Rose McGowan has racked up an impressive roster of credits since the '90s, but embraced her
new role as an activist in the latter part of the 2010s.
The actress starred on Charmed, but her life off screen has unfortunately been anything
but.
Here is the tragic real-life story of Rose McGowan.
McGowan grew up in Italy, under some far-from-normal circumstances.
As she revealed to People magazine in a 2011 interview, her parents were members of Children
of God, a polygamous religious cult that gained popularity amidst the hippie ethos of the
late 1960s.
McGowan explained,
"You were cut off from your [outside] family.
There were no newspapers, no television.
You were kept in the dark so you would obey."
Recalling that she never really fit in as a child, she admitted that she once rebelled
by lighting a bookshelf full of Bibles on fire.
The patriarchal cult was rife with misogyny and has since, according to BBC News, become
infamous for allegations of child abuse.
Thankfully, McGowan and her parents were able to eventually flee the cult when she was nine,
after her father found out the group's founder had begun advocating the idea of adults having
inappropriate relationships with children.
McGowan explained in a 2019 episode of The Irish Times' Back to Yours podcast,
"That was too far for my father.
So we escaped."
After bouncing back and forth from her then-divorced parents' homes, McGowan was just 15 years
old when she legally emancipated herself.
As she later told The Guardian,
"[I] had about 25 cents to my name, so I represented myself in court.
I needed to have control of my own life."
However, the actress recalled how gaining that control came with a high price in a letter
written to her younger self for The Big Issue.
She wrote,
"I was homeless, I was on my own, and I was very lonely.
I was entirely focused on just surviving."
Having grown up in a polygamous cult in which women were subservient to men, McGowan was
left with no role models for what a romantic relationship was supposed to look like.
As a result, she was woefully unprepared when she began dating.
She wrote in The Big Issue,
"When I started having relationships with men I wasn't set up to understand that kind
of world."
Revealing that she attracted the attention of men who were older than her, she added,
"At the time I thought [it] was cool but now I think it's creepy."
In McGowan's 2018 memoir Brave, she writes about being 19 years old in an abusive relationship
with a man 20 years her senior, whom she left after meeting music executive Brett Cantor.
Cantor proved to be her savior, finding McGowan a place to stay so she could escape that relationship.
However, as their own romance blossomed, tragedy struck.
McGowan was on her way back to Los Angeles after a road trip to Seattle, and, at one
point, called Cantor's number and found herself speaking with someone from the LAPD, who delivered
terrible news: Cantor had been killed.
According to Variety, the 25-year-old was found inside his home with multiple stab wounds.
Writing that Cantor would, quote, "always have a piece of my heart," McGowan noted in
her memoir,
"The case is still unsolved, but I have been trying for years to remedy that."
In The Big Issue, McGowan recalled falling into a "deep depression" afterward and fearing
the prospect of becoming homeless again.
She revealed,
"I was standing on a street corner crying and a woman came up to me and asked me if
I wanted to be an actress."
Crunching the numbers, she figured accepting the role would mean she'd have enough money
to get her own apartment.
And so she took her first acting job.
In 2001, McGowan and Marilyn Manson revealed they were breaking off their two-year engagement.
At the time, the couple had been together for nearly three years, and McGowan released
in a statement via ABC News,
"There is great love, but our lifestyle difference is, unfortunately, even greater."
During an appearance on Watch What Happens Live years later, host Andy Cohen asked the
actress what that "lifestyle difference" may have been.
McGowan implied that Manson's admitted drug use was to blame for the split.
Cohen guessed that Manson did too much cocaine, but McGowan didn't totally confirm his assumption.
She went on to say,
"It was me.
[...] Actually, I don't know.
I plead the [Fifth] […] I'm honest, always, I can't help it."
However, she shed more light on the split in Brave.
While she called it a, quote, "pretty legendary relationship," McGowan wrote that she simply
"grew exhausted" of Manson's rock-star antics.
According to People, she went on to admit,
"I was really in love with Manson.
I just couldn't do the lifestyle anymore.
I was too tired."
At some point in the 2000s, fans noticed that McGowan looked a little different.
After much speculation, she eventually admitted to undergoing plastic surgery, but claimed
at the time that it was reconstructive surgery to repair the damage inflicted to her face
from a 2007 car accident.
She told the New York Daily News that her sunglasses had sliced her under her eye, and
it needed a surgical fix.
That tale, as she later admitted in her 2018 memoir, was a lie.
The truth was that her appearance was altered during a botched surgery to fix a sinus issue,
when the surgeon pierced the skin below one of her eyes by mistake, requiring reconstructive
surgery to repair.
The result, McGowan wrote, made one of her eyes looking "slightly pinched," leading her
to have additional surgery on the other eye so they would match.
McGowan admitted,
"I told my publicists what happened and they said to say it was a car accident.
Looking back, I don't know why it mattered but I took that advice.
And so when I was asked by the press, that became the party line."
In October 2016, McGowan took to Twitter with a shocking allegation: she had been attacked
by an unnamed "studio head" whose predatory behavior was, quote, "an open secret in Hollywood,"
and revealed that she didn't pursue legal action when a lawyer told her she'd never
prevail in court because she'd done intimate scenes in movies.
A year later, McGowan confirmed that the studio head was Harvey Weinstein , becoming one of
the first actresses to come forward to accuse the disgraced movie mogul of sexual misconduct
in Ronan Farrow's shocking report in The New Yorker.
