Joan Baez says she finally forgives Bob Dylan for breaking up with her 

Folk-rock legend Joan Baez says she has forgiven fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Bob Dylan for his abrupt and infamous breakup with her in 1965, after a yearslong relationship in which she helped kick-start his career.

“We were in our early 20s,” Baez, 82, told People magazine in an interview posted Wednesday, ahead of this Friday’s release of the documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise.” “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody forever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.”

Baez, also an accomplished visual artist, explained she found “total forgiveness” for Dylan after painting a portrait of the singer-songwriter’s youthful self. “I put his music on, and I just dissolved into tears,” she said. “When I was through with the painting, I had no animosity left. None. It’s remained that way.”

The two had met in 1961 at the now-gone Greenwich Village institution Gerde’s Folk City. Dylan in a speech to the charitable organization MusiCares in 2015 recalled that, “She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice. … Her kind of love and devotion, I could never repay that….”

They eventually became a couple, but he distanced himself both from her and the entire folk-music scene during his 1965 final U.K. acoustic tour, as documented in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 concert film "Don't Look Back.” Baez in the new documentary calls his freeze-out “demoralizing,” and it eventually inspired one of Baez’s best-known songs, 1975’s pointed and melancholy “Diamonds and Rust.”

Later that year after the song’s release, Baez, while out of Dylan’s life personally, performed with him and others in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour, doing so again the following year. Despite any personal antipathy, they continued to make sporadic joint appearances over the years.

Dylan did not respond to People’s request for comment. In the 2009 PBS “American Masters” documentary “Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound” he said of their relationship, “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, y'know, and unfortunately she got swept along and I felt very bad about it.…"