The actress details how she was allegedly pinned down and raped by the Hollywood mogul
Rose McGowan, the angry voice of the #MeToo movement, has detailed her alleged rape at the hands of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in her new memoir, entitled Brave.
The memoir, published worldwide on January 30, recalls the first time she met Weinstein, or as she refers to him, ‘The Monster’, more that 20 years ago at a screening of her film Going all the Way at Sundance film festival in 1997.
Aged 23 at the time, McGowan was invited to a meeting with Weinstein after the screening at his hotel suite. She assumed the arrangement would be a chance to ‘plot out the grand arc of my career’. But it turned into a hellish nightmare.
After discussing the next steps of the young actress’s career for half an hour, Weinstein allegedly pinned McGowan down on the edge of a jacuzzi and raped her. He then later called her to describe her as ‘a special friend’, according to McGowan.
‘I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being,’ she wrote, ‘I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him. Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.’
McGowan said that immediately after the rape, she attended a photo opportunity for Phantom, another Miramax film she was in, where she allegedly told a co-star what happened. The co-star, who has previously been identified as Ben Affleck, reportedly said: ‘Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that.’ Affleck has never responded to this allegation.
A spokesperson for Weinstein in the US told the Guardian: ‘Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.
‘Mr Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.’