Yahoo Lifestyle Rose McGowan details Weinstein's 'assault'
Actress Rose McGowan has shared graphic details of her alleged sexual assault at the hands of producer Harvey Weinstein in an extract from her new memoir.
In Brave, she claims that the former boss of Miramax and The Weinstein Company assaulted her in his suite while attending the Sundance Film Festival in 1997.
McGowan, who was 23 at the time, says that she thought that she was being summoned to his suite for a meeting, but instead was pulled into a room with a jacuzzi in it, where he removed her clothes while she froze ‘like a statue’.
The actress alleges that he then sat her on the side of the jacuzzi and performed oral sex on her while he masturbated.
“He moans loudly; through my tears I see his semen floating on top of the bubbles,” she writes, referring to Weinstein only as ‘the monster’ in the text, which was shared in The New York Times.
“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him. Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.”
She goes on to say that following the assault, she attended a photoshoot for another Miramax movie, Phantom, with her co-star, which she has since identified as Ben Affleck.
McGowan says that she told her co-star what had happened, to which he replied, “Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that.”
Affleck has never spoken about the alleged exchange, but a rep for Harvey Weinstein told The Guardian: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.
“Mr Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.”
Around 80 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, harassment or rape, with the claims being investigated by police in New York, Los Angeles and London.
McGowan’s claims against Weinstein were some of the first to emerge from The New York Times exposé in October last year, which uncovered out of court settlements between Weinstein and dozens of women dating back decades.
McGowan was said to have been given $US100,000 in a payout to ‘avoid litigation and buy peace’, but ‘not to be construed as an admission’.
The story in the Times kicked off the sex abuse scandal which has engulfed the entertainment business ever since.
Harvey Weinstein has always denied the allegations.
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