NEW YORK (AP) — In a flurry of unrestrained tweets and with the “RoseArmy” at her back, Rose McGowan has emerged a kind of whistleblowing avenger in the Harvey Weinstein saga, leaving a scorched path behind her across social media.
After long referencing a past incident with Weinstein, McGowan on Thursday for the first time said it outright: “HW raped me,” the actress wrote, apparently referring to the embattled former Weinstein Co. co-chairman. Weinstein representative Sallie Hofmeister said “any allegations of non-consensual contact are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.”
The Hollywood Reporter said McGowan confirmed it was Weinstein she was referring to; her representative did not respond to a message seeking comment.
McGowan’s accusation was the latest development in the fast-unraveling saga surrounding Weinstein.
Police detectives in New York and London said Thursday that they are taking a fresh look into sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein now that some 30 women have accused the Hollywood film producer of inappropriate conduct. Hachette Book Group, one of the country’s top publishers, announced it has pulled the plug on its Weinstein Books imprint.
But it has been McGowan who spoke loudest Thursday, even though she spent half the day suspended by Twitter.
McGowan last year said that she had been raped by a “studio head.” The New Yorker expose that ran Tuesday reported that Weinstein had allegedly sexually assaulted three women, though the third woman was unnamed. The New York Times earlier reported that Weinstein paid a financial settlement of $100,000 to McGowan in 1997 after an episode at a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
That settlement included provisions about speaking about the case in the future, but McGowan has increasingly refused to mince words. “It’s on,” tweeted McGowan before launching into a series of tweets directed at Amazon head Jeff Bezos.
“I told the head of your studio that HW raped me,” said McGowan in tweets directed to Bezos. “Over and Over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof.”
Amazon did not return a message seeking comment.
Authorities are also seeking evidence against Weinstein, who in a video posted by celebrity website TMZ was shown Wednesday outside a Los Angeles home telling the paparazzi he’s “not doing OK” and that he “needs help.”
New York Police Department spokesman Peter Donald said Thursday that investigators are reviewing police files to see if anyone else reported being assaulted or harassed by him.
So far, no filed complaints have been found, he said, other than one well-known case that prompted an investigation in 2015, but authorities are encouraging anyone with information on Weinstein to contact the department.
London police were also looking into a claim it had received from the Merseyside force in northwest England, British media reported Thursday. Merseyside police said the allegation was made a day earlier and concerned “an alleged sexual assault in the London area in the 1980s.”
Some 30 women — including actresses Angelina Jolie, Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow — have spoken out recently to say Weinstein had sexually harassed or sexually assaulted them. Weinstein was fired Sunday by The Weinstein Co., a studio he co-founded with his brother.
Some of the allegations involved conduct at hotels in Beverly Hills, but police there didn’t return calls on whether they were investigating any possible crimes. The Los Angeles Police Department has no open investigations.
Detectives in the NYPD’s special victims unit were instructed to identify and speak with any potential victims, including the women who spoke about their encounters with Weinstein in the New Yorker article, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The Summit County Sheriff’s Office, which shares a records system with Park City Police, had no reports or calls involving Weinstein or McGowan in the past 30 years, sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Andrew Wright said.
In The New Yorker expose, a former actress, Lucia Evans, said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex in 2004 when she was a college student. A second woman, actress and filmmaker Asia Argento, told the magazine that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in 1997 at a hotel in France.
Under New York law, making someone engage in oral sex by physical force or the threat of it is a first-degree criminal sexual act. There’s no legal time limit for bringing charges.
New York detectives already investigated Weinstein once, the 2015 probe when an Italian model said the studio executive grabbed her breasts and groped her. Detectives set up a sting where they recorded a conversation between the woman and Weinstein while he tried to persuade her to come into his hotel room.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said prosecutors decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute the case.
“I, like they, were very disturbed by the contents of the tape,” Vance said. “But at the end of the day we operate in a courtroom of law, not the court of public opinion. And our sex crime prosecutors made a determination that this was not going to be a provable case.”
Police investigated that allegation as a case of forcible touching, a misdemeanor with a two-year time limit for bringing charges. The statute of limitations has since expired.
Thursday evening, Amazon Studios announced its chief, Roy Price, had been placed on leave after a producer detailed crude remarks she said he made to her after a 2015 Comic-Con event in San Diego. Isa Hackett, the daughter of author Philip K. Dick and a producer on the Amazon series “Man in the High Castle,” told The Hollywood Reporter that Price persisted with sexual remarks toward her throughout the evening.
She said she complained to Amazon executives, who launched an investigation but never informed her of the results. She told the Reporter she never saw Price again at an Amazon event promoting the show or another series based on her father’s work.
Hours earlier, the Eastern branch of the Writers Guild of America pledged to take action to prevent future abuse, noting that “sexual harassment and assault have long been hallmarks of the entertainment industry.”
I watched the Rachel Maddow interview with Jodi Kantor, one of the reporters working on the Weinstein case, and she makes the important point that this isn’t a political problem, it’s a power issue. These are men in power, who have a complete support network of complicit people.
What disturbs me the most is the methodical way he used aides, who described themselves as 'honey-traps" to make the women feel somewhat safe in these meetings. He knew exactly what he was doing was wrong. But he had power and lawyers; lawyers who are still hounding and harassing these women who come forward; and the ability to hurt these people’s carriers. Everyone in Hollywood knew about it, Seth MacFarland openly joked about it at the Oscars.
What makes tRump different from Weinstein, Cosby, Ailes, and O’Reilly is that their power is waning, they are not at their peak. It might change for Mr. Tiny Hands after he gets out of office, but they system will not change overall until we believe these women, and truly believe women are just as important as men. Because that’s the choice being made here, not only are these men powerful, but people think what else these men do makes their ‘worth’ more than the women they assault.
Weinstein is/was a far bigger fish than Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly. He really had the power to make or break people’s careers, and sexual assault was integral to his bullying business tactics. From what we have seen so far, trump does not seem to be such an efficient and far-reaching aggressor, but when he finally loses power, we may learn otherwise.
This is big–a whole industry has been affected. I think it’s really going to help change things.
I hope it is the moment for needed change to occur. Men who treated women like property (like donald does) have been for so long a force that has power, as you say, over other people’s lives. For decades, some women have had the strength to call them out on it. Few in society believed them. Most of those women suffered severe set-backs in their lives as a result.
Powerful, predatory men have cheated this country for so long of the voices we should have been able to hear - all for the sake of keeping power (and money) among themselves.
We, as a whole society, let them do it. After the last election, when 62M of our neighbors, friends, and often family voted for a man who acknowledged (albeit on what he presumed would be an out-take of a tape being made) that he casually assaulted women just because his status and power allowed it, many of us were in disbelief, and are now flabbergasted at the prevalence of that behavior.
I mean, we knew it happened, and we knew women weren’t believed, and maybe we even knew they were probably telling the truth, but “proving it” has always been a different story. Maybe now, finally, we will change standards of proof to align with ones put in place at colleges by the Obama administration. (Which, damn her, Betsy DeVos recently eliminated!)
All of these bastards had the power to make/break careers. It was the power they used to intimidate and harass. We can only hope this latest episode of dicks without brains is the beginning of the end.
I doubt this kind of revelation will end any time soon. I hope it doesn’t, because so many men are guilty of those behaviors. They all need to be called out and held to account for it.
I do hope it is the beginning of the end of men expecting they will get away with it, which may lead them to stop doing it.