Read: The plan to make Harvey Weinstein a hero One of the revelations in She Said was a memo written to Weinstein by the attorney Lisa Bloom in December 2016 in which Bloom suggested discrediting any allegations McGowan might make against Weinstein by planting negative stories in the media “re her becoming increasingly unglued.” It’s difficult to fully conceive of the toll this kind of mental and emotional campaign against someone could take. He’d had McGowan tailed by former Mossad agents in an effort to uncover what she might reveal about him in her then-unpublished memoir, Brave. He’d also blacklisted her and other women, smearing their reputations and enlisting magazine editors, lawyers, and private security forces to help. Weinstein hadn’t just assaulted her 20 years ago, McGowan said. But McGowan, during the same period, was struggling. Kantor and Twohey’s work for The New York Times, along with that of The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. Her accusations sparked an investigation in which a substantial number of women finally agreed to go on the record with accusations against Weinstein in the months that followed, subsequent stories revealed hundreds more men who had reportedly abused their power. She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about how they broke the story of Weinstein’s alleged abuses in Hollywood, describes how their reporting process began with McGowan’s tweets. It’s hard to imagine any of what happened post-Weinstein transpiring without McGowan, whose 2016 tweets about being raped by a studio head she couldn’t name were the media equivalent of putting a lit match to a fuse. ![]() ![]() (Weinstein has denied all allegations against him in 1997, he paid McGowan a $100,000 settlement precluding her from legal action.) “One of the reasons I got out of America,” she said, “was to reclaim my life.” So what now? And she described the discomfort of being back in New York, the city that was long synonymous with Harvey Weinstein, who McGowan says raped her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997, and whose criminal trial on charges of sexual assault against other women began this week. She explained her love of London, where the artistic community welcomed her without attaching any of the asterisks that have dogged her for decades as an actor in Hollywood. In person, McGowan looked elfin, with her cropped blond hair, and was surprisingly gentle in manner-not at all like her pugnacious and unpredictable presence online. “Imagine, every time you meet someone new they look at you like you’re maybe insane. “I’m perceived very differently here,” the activist and former actor told me over tea in the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, while Christmas music played in the background. For the past year she lived in London, until visa issues brought her back to New York, where we met in late December. ![]() R ose McGowan’s reputation precedes her, which is why escaping it, temporarily, was such a relief.
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