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Was Rose McGowan Trying to Warn People About Harvey Weinstein?

The actress posted damning tweets back in 2016, alluding to an unnamed studio head who allegedly raped her.
Rose McGowan
By Noam Galai/WireImage.

Update (October 12, 5:45 p.m.): On Thursday, Rose McGowan issued a series of tweets at Amazon head Jeff Bezos, claiming she “told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof.” It is the first time she has directly used Weinstein’s initials, though she still has not named him directly in her tweets.

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Update (October 10, 2:45 p.m.): On Tuesday, in light of damning new reports from The New Yorker and The New York Times about Harvey Weinstein, Rose McGowan tweeted a blunt question: “Now am I allowed to say rapist.” She also shared the jarring audio footage, obtained by The New Yorker, of Weinstein trying to persuade model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez to enter his hotel room before admitting that he had previously groped her breast.

“Now imagine his huge size, his monster face/body closing in on you,” McGowan tweeted. “In one second your life path is not yours. You have been stolen.”

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In 2016, Rose McGowan made waves when she alleged that a studio head had raped her. Using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport, she said she never reported the alleged crime because she was told that she could never win such a case: “A (female) criminal attorney said because I’d done a sex scene in a film I would never win against the studio head,” she wrote. McGowan added that her ex-partner sold the film she was working on to her alleged rapist’s company, and that the man’s behavior was “an open secret in Hollywood/Media.”

“They shamed me while adulating my rapist,” she wrote.

In the wake of the recent revelations about Harvey Weinstein, the Oscar-winning power producer who has been accused of sexually harassing women for years, the question of whom McGowan was alluding to in her 2016 tweets has grown more pressing. The bombshell New York Times piece Thursday reported that Weinstein paid out settlements to numerous women over the years, McGowan among them. Per the Times, Weinstein paid the then-23-year-old $100,000 in 1997, after “an episode in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival.” In the late aughts, McGowan was reportedly in a relationship with Robert Rodriguez, who directed her in 2007’s Grindhouse. The movie was distributed by Dimension Films, an independent label owned by the Weinstein Company.

Representatives for Weinstein have not yet responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. Representatives for McGowan had no comment.

Though the Times piece does not go into detail about the incident that prompted McGowan’s alleged settlement with Weinstein, it does include numerous reports of Weinstein allegedly bringing women to his hotel rooms and requesting massages or asking them to watch him shower. Ashley Judd told the Times of one such incident that she claimed happened 20 years ago. She was supposed to join Weinstein for a breakfast meeting at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, but when she got there, he allegedly invited her up to his room. Judd said Weinstein was wearing only a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower. “How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” she remembered thinking.

For his part, Weinstein denied Judd’s claims in a Thursday interview with Page Six. “I never laid a glove on her,” he said. (In a previous statement to the Times, however, he did admit that his past behavior “has caused a lot of pain,” and that he was taking a leave of absence from the Weinstein Company. He is also preparing a $50 million lawsuit against the Times for “false and defamatory statements,” his lawyer Charles Harder said in a statement.)

Two years before the Times interview, Judd told a story about a powerful exec who had harassed her, without explicitly naming Weinstein. After the Times piece, many have taken a step back to comb over those remarks, speculating that she was alluding to Weinstein all this time.

Aside from her 2016 tweets, McGowan also alluded to a “rumored serial predator” in the industry in a 2015 interview with BuzzFeed.

“There’s a lot of people that don’t deserve to be alive—put it that way,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who also get the face and body they deserve. There’s a lot of destroyers, and there’s the collusion. For anybody who reads this, anybody who’s ever colluded on anything by being a weak human being, fuck you. How dare you.”

Since the Times revelation, McGowan has not mentioned Weinstein by name—but she has alluded to the news on Twitter.

“Anyone who does business with __ is complicit,” she wrote. “And deep down you know you are even dirtier. Cleanse yourselves.”

She also re-tweeted a link to the BuzzFeed interview and responded to a tweet from Patricia Arquette, who applauded both McGowan and Judd for speaking up: “I’m sure it wasn’t easy to come forward but in doing so you helped a lot of others who might not have been heard,” she wrote.

Though McGowan might never formally name Weinstein for a variety of reasons—including her alleged settlement, which may have come coupled with an N.D.A.—her tweets have made it clear that she has a personal connection to the Weinstein allegations. Perhaps now that they’re out in the open, the actress will speak openly about them as well.