Rose McGowan accuses director Alexander Payne of sexual misconduct

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Actress Rose McGowan, who led the charge outing movie mogul Harvey Weinstein for his predatory behavior, has now accused director Alexander Payne of sexual misconduct that allegedly occurred when she was just 15 years old. The actress shared her experience in a series of tweets of Sunday and Monday that intimately recalled her time with the director at the time. You can check out McGowan's tweets below which, if they occurred when she was 15, puts Alexander Payne around his late 20s at the time:

If the timeline adds up, McGowan could be recalling what appears to be the same incident in 2018 during a conversation with Ronan Farrow, according to "The Cut". During the conversation, Farrow noted that the actress told him she had experienced statutory rape at the hands of “a prominent man in Hollywood.” She did not say names at the time, but she said that the director took her home, showed her an inappropriate movie, and engaged with her sexually. She told Farrow that since she had been attracted to him, she played off the incident as a “sexual experience.”

McGowan emancipated herself sometime in the late 1980s and moved to Los Angeles, which was about the same time Payne started building up directing credits. His first directing project was 1985’s CARMEN. Payne's career really took off after directing ELECTION with Reese Witherspoon and that then led to more critically acclaimed releases like SIDEWAYS and THE DESCENDANTS. The latter two films garnered Payne two Oscars for best-adapted screenplay. Payne has a series in the works with HBO and Sky called Landscapers, set to star Oscar winner, Olivia Colman. There is no word as of now if the project will be impacted by the allegations and Payne has yet to release a statement about McGowan's claims. 

McGowan took to "Variety" to expand on her reasons for coming out with these allegations now and it appears that it came over her that, at 15, what she experienced wasn't a consensual sexual encounter but what many have come to know as "grooming."

"I feel very badly for my 15-year-old self. I had auditioned for him. He took me home afterwards. I quit acting after that and then was discovered by Ilene Staple (a friend of Gregg Araki) 6 years later. It wasn’t until after the HW [Harvey Weinstein] stories came out that I reframed the Payne of it all. I had for years looked at it as a sexual encounter, not understanding what it really was. It was a grooming situation. The first time I’d been shown a straight porn."

There are always two sides to every story but McGowan has been consistently straight forward about her allegations and it can be argued that her initial whistleblowing sparked the #MeToo movement and ultimately led to more women being brave enough to come out and share their experiences with sexual harassment and misconduct. McGowan was one of the first women to come forward with allegations against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, sharing that Weinstein raped her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 in his hotel suite. Weinstein is now serving a 23-year sentence in upstate New York, convicted on the charges of third-degree rape and first-degree sexual assault. I'll leave this piece with a final statement from McGowan that she posted on her Instagram page on Monday, expanding more on her experience and what that means for her today.