For Rose McGowan, it was only a matter of time. She’s an ice-cold operator who’ll verbally shiv with military precision anyone who crosses her. She’d have to be, to survive the hellhole of Hollywood hypocrisy with her sanity mostly intact. It was only a matter of time, then, before she’d turn on the activist left that claimed her as its heroine after she helped tear down Harvey Weinstein—or, it was only a matter of time before they’d turn on her. Last week, in due course, Rose and the activist left turned on each other.
At an event where McGowan was promoting her memoir Brave, trans protester Andi Dier tore into her perceived failure to support the transgender subset of modern feminism. McGowan walked back a controversial comment she’d made on RuPaul’s podcast last year: “They assume because they felt like a woman on the inside. That’s not developing as a woman. That’s not growing as a woman, that’s not living in this world as a woman and a lot of the stuff I hear trans complaining about, yeah, ‘Welcome to the world.’”
“My point was,” she tried to clarify, “we are the same.” But the activist, unsatisfied, broadly criticized the heteronormative tilt of her “cisgendered, white feminism.” So, McGowan shot back, “Don’t label me, sister,” as bookstore security carted off the protester. “I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone. I do not subscribe to your rules. I do not subscribe to your language,” she went on, in a mounting rage you can watch for yourself. “What have you done? I know what I’ve done, God dammit.”
The woman who challenged her, McGowan believes, was a Weinstein plant—part of a plot to undermine her that, Ronan Farrow reported, had included an international spy. A plot in which, McGowan tweeted, her publicists have been complicit. While anti-Rose reactions and charges of transphobia mounted and multiplied from her former champions, her book tour—which was supposed to bring her to Washington, D.C. last Friday—was abruptly cut short.
The protester, a trans rights activist, savvily elevated her cause at free-wheeling McGowan’s expense. It wasn’t the first time McGowan had drilled into a detractor. In a recent appearance on Nightline, for example, she trained her steel on former co-star Alyssa Milano and questioned the authenticity of the #MeToo movement and the parade of black gowns on the red carpet at the Golden Globes : “She’s a lie.” And, seeming to lose patience with her interviewer, she said icily, “Do you think I don’t know these people?”
I once witnessed Rose’s icy fire up close, just after her extemporaneous address to the Women’s Convention in Detroit. She hadn’t written a word ahead of taking the podium, she told us reporters—all clamoring for a one-on-one with Rose. For some reason, as though she were a local candidate embroiled in a national scandal, Rose’s handler would only let her talk to local reporters.
One of the lucky ones, a woman with the Detroit Free Press, also got a face full of that flaming blizzard ice blast.
She sidled up to her subject, and asked why she hadn’t named Weinstein in her speech. McGowan stared her down, paused, and coldly demanded: “Was I supposed to?” She blinked once. The reporter reddened, sputtered. McGowan asked, “Who’s your rapist?” The reporter, smiling nervously, confessed she didn’t have one. If she did, McGowan instructed, she wouldn’t have asked.
Does this woman really need a Hollywood handler? I wondered, watching as she softened back to mid-range intensity for her next interviews, first with a local network affiliate, then with a documentary crew, while I tried, in vain, to re-up my request for five minutes. In those days, last October until last week, everyone wanted their minute with Rose McGowan.
Now that she’s publicly, loudly defied polite progressivism, we can expect to see her book 70-percent-off at Costco, her shero status scrubbed. Let it not be in vain. It takes an irascible woman like Rose—precisely because she says what she means without self-censorious forethought or concern for the consequences—to tear down a monster like Weinstein.
