Rose confirms Asia allegations
Actress says the claims of assault by Jimmy Bennett are true
mark the International Women’s Day in Rome on March 8. Rose McGowan, one of the leading voices of the #MeToo movement, said on Monday that her partner had exchanged text messages with actress and director Asia Argento in which Argento said that she had indeed slept with actor Jimmy Bennett — an act that Argento recently denied.
In a lengthy statement, McGowan also said that her partner — model Rain Dove — told her that in text messages, Argento had said that she had received unsolicited nude photos of Bennett since the time he was 12 years old and had not informed the authorities or told him to stop sending the photos.
A spokeswoman for Dove confirmed in an email that everything McGowan said in her statement was factual.
In the statement of more than 1,000 words, McGowan took pains to both explain why she had grown close to Argento as well as suggest that she had more recently distanced herself after allegations emerged that Argento sexually assaulted Bennett when he was 17.
McGowan released her statement a few days after the celebrity news website TMZ published screenshots of what it said was a text message conversation between Argento and a person the website called “a friend.”
In her statement, McGowan described Argento as someone who had been a friend whom she had “loved” — all in the past tense. McGowan also said she had urged her partner to tell the police about the texts from Argento, which Dove told McGowan had been done. McGowan also acknowledged that she had worried that the #MeToo movement “was about to be in jeopardy.”
“It’s sad to lose a friend connection,” she wrote in reference to Argento, “but what’s even more sad is what happened to Jimmy Bennett.”
In a statement last week, Argento said she had not had sex with Bennett.
“I am deeply shocked and hurt by having read news that is absolutely false,” she said last week in a statement circulated on social media.
Last autumn, Argento was among the first women to publicly accuse producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. Around the same time, a New York Times article detailing Weinstein’s behaviour reported the existence of a previously undisclosed settlement between Weinstein and McGowan related to an episode in a hotel room. Soon after the publication of the article, McGowan became one of Weinstein’s most vocal accusers.
This month, the New York Times reported that Argento had arranged to pay Bennett $380,000 (Dh1.39 million) after he accused her of sexually assaulting him before he had reached the age of consent in California.