Harvey Weinstein may have been Rose McGowan\u2019s worst nightmare in 1997, when he allegedly raped her. Twenty years later, she would become his\u2014spearheading the onslaught of charges against the producer. With the publication of her upcoming memoir, the actress discusses the web of cruelty and complicity that she is determined to expose.<\/strong><\/p>\nI’ve had this giant monster strapped to me for 20 years,\u201d says Rose McGowan, her voice gripped with defiance. \u201cSo many women have been strapped around him. He ate so many of our souls that he couldn\u2019t tell which way was which. He\u2019s always been gunning for me. But that\u2019s O.K.\u2014I\u2019ve been gunning for him, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The open bathrobes, the locked doors, the pinning against walls and bending over desks, the grabbing, groping, and forced masturbation-witnessing\u2014the drumbeat of sexual-assault claims has become as familiar as President Trump\u2019s tweets, giving rise to a disturbing question: Is our sense of shock becoming dulled? Amid the white noise, McGowan, who, with her accusations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, helped start it all, has emerged as the movement\u2019s white-hot voice of rage, determined to ensure that the #MeToo moment isn\u2019t just a passing fad. She\u2019s armed with a sizable Twitter following (literally called #RoseArmy), messianic certitude, and a sense of nothing to lose.<\/p>\n
Her memoir, BRAVE, out this month, isn\u2019t just about gunning for Weinstein. It\u2019s calling out \u201call of them,\u201d she says, the whole eco-system of Hollywood\u2014the purveyors, the consumers, the media, the fans. Her argument is told via her personal story, which by any measure is extraordinary. Born in Italy into a cult called Children of God, which practiced free love and forced women into public flirting to attract followers, McGowan eventually fled with her family to America. Here, her parents having split up, she bounced between the homes of her psychologically cruel father and her mother, who continued to attach herself to abusive men. She did a stint in rehab, became a homeless runaway at age 13, and by 15 was living in Los Angeles, where she was taken in by a wealthy Beverly Hills kid who became her boyfriend, the first in a line of wolves in sheep\u2019s clothing. As she puts it, another cult awaited her: Hollywood.
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McGowan chronicles the many forms of abuse she has endured in her 20-plus years there: molestation by someone on set, exploitation at the hands of directors, complicity from agents and managers, demeaning critiques from the hair, makeup, and style departments, and bashing from the likes of blogger Perez Hilton. McGowan, it must be said, doesn\u2019t tread lightly in assigning blame, and at times her sense of martyrdom seems a bit over the top. For example, when she claims that having to shoot a wedding scene for the television show Charmed \u201crobbed me of the real experience. We performers sacrifice so much for your entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in a backward world,\u201d writes Rose McGowan. \u201cI was losing my grip on sanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, the facts surrounding McGowan\u2019s experiences are infuriating, their cumulative power chilling. Weinstein (whom she refers to only as \u201cthe monster\u201d) allegedly raped her during the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, where Miramax was presenting Going All the Way, in which the actress starred. As she tells it, her presence had been requested by Weinstein, in the top-floor suite of the Stein Eriksen Lodge, in Deer Valley, Utah. McGowan resisted, but she was told by a member of her management team that respect needed to be paid to the big man.<\/p>\n
McGowan has saved the hotel-room details for the publication of her book. But she tells me that the incident looms as the \u201cB.C. and A.D.\u201d of her life. \u201cPart of you has been left behind,\u201d she says. \u201cYou just got killed.\u201d After she left that room, she was bundled into a car and deposited on the red carpet. \u201cYou still have the million-yard stare and don\u2019t know what the fuck just happened to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The alleged assault, and her agreement to keep quiet, sowed the seeds for more destruction. In one of the memoir\u2019s most gripping chapters, she recounts her affair with director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, From Dusk till Dawn), a smooth-talking, sensitive-seeming guy who turned out to be a Svengali. He and Quentin Tarantino were planning a double feature\u2014Planet Terror and Death Proof\u2014based on pulp movies of the 1970s, and he wanted McGowan to star. McGowan fell hard and fast, trusting Rodriguez enough to tell him about her experience with Weinstein. He proceeded to use the knowledge against her, she claims, as a tool for mind games, starting with a scene in which Tarantino, playing a character in his movie, attacks McGowan\u2019s character. \u201cI was in a backward world,\u201d she writes. \u201cI was losing my grip on sanity.\u201d In what McGowan interpreted as the ultimate act of cruelty, Rodriguez \u201csold our film to my monster.\u201d<\/p>\n
(In a statement to Vanity Fair, Rodriguez disputed McGowan\u2019s account, while stating that he agreed \u201cwith what Rose is trying to do overall, which is continue to push for change both in our industry and beyond.\u201d Of the film Planet Terror, he wrote, \u201cI did not sell the movie to the Weinsteins, they had a first look on my next project.\u201d He also said that the movie had been financed by the Weinsteins prior to filming. \u201cThere was certainly ample time for Rose to decide not to be in a film funded by the Weinsteins,\u201d he wrote. Regarding the scene in the movie that McGowan took issue with, Rodriguez wrote that it had been \u201cin every draft of the script since the first draft was issued to cast and crew [and] if there was any objection to the scene there was plenty of time to address it. It was never brought up as being an issue.\u201d)<\/p>\n
McGowan began writing BRAVE three years ago, not simply to tell her story but to reform our thinking, as part of an immense \u201csocial re-engineering project.\u201d She believes she was put through these experiences to gather information. \u201cEven with Rodriguez, as brutal as it was, it was all gathering data. Unfortunately, I am the data. It was a sacrifice. But I knew from a very early age that this messaging system was very, very wrong and needed to be brought down.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Weinstein, he remains ever present, seeing everything. No, this isn\u2019t paranoia. Among Weinstein\u2019s spies reportedly hired to gather dirt on his potential accusers was one \u201cDiana Filip,\u201d who presented herself to McGowan as a women\u2019s activist and befriended her. It\u2019s a measure of McGowan\u2019s shrewdness that she was not all that surprised when she learned the woman was, in fact, a private investigator. \u201cI\u2019m very open about whatever I actually think about the monster. Whomever I spoke to randomly, I knew it would get back to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were more mysterious incidents to come. Last January, on her way to the Women\u2019s March in Washington, McGowan walked off the airplane without her wallet. She says she began shaking, sensing something was amiss. The police contacted her, claiming that they had found two small bags of cocaine in it. She denies the drugs were hers and believes this was, somehow, the work of her nemesis. A hearing is scheduled for later this month.<\/p>\n
Whatever the truth, it has only emboldened McGowan. This fall, she embarked on what she says was a fake negotiation with Weinstein to settle for hush money, stalling for time, while she prepared to tell her story, eventually published in The New York Times and The New Yorker. \u201cThey built a motherfucking beast, and they built a motherfucking problem,\u201d she says. \u201cI am that problem to all of them. He represents all of them to me. And that\u2019s why he must be slayed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rose heeft een interview gehad met Vanity Fair met daarbij een nieuwe fotoshoot door Brigitte Lacombe, hierin praat ze over haar beschuldigingen tegen Havey Weinstein, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,15,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fotoshoots","category-rose-mcgowan","category-tijdschriften"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4885,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions\/4885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charmed-online.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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