Rose McGowan won't feel closure over Harvey Weinstein 'until he's dead'
Though disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is now a convicted rapist, actress Rose McGowan — who previously claimed the Oscar-winning producer sexually assaulted her — says his guilty verdict likely won’t bring her closure over the trauma surrounding the long-running case.
Speaking to writer and editor Evan Ross Katz for Tuesday’s episode (below) of the new podcast Shut Up Evan (which was recorded prior to Monday’s verdict in Weinstein’s New York trial), McGowan speculated that the only way she’ll find solace amid the disgraced movie mogul’s legal reckoning is if Weinstein — who was found guilty Monday of committing a criminal sex act in the first degree and rape in the third degree — ceased to exist.
“Probably not until he’s dead now,” McGowan responded when Katz asked if Weinstein’s trial gave her a sense of finality to her ongoing ordeal. “I feel like he and I are strapped in this battle together until one of us is dead. That’s how it goes. I energetically, we’re like just locked. It’s a really disgusting feeling. I just would love to be able to be like other people and live my life. That would be really nice, you know?”
She also called digital culture’s circulation of her image as a meme as “very strange” as something humorous tied to a very real moment of pain in her life.
“It’s weird when it says ‘Harvey Weinstein victim’ and that’s on the meme, you know? It’s kinda cruel,” she continued. “But it’s funny too, you know what I mean? It’s both. So it’s like cruel because it’s me, but funny if it’s not me. Does that make sense? In the abstract, it’s funny; In the personal, it’s kind of like that’s f—ed up if you really break it down.”
McGowan previously claimed Weinstein raped her after the New York Times revealed the Oscar-winning producer had allegedly paid McGowan a $100,000 settlement after an alleged incident in a hotel room during the 1997 Sundance Film Festival — claims that Weinstein “unequivocally denied.”
Elsewhere on Katz’s podcast, the 46-year-old also addressed a since-deleted tweet in which she claimed she was “a registered Republican in California” and that she “cannot vote Democrat” in any upcoming election.
“It was a bet,” McGowan said of the incident. “Why, at this point in time in my life, I decided to do this and take this bet from a brother of mine who said, ‘I dare you to be a Republican for three months’ [I don’t know]. I thought about it and he said, ‘I’ll bet you $200 that you can’t’ and I said ‘I’ll bet you $200 that I can.’ Granted, late-night ideas aren’t always the best. In my mind at that time I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to blow them. I’ll be like, I’m a Republican. What are you going to say to me now? Am I still snowflake? And I still a libtard idiot?'”
Katz also asked McGowan if she’d consider returning to acting after her rise to prominence as a sexual assault activist, though the Jawbreaker and Charmed star said she’s “blacklisted” from the industry after raising her voice.
“No one has come to me,” explained McGowan. “I’m not exactly without little thorns coming out of me towards Hollywood, but nobody’s approached me so it’s not even an issue I have to think about.”
“It comes with so much trauma for me,” she continued, adding that a conversation with British director Mike Leigh opened her eyes to acting in other countries besides the United States. “I did a little tiny short thing as a favor to someone and it bugged my brain out so badly. I actually went into the bathroom and started crying. There’s so much trauma linked into Hollywood for me.”
Listen to McGowan’s full interview on Shut Up Evan above.
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