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Recently, Rose McGowan launched a scathing attack on Meryl Streep’s alleged “hypocrisy”. The former certainly didn’t hold back berating Streep for reportedly planning to wear black on the Golden Globes red carpet in protest of men using their power to intimidate their victims. “Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @GoldenGlobes in a silent protest,” McGowan wrote. “YOUR SILENCE is THE problem. You’ll accept a fake award breathlessly and affect no real change. I despise your hypocrisy. Maybe you should all wear Marchesa.”
Now, the 31-time Golden Globe nominee has today released a statement to the Huffington Post stating she wasn’t being silent, she simply didn’t know of Weinstein’s intimidation and sexual assault of young women.
“It hurt to be attacked by Rose McGowan in banner headlines this weekend, but I want to let her know I did not know about Weinstein’s crimes, not in the 90s when he attacked her, or through subsequent decades when he proceeded to attack others,” Streep began.
“I wasn’t deliberately silent. I didn’t know. I don’t tacitly approve of rape. I didn’t know. I don’t like young women being assaulted. I didn’t know this was happening.”
“HW was not a filmmaker; he was often a producer, primarily a marketer of films made by other people — some of them great, some not great. But not every actor, actress, and director who made films that HW distributed knew he abused women, or that he raped Rose in the 90s, other women before and others after, until they told us. We did not know that women’s silence was purchased by him and his enablers,” Streep continued, subtlely putting the silence argument back on McGowan who was paid to keep quiet.
“[Harvey Weinstein] needed me much more than I needed him and he made sure I didn’t know.”
“Rose assumed and broadcast something untrue about me, and I wanted to let her know the truth. Through friends who know her, I got my home phone number to her the minute I read the headlines. I sat by that phone all day yesterday and this morning, hoping to express both my deep respect for her and others’ bravery in exposing the monsters among us, and my sympathy for the untold, ongoing pain she suffers. No one can bring back what entitled bosses like Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and HW took from the women who endured attacks on their bodies and their ability to make a living. And I hoped that she would give me a hearing. She did not, but I hope she reads this.
“I am truly sorry she sees me as an adversary, because we are both, together with all the women in our business, standing in defiance of the same implacable foe: a status quo that wants so badly to return to the bad old days, the old ways where women were used, abused and refused entry into the decision-making, top levels of the industry. That’s where the cover-ups convene. Those rooms must be disinfected, and integrated, before anything even begins to change.”
Meryl, we really hope McGowan gives you a call. She has deleted the tweet at least.
Read the full statement here.
