Actor Rose McGowan claims that director Alexander Payne showed her pornography and exposed himself to her when she was a teenager. She made the allegations in a Tweet on Monday, in which she asked for an “apology.”
In her tweet, the 46-year-old McGowan said she was 15 when Payne, 29, played a “soft-core porn movie” as she was at his apartment in California and exposed himself.
In another tweet, she shared an image of herself as a teen and insisted that she does not want to “destroy” Payne, a two-time Oscar winner for Best Adapted Screenplay. She said she wanted an acknowledgment of her allegations and the apology.
Neither Payne nor McGowan responded to HuffPost requests for comment.
McGowan alleged in 2017 that she’d been raped by disgraced film executive Harvey Weinstein, 68. In February, Weinstein was convicted in New York of rape and sexual assault in cases involving other women, and he faces sexual assault charges in Los Angeles.
McGowan sat down with reporter Ronan Farrow in February 2018 to discuss her accusations against Weinstein and another allegation of misconduct with a “very famous” man came up.
“He took me home, after he met me, and showed me a soft-porn movie he’d made for Showtime, under a different name, of course … And then he had sex with me. And then he left me next to Tropical in Silver Lake (a cafe in a Los Angeles neighbourhood), standing on a street corner,” McGowan said at the time.
Sex with a 15-year-old constitutes statutory rape in California.
She also told Farrow that the man “worked for my rapist (meaning Weinstein) and won Oscars.”
McGowan was recognised as one of the ‘Silence Breakers,’ the group of women honoured by Time magazine for speaking out about sexual misconduct and honoured as a group as the 2017 Person of the Year.
In an interview with the publication at the time, she offered advice to women: “Know your power. Know your worth. Don’t let them trick you. They’re going to start around age nine. People, especially need women, need to understand they’re not equal to—they’re more than. Once they know that, they can fly.”