Rose McGowan says Hollywood is like a cult

When allegations of sexual assault started to surface about the film producer Harvey Weinstein late last year — he has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex — Rose McGowan added her voice, early and loudly.

“I wanted to show people around the world that you can strike at the head of power and not just bite at the ankles,” she says. “Because they can shake you off when you bite at the ankles.”

The former actor had collaborated with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times journalists who broke the story in October, passing on information about the $100,000 (Dh367,248) settlement he paid her in 1997 after an alleged assault. When Weinstein turned himself in, McGowan tweeted: “We got you, Harvey Weinstein, we got you.”

McGowan’s experiences of abuse in Hollywood began early. At 15, she appeared in a film Class of 1999; one of the men involved in the film called her up to his hotel room and allegedly sexually assaulted her. She soon realised, she says, “that town is really built on sickness. Very early on I looked at the power structure, the figureheads, the silence, the closed ranks. Nobody tells. It operates like a cult.”

As a woman, she says she felt belittled and objectified, treated as inferior to her male colleagues: “I always knew that I was No 2 on the call sheet instead of No 1, even though I was the lead. Or nobody would listen to anything I would say, even if it could save a lot of money or time on set. I had a line on the inside of my mouth that I would chew, just bite down. Just suck it up, push the rage down.”