Rose McGowan Says She Will Plead Not Guilty to Felony Possession of a Controlled Substance
Rose McGowan recently turned herself in after an arrest warrant was issued for felony possession of a controlled substance that allegedly occurred in January, and is set to be arraigned Thursday morning. The actress has said that she will plead not guilty at her assigned court date.
In an interview with Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, McGowan implied that the cocaine found in a wallet she left on a United Airlines flight while on her way to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. may not belong to her. At the time of the Women’s March, she said, she had no interest in using cocaine.
“Imagining I’m going into sisterly solidarity, I can think of nothing more opposed to that, energetically, that I would want in my body at that moment.”
McGowan’s attorney, Jim Hundley, has stated that the drugs could have been planted in a memorandum filed to the Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman, asking to dismiss the charges.
“Depending on when and where the wallet was lost, individuals other than Ms. McGowan had access to the wallet for somewhere between approximately 5 hours 40 minutes and more than 11 hours,” the memorandum reads.
According to McGowan, she carried a slim card wallet while on the flight to Washington, D.C., which she kept in a side pocket of a backpack and only noticed was missing after disembarking the plane. She said she filed a lost luggage claim with the airline and tweeted at United, asking for help in recovering the wallet.
She also explained her reasons for not responding to the felony warrant for months, stating that she was afraid that Harvey Weinstein had investigators following her. When she received the first phone call from airport detective Jerrod Hughes notifying her that her wallet had been found, she said she was uncertain that Hughes was who he said he was, and decided not to return to the airport out of fear.
McGowan said she was going to turn herself in as soon as possible, “but then things started to get really weird. I knew I was being followed and that I wasn’t safe. I even hired a private investigator to investigate whether the warrant was real.”
McGowan has been vocal regarding survivors’ and women’s rights following her assertion that Weinstein raped her after tweeting that she had been assaulted by a “studio head” and including details that pointed to the producer. She was named in a New York Times expose on Weinstein, which detailed eight instances in which he had settled sexual harassment lawsuits, one of which was with McGowan, and has gone on to speak at the Women’s Convention in Detroit.
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