Fighting back
In Rose McGowan’s ferocious new memoir, “Brave,” she reveals for the first time the details of her alleged assault by Harvey Weinstein in Park City, Utah, during the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. McGowan, a young up-andcoming actress who was appearing in four films at Sundance that year, was supposed to meet the Miramax studio head, referred to in the book as “the Monster,” in the restaurant of his hotel, but in what’s now a nauseatingly recognizable pattern, she was told he was finishing a call and sent instead to his suite.
McGowan was being followed by an MTV film crew that day, and as she entered the hotel, her cheerful parting words to the camera were, “I think my life is finally getting easier.” The meeting had been called to discuss future film roles. “I figured I’d do what I did best, use my intelligence and wit to prove I was different from the stereotype of an actress,” writes McGowan, who had never met the studio boss. After they spoke briefly, she alleges that the hulking Weinstein pushed her into a room in his suite with a Jacuzzi, removed her clothing, and forced oral sex on her while masturbating in the Jacuzzi. “My life has been rerouted,” she writes. “I just got hijacked.”
The disconnect between what McGowan expected from the meeting and what she experienced is heartbreaking, and it resonates with our current national reckoning on workplace harassment and assault (which we can credit McGowan, a key early source in the investigative reporting on Weinstein, with helping to inspire). Women with ambitions and aspirations can work hard to advance their careers across industries, but if the men in power see them merely as objects, then the women don’t stand a chance, never mind their “intelligence and wit.” McGowan knows that now: “Looking back, I want to hug myself for being so naive,” she writes.
As McGowan’s words to the MTV crew suggest, she had already suffered her share of trauma by that point, and she describes her early years with raw candor. She was born to American parents in Italy, where her father headed a sect of the polygamous Children of God cult. McGowan calls the cult “a highly sexualized environment, run by men, to benefit men.” The family fled to the United States when the cult’s leader began calling for adults to have sex with children, but the move brought McGowan little stability, as she was shuttled back and forth among her divorced parents and various relatives she hardly knew; for a period in her early teens in Oregon she was a homeless runaway. She made her way to Los Angeles, became an emancipated minor at 15, and was eventually discovered by a producer and cast in her first starring role, 1995’s “The Doom Generation.”
“I quickly learned nobody was going to protect me,” she writes of her experience on the set, although she says much the same about her childhood and her acting career overall. (She starred, unhappily, on the TV show “Charmed” for five years after, she claims, Weinstein sabotaged her film career.)
McGowan intends the book’s title to describe herself — “My name is Rose McGowan and I am BRAVE,” she declares at the outset — but also as an exhortation to the readers she addresses directly and advises throughout. She seems to imagine a young female readership. “When someone ... rushes to tell you he loves you, that should be a big warning sign,” she advises in a chapter on what she paints as a nightmarish relationship with director Robert Rodriguez. “If people are saying cruel things to you and about you, you can weather it, you will survive,” she writes elsewhere, describing the “global slut-shaming” she endured after wearing an infamously revealing dress to the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards with her then-boyfriend Marilyn Manson.
McGowan hates Hollywood, and she delights in telling us that Hollywood hates us, too. “I wish you could all be flies on the wall when studio executives and producers talk about you,” she writes. “Believe me, you are looked at as sheep with no minds of your own.” She wants everyone to be as riled up as she is, to reject mediocre, stereotypical entertainment, and her righteous anger is rousing: “Start complaining. Tweet at the directors, studios, whatever company is behind them. But most of all, demand more.”
While McGowan can be sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing, young women, particularly the celebrityobsessed, have much to gain by reading “Brave.” “If you yearn to be famous, think on it long and hard,” she warns, ticking off all the ways being a celebrity made her feel objectified, preyed upon, demeaned and detached. Photographs of herself made her think of “a blow-up sex doll,” and she now marvels that she was the one who’d paid stylists to make her look that way. The “beauty pageant contestant hair” she loathed is now shorn.