‘Untouchable’ Exposes How the Media Protected Harvey Weinstein for Decades
It was at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival that Harvey Weinstein, a crater-faced caricature of an asshole Hollywood movie producer, allegedly raped Rose McGowan.
Following a screening of her film Going All the Way, McGowan, then 23, alleges that Weinstein invited her to a meeting at a restaurant that was then changed to his hotel suite. He was effectively her boss, since she’d already filmed a sizeable role in the sci-fi thriller Phantoms, which was to be distributed by the Weinstein-owned Miramax, as well as one of the most powerful men in the film industry, so she went.
Once inside, she says that Weinstein eventually forced himself on her, raping her at the edge of his Jacuzzi. “I felt so dirty. I had been violated and I was sad to the core of my being,” she writes in her memoir Brave. “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 in. Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.” (Weinstein has denied all of the many, many allegations of sexual assault made against him.)
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