Harvey Weinstein claims Rose McGowan never told Ben Affleck about her rape
January 31, 2018Rose McGowan’s E! show, Citizen Rose, premiered this week. She’s been promoting it in interviews all over the place, as well as promoting her memoir, Brave. The New York Times and other outlets have been running excerpts from the book, where she describes in detail what Harvey Weinstein did to her at the Sundance Film Festival, and everything that happened afterwards. She told her manager, her agent, she consulted a lawyer, and basically she received next to no help at all:
Afterwards, McGowan says she told some people who “counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run” and was allegedly told by a criminal attorney she wouldn’t be believed if she pressed charges.
McGowan says she heard Weinstein was calling people after the alleged assault and telling them not to work with the actress.
“It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment,” she writes, according to the NYT. “And I was the one who was punished for it.”
Rose had previously claimed that she told Ben Affleck what Weinstein had done to her shortly after it happened and Affleck’s response at the time had been “I told him to stop doing that!” Now that Rose is telling her story far and wide, Harvey Weinstein feels the need to chime in, because he’s just that big of an a–hole. This is what happened:
Harvey Weinstein is using an email allegedly written by Ben Affleck to cast doubt on Rose McGowan’s claim that the producer sexually assaulted her in 1997. According to a statement from Weinstein’s attorney Ben Brafman, two people whom McGowan claims to have told about the alleged assault at the time — her then-manager and Affleck — have denied that the actress reported the attack to them.
“She never told me nor did I ever infer that she was attacked by anyone. Any accounts to the contrary are false. I have no knowledge about anything Rose did or claimed to have done,’ ” Affleck allegedly wrote in an email to Weinstein, according to Brafman.
Am I the only one who feels a little bit sorry for Ben Affleck today? I mean, granted, Ben and Matt Damon (#neverforget) both said a lot of dumb sh-t in the wake of the Weinstein scandal, but let’s also be clear: they were not responsible for what Weinstein did to Rose, and they *probably* don’t deserve to be dragged into this mess at this late stage. Weinstein needs to shut his mouth and stop trying to use someone like Affleck as a human shield.
Rose also had some interesting things to say about Meryl Streep and CAA and Justin Timberlake – go here to read. She does not believe that Meryl Streep never knew anything about Weinstein… which we can debate until the cows come home, but isn’t it clear by now that there were a lot of people who didn’t know the extent of Weinstein’s behavior? Rose also says that Time’s Up was basically cooked up at CAA, and it’s CAA’s way of obfuscating their role in feeding their clients as victims to Harvey Weinstein. Which is a very interesting conspiracy.
Photos courtesy of Getty.