LAST Wednesday the New Yorker magazine tweeted a link to their breaking story about the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. It was written by Ronan Farrow, a man close to the industry – he's the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen – and contained a link to an audio tape, secretly recorded by the NYPD, in which Weinstein admitted to groping a woman.
There was considerable reaction online but for many people one tweet stood out. “Now imagine his huge size, his monster face/body closing in on you,” it read. “In one second your life path is not yours. You have been stolen.”
The tweet came from Rose McGowan, who was just 23 when, in 1997, Weinstein reportedly reached a $100,000 settlement with her following an incident in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival.
The incendiary tweet has been one of many she has posted in recent days. She has also tweeted that Weinstein raped her, she has agitated endlessly for the entire board of the Weinstein Company to be dissolved and she has scorned the “men of Hollywood” for what she described as their “I stand with you’ crap” – “we need you to ACT.”
She has attacked actors for what she sees as their silence in the matter. She told Ben Affleck to “f--- off” and accused him of not being truthful about his knowledge of Weinstein’s long pattern of sexual misconduct.
Another series of tweets saw her accuse Roy Price, head of Amazon Studio, of ignoring her when she had previously and repeatedly alleged to him that Weinstein raped her. On Friday it was reported that Amazon had put Price on leave of absence.
Little wonder that McGowan, 44, should have been widely praised on social media for her fearlessness and determination and hailed as the voice of the “Weinstein Resistance.” (The producer has insisted that any sexual contacts he has had were consensual.)
She was born in Tuscany, Italy, in 1973, the second eldest of six children to an American couple. She is one of a number of Hollywood stars with personal experience of a cult. In her case it was the Children of God – a group that, People magazine said in 2011, “extolled the virtues of free love and prepared for the second coming of Jesus”.
Her first nine years were spent with the group in Italy. She told People that at first the setting was “really idyllic” but “like most cults you were cut off from your [outside] family. There were no newspapers, no television. You were kept in the dark so you would obey.”
Despite her tender years she rebelled – “I did not want to be like those women. There were basically there to serve the men sexually.”
When she was nine she, her father and her siblings, fled when the cult began to advocate sexual relations between adults and children.
They made their way to the US. The assimilation, she has said, was “not easy … My brothers and sisters, we thought everyone was boring.”
In 1997, she told People, she met shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, “one of the sweetest people you could ever meet, and I ran away with the circus. That’s what I needed for 3½ years. I just needed to not be responsible, to have fun. Then eventually I kind of grew up.”
She was “discovered” at the age of 18 and her early CV included the slasher-flick Scream (1996) and numerous other projects before she landed, in 2001, a role as one of the witch-sisters in Charmed, the long-running US cult TV hit.
She went on to star in Brian de Palma’s Black Dahlia, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (in which she wore a machine-gun as a leg).
In early 2007 McGowan was injured in a car crash. She sustained facial injuries and needed to undergo several plastic-surgery procedures. In January 2014, however, she posed for a photo in which she appeared, stylishly dressed and in full make-up, with “blood” trickling down her temple as she stepped out of a smashed-up red sports car.
In a revealing interview she said she had realised that she had turned herself into a commodity in her film career.
“I felt very uncomfortable about making myself into that commodity,” she said. “The male gaze affected me a lot, most of the time. When you see a woman on screen, she proceeds with the eyes of the men that filmed and directed her; she sees herself that way instead of having her own perception. "And I've been seeing that way for years – I'm not blaming anybody, I was part of the Hollywood machine – but I'm glad that my own life experiences and empirical evidences made me think and act in a different way.”
She has now written a memoir/manifesto Brave, to be published in February. It will be, says the blurb, about the rise of a “feminist whistleblowing badass” determined “to expose the truth about the entertainment industry, dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multi-billion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny.”
We have not heard the last from her – not by a long chalk.
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