Since then, over 80 women have shared their own Weinstein allegations.
Referring to Weinstein simply as "Monster" in her Brave memoir, McGowan opened up about
the incident, which allegedly took place after Weinstein asked her up to his hotel room during
the 1997 Sundance Film Festival to ostensibly have a meeting about her career.
"He is a sociopathic predator.
He thinks he's done nothing wrong."
In early 2020, Weinstein was found guilty of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to
23 years in prison.
Following the verdict, McGowan told The Guardian,
"I felt like I had about 500,000 [pounds] lifted off my shoulders.
[...] To have that burden lifted, it felt like my cells were dissolving."
The years that followed her alleged assault by Harvey Weinstein saw McGowan's Hollywood
fame fade as a big-screen career that had been on the rise began fizzling out.
The actress-turned-"Silence Breaker" later claimed this was due to Weinstein bad mouthing
her throughout the industry, advising directors and studios not to work with her.
McGowan wrote in her memoir,
"It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment.
And I was the one who was punished for it."
McGowan later learned that her experience was not unique, with other actresses making
similar allegations of being blacklisted after refusing Weinstein's advances.
Meanwhile, Weinstein denied ever having a non-consensual encounter with McGowan or any
of his other accusers, with his lawyer previously issuing a statement to The New York Times
insisting that, quote, "there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for
refusing his advances."
"I don't know about you but when you've had consensual sex you don't really fill up with
tears afterwards."
McGowan told The Guardian in 2019,
"I miss performing.
But my career was stolen.
We all got stolen.
And we were all very good at our jobs.
That's the other crime in all this."
While attending the 2020 Academy Awards, Natalie Portman made headlines with a fashion-statement
gown that called attention to female directors who had been snubbed that year.
However, amid much praise in the press came a disparaging comment from one McGowan.
In a lengthy Facebook post, she called Portman out as a "fraud," before blasting her supposed
"fake support of other women" and deriding her as, quote, "an actress acting the part
of someone who cares."
In response, Portman simply released a statement to CNN, saying,
"I agree with Ms. McGowan that it is inaccurate to call me 'brave' for wearing a garment with
women's names on it.
Brave is a term I more strongly associate with actions like those of the women who have
been testifying against Harvey Weinstein the last few weeks, under incredible pressure."
McGowan seemingly had second thoughts about her initial social media rant, when she took
to Twitter to issue a post that she subsequently deleted.
According to The Guardian, without mentioning Portman by name, McGowan had written,
"My critique should've been about Hollywood's ongoing culture of silence.
I realize that by critiquing someone personally, I lost sight of the bigger picture.
All voices, however spoken, are valid."
McGowan found herself facing a wave of social media backlash over an interview she did with
Britain's The Times to mark the one-year anniversary of the Me Too movement going mainstream in
Hollywood.
In the original story — which the outlet later amended — McGowan was quoted as describing
the movement as, quote, "all bulls---."
After the story was published, McGowan fired back with a scathing tweet, insisting she
was misquoted and her words taken out of context:
"I never said [Me Too] is a lie.
Ever.
I was talking about Hollywood and Time's Up, not [Me Too]."
The Times subsequently updated the piece, emphasizing that McGowan was indeed criticizing
"Hollywood's approach to [Me Too]" — not the actual movement itself.
However, McGowan had more to say on the matter and narrowed in on the Time's Up initiative,
further clarifying her words in a pair of videos she posted on Twitter, as well as another
tweet containing the actual interview transcript to demonstrate how her words had been twisted.
She wrote,
"The question was, 'And you don't get invited to all the lunches?'
[...] No, and I don't want to go, because it's all bulls---.
It's a lie.
It's a Band-Aid lie to make them feel better."
"So come on, it is fake, I wish it weren't, I wish everybody was good, I wish it wasn't
like, I'm sorry to puncture your heroes."
McGowan is clearly no stranger to sharing her views via social media, but that hasn't
always gone well.
Case in point: in a since-deleted tweet she issued in January 2020, the actress criticized
the controversial U.S. military airstrike that took out Iranian General Soleimani . According
to Newsweek, she wrote,
"Dear [Iran], The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people.
52% of us humbly apologize.
We want peace with your nation.
We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime.
We do not know how to escape.
Please do not kill us."
However, the message was met with backlash from Twitter users who blasted McGowan as,
quote, "a treasonous psycho," "a disgrace to this country," and "un-American."
Some responded with the hashtag "Move To Iran."
McGowan addressed the controversy in an interview with the Associated Press, saying that she
didn't mean to come across as unpatriotic.
She explained,
"I don't support Iran over America.
I want America to be better [...] I just thought I would do something a little strange or unusual."
In May 2020, McGowan shared a vintage recollection from her appearance on Bill Maher's long-defunct
talk show, Politically Incorrect, from back in the 1990s — and it was not a pleasant
one.
She wrote on Twitter,
"[Bill Maher] Here's a memory I'd like to share with you.
I bet you don't remember, but I sure do.
I was so excited to be on your show & get to flex my mind instead of my face.
Here's what happened.
All I can say, Bill, you got the face you deserved."
Attached was a statement, in which she claimed that when the show was returning from a commercial
break, Maher leaned over and whispered a highly inappropriate comment in her ear.
People magazine's request for comment from Maher's rep went unanswered, while a rep for
HBO — which airs Maher's talk show, Real Time — told the Washington Examiner that
the network "declined to comment."
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