Rose McGowan calls Harvey Weinstein's refuting of rape allegation 'sad, sexist attempt to undermine truth

Rose McGowan says it’s time for Harvey Weinstein to drop his story about a “consensual” relationship. “He can fall off the planet,” the activist said during an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday. “My statement is truth. My statement is reality. Stop saying it’s consensual, you pig! You know it’s not true.” [caption id=“attachment_4330385” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Rose McGowan. Reuters[/caption] Weinstein issued a statement Tuesday that quoted an alleged email from McGowan’s former manager, saying that the actress had spoken of a consensual encounter with him. Weinstein is accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, revelations that helped lead to allegations against Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and dozens of other men. McGowan, 44, is promoting a trilogy (a “holy trinity without the ‘holy,’” she calls it) of new projects this week, including the album Planet 9, the E! docuseries Citizen Rose and the memoir Brave. Her book includes a graphic account of being assaulted by the movie producer, whom she calls “the monster,” in a hotel 20 years ago. Besides her comment to the AP, McGowan issued a statement Wednesday saying that his remarks were part of an ongoing effort to “smear” her. “It is an affront not only to Rose but to the hundreds of women who have come forward with their stories of harassment, sexual abuse and rape perpetrated by Mr. Weinstein and those like him,” the statement reads in part. “This is a sad, pathetic old-fashioned sexist attempt to undermine obvious truth and the gaslighting will no longer be tolerated.” McGowan signed a deal for Brave in 2016, well before the current #MeToo movement, but says she knew all along the world would change — in part because she would change it. Brave describes her survival of what she calls a lifetime of attempted brainwashing, whether the Christian-influenced cult her family belonged to as a child to her years in Hollywood. “This is not a tell-all,” she writes. “This is a tell-it-how-it-is.” McGowan is known for such films as Scream and Going All the Way, and for the TV series Charmed. But she says she’s done with acting and describes her time on screen as “just a job” and scorns the recent reboot of Charmed as an idea “so flaccid.” She did enjoy directing Dawn, a short film about an innocent girl’s murder she has likened to her time in the movie business. And she is anxious to work in other art forms. A fan of such authors as Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose Love in the Time of Cholera she re-reads each year, McGowan says she’s thinking about writing a “fiction-ish” story about an 11-year-old girl. During her interview, she also spoke of her love for visual art and music and of the liberating feeling of working behind a camera instead of front of it.