Rose McGowan accuses Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne of sexual misconduct: ‘I Was 15’

Rose McGowan has accused the Oscar-winning filmmaker, Alexander Payne of sexual misconduct. The alleged incident supposedly took place when she was 15 years old.

The actress, activist and director, who was at the forefront to take down Harvey Weinstein after publicly accusing him of rape, wrote allegations against Payne on Twitter. The 46-year-old actress claims he exhibited sexually inappropriate behavior towards her when she was 15 and he was in his twenties.

When asked why she was ready to make the allegation against Payne now, McGowan said,“It just came over me. It was time.”

“I just want an acknowledgement and an apology”

On Monday morning, August 17th, the actress tweeted, “Alexander Payne. You sat me down & played a soft-core porn movie you directed for Showtime under a different name. I still remember your apartment in Silverlake. You are very well-endowed. You left me on a street corner afterwards. I was 15.” The post was accompanied by a GIF of McGowan making an emphatic X gesture against a background featuring the word “No.”

In a follow-up tweet, the “Charmed” actress posted a Black and White headshot of herself at 15 and wrote. “I just want an acknowledgement and an apology. I do not want to destroy. This was me at 15.”

This isn’t the first time that McGowan has talked about the incident

McGowan’s new claim appears to match up with a description of an encounter, with an unnamed man, that she alluded to back in February 2018. While appearing on Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill podcast. The chat was organized to promote her autobiography, Brave. McGowan went on to discuss an incident of inappropriate sexual behavior committed against her by a powerful man in Hollywood, when she was 15.

“Even long before the Harvey Weinstein incident, you recounted to me that there was a statutory rape by a prominent man in Hollywood,” Farrow said to McGowan at the time. “Yes, and I didn’t process that until, well, I’ll get to him,” McGowan responded without naming the man.

“How old were you?” Farrow asked. “15,” McGowan replied. “Looking back, I was groomed. I auditioned for him, and then he took me back to his apartment in Silver Lake. Played me a soft porn movie he’d directed for Showtime under a different name. And then I slept with him,” she recalled during the chat. “Then he left me on the street corner next to Cafe Tropical on Sunset Boulevard. I always thought he was really handsome and I liked him.”

“I started crying because I felt really bad for that girl that was left on that street corner”

McGowan also detailed that she realized much later after the encounter that it would qualify as a statutory rape allegation. “I’d been attracted to him, so I always filed it away as a sexual experience. Two weeks after your [New Yorker] story came out, I’d processed it, but I removed myself from it.”

Talking about the incident more, McGowan revealed, “When I started to break it down and figure it out, I started crying because I felt really bad for that girl that was left on that street corner,” she said. “I still talk about it like that, like that ‘young girl’ or that. It’s a very divorced feeling from me. But I think it’s just coping mechanisms. But I don’t know, I haven’t decided what to do with that information.”

When Farrow asked if she would ever name the man in question, McGowan said: “I’ll go reflect on it more and get back to you.”

“I feel like he and I are strapped in this battle together until one of us is dead”

McGowan was one of the leading activists of the global #MeToo movement. She publicly accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her at a Sundance Film Festival hotel in the late ’90s. The disgraced movie producer has denied McGowan’s allegation. Weinstein was convicted in March in a landmark #MeToo case. Which ended with six of his accusers sobbing and hugging each other from the front row of the courtroom. 

During an episode of the podcast, Shut Up Evan, a few days before Weinstein was convicted, host Evan Ross Katz asked McGowan if the ongoing trial was bringing her any sense of finality in her story with Weinstein. To which she replied, “Probably not until he’s dead now.”

“I feel like he and I are strapped in this battle together until one of us is dead. That’s how it goes,” she continued. “Energetically, we’re just locked. It’s a really disgusting feeling. I just would love to be able to be like other people and live my life. That would be really nice, you know?” In May McGowan said that she is ‘in a good place now’ that Weinstein is serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault.