Rose McGowan to plead not guilty to drug possession
Rose McGowan was arrested and released in Virginia on Tuesday after turning herself in on a months-old arrest warrant for felony drug possession stemming from a flight she took to Washington Dulles International Airport in January.
Kraig Troxell, a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff ’s Office in northern Virginia, confirmed that McGowan turned herself in, was placed under arrest, booked, photographed and then released on US$5,000 (165,000 baht) bond.
McGowan, 44, reported to the airport authority police, who issued an arrest warrant on Feb 1 for felony possession of a controlled substance after personal items McGowan left behind on a Jan 20 United Airlines flight to Dulles allegedly tested positive for narcotics.
It’s unclear why it took nearly nine months for the warrant to come to light but it did so just after McGowan took a central role as an outspoken accuser of fallen movie mogul Harvey Weinstein: She says he raped her during the 1997 Sundance Film Festival.
Although she accepted a settlement from Weinstein and agreed not to disclose details, she has since become one of the leading voices against sexual harassment-and-assault in Hollywood since the Weinstein scandal broke on Oct 5.
When news emerged late last month about the arrest warrant, she reacted angrily, posting an outraged tweet suggesting it was an attempt to silence her. She told Ronan Farrow in an interview published in The New Yorker on Tuesday she intended to turn herself in “ASAP”, but hesitated when “things started to get really weird. I knew I was being followed and that I wasn’t safe. I even hired a private investigator to investigate whether the warrant was real”.
Though McGowan said that she has stock in a marijuana company, she said she had no intention of using cocaine during her trip for the Women’s March. “Imagining I’m going into sisterly solidarity, I can think of nothing more opposed to that, energetically, that I would want in my body at that moment,” she said.
She told Farrow that the cocaine could have been planted in her wallet after it went missing on her Jan 20 flight. She told Farrow: “I will clearly plead not guilty.”