepancy is impossible to miss.
Allen has never been accused of participating in Epstein’s criminal activities. No victim has named him in court filings or public testimony. Still, the photographs do not lie. They document proximity — repeated, documented, photographed proximity — to a man and a network later exposed as a trafficking operation. When Allen says he “never saw” underage girls, the images reply: they were standing right there, in the same room, in the same frame.
In the end, the resurfaced photos do not prove guilt. They prove something perhaps more uncomfortable: that the elite world Epstein moved in was so saturated with power and predation that even those who claim ignorance were surrounded by the evidence. And the cameras, unlike memory, never forget.
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