Why feminist ‘badass’ McGowan is at heart of Weinstein backlash
Actress has become film industry’s whistleblower, writes Alice Vincent
IF THE fallout from the Harvey Weinstein allegations has shown us anything, it’s how fear and power have allowed Hollywood’s sexual assault victims to suffer in silence.
With each passing day, former Weinstein collaborators including Judi Dench, Gwyneth Paltrow and Benedict Cumberbatch have come out to either condemn his actions, or admit to being a victim of them.
But one Hollywood star was there before any of them, before the immediate days of crashing silence after ‘The New York Times’ published its initial, revelatory report, and long before Weinstein had started to lose his grip on his Hollywood throne.
Rose McGowan was the only actress, alongside Ashley Judd, to be named by the US paper as one of Weinstein’s victims. According to the report, she had received $100,000 (€84,000) from Weinstein after an encounter with the producer in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. McGowan didn’t speak to the publication, but praised its journalists, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, “for [their] incredible work”. The ‘Charmed’ actress, however, had been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for years.
McGowan has recast herself as a “feminist whistleblow
ing badass” in the film industry for the past few years – and faced the consequences. In the summer of 2015 she shared a casting note for a film made by a “male star rhymes with Madam Panhandler” that requested that auditionees “show off cleavage (push up bras encouraged)”. It went viral, and by the following morning, McGowan had been dropped by her agent, something she promptly tweeted about: “I just got fired by my wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bulls**t in Hollywood. Hahaha.” Within hours, she was appearing as a guest on US chat shows to discuss the systemic sexism in the film industry.
McGowan wasn’t even that offended by the sexism of Adam Sandler’s note – the casting was for his big-budget Netflix film ‘The Do Over’ – but what it said about the industry. “It was just so dumb. I was offended by the stupidity more than anything,” she told E!. “I was offended by the fact that went through so many people’s hands and nobody red-flagged it. This is normal to so many people. It was probably even a girl that had to type it up. It’s institutionally OK.”
When Renee Zellweger’s face was the target of a preposterous column by ‘Variety’ critic Owen Gleiberman a year later, McGowan was the one who published an eviscerating response in rival title ‘The Hollywood Reporter’. “You are an active endorser of what is tantamount to harassment and abuse of actresses and women,” McGowan wrote. “I speak as someone who was abused by Hollywood and by people like you in the media, but I’m a different breed, one they didn’t count on.”
She went on to explain that she was “forced by a studio to go on Howard Stern, where he asked me to show him my labia while my grinning male and female publicists did nothing to protect me.” The level of abuse McGowan had suffered was so high, she said, she “actually forgot what [she] looked like”.
McGowan has clocked up a couple of film credits since, but she’s had somewhat of a career change. In 2015 she told Buzzfeed she realised she “hated acting”, and has done little of it since, focussing instead on writing a memoir, ‘Brave’, which will be released in February, and calling out injustice on social media.
This is not, however, a recent awakening for McGowan. She was brought up by US parents in a religious cult in Italy, where bigamy was encouraged. The women were sent to bars to try to recruit more members in a practice called “Flirty Fishing”.
“I remember watching how the [cult’s] men were with the women, and at a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women,” McGowan said in 2015. “They were basically there to serve the men sexually.” Her father fled with her, one of his wives (her mother escaped later) and her sisters when she was 10, when it became clear the cult was encouraging paedophilia.
It’s not difficult to see Hollywood may have represented another “cult” for McGowan. She emerged as an actress in the early 1990s, after officially emancipating from her parents at 15. She swiftly made a name for herself as a modern-day pinup, getting typecast as the woman to play dark, edgier female characters such as Amy Blue, the brittle lead in 1995 cult favourite ‘The Doom Generation’, and Courtney, the sociopath at the heart of ‘Jawbreaker’.
McGowan got her big break in the noughties, when she land- ed the role of Paige Matthews in ‘Charmed’, a drama that followed a family of witches, of which Paige was the spirited baby of the family. Off-screen, she was at the tail-end of a public relationship with Marilyn Manson, the face-painted gothic rock star who fascinated and repelled the media.
But her first interaction with Hollywood sexism, and specifically, Weinstein, had happened years before. McGowan was promoting ‘Going All the Way’, a romantic drama about soldiers returning from the Korean War, alongside her castmate Ben Affleck.
The film won a prize at Sundance, but the festival would become a source of trauma for her. It was here she was assaulted by Weinstein.
When she was “made to” attend a press conference with Affleck afterwards, and told him what had happened, Affleck reportedly responded: “Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that”. Earlier this week, Affleck posted a statement claiming the allegations against Weinstein “made him sick” and were “completely unacceptable”. McGowan told him to “f**k off”, suggesting Affleck had known about Weinstein’s behaviour for decades.
That wasn’t the last of McGowan’s run-ins with Weinstein. In the mid-noughties, she started dating director Robert Rodriguez, who directed ‘Grindhouse’, a film in which she starred and that was funded by Dimension Films, an indie label owned by the Weinstein company.
Even a year ago, McGowan was tweeting about why she kept silent on her assault. Among the reasons was “because my ex sold our movie to my rapist for distribution”, adding, “it’s been an open secret in Hollywood/Media & they shamed me while adulating my rapist”.
McGowan is yet to name Weinstein as the man who raped her. Possibly because of the non-disclosure agreements the producer was meticulous about his employees signing, or the details of the $100,000 settlement she received a decade after her assault.
But she has been vocal in exposing the endemic sexism and abuse at the heart of Hollywood, setting up a petition to dissolve the board of the Weinstein Company (it currently has 6,000 signatures) and shaming other high-profile male figures who allegedly helped to cover up Weinstein’s crimes – such as Matt Damon, who is said to have helped to stop a report being published in 2004.
McGowan has created #RoseArmy, a social media hashtag for users to gather their support of sexual assault victims and exposure of the perpetrators.
She is one of the biggest users of it, posting incriminating emails and graphics that promise a breakdown in the silence that held her, and other victims, captive for years.
After being dumped by her agent, betrayed by her boyfriend and abused by her industry, McGowan is leading the charge in fighting back.