Rose McGowan: 'Seeing Harvey Weinstein's face every day was brutal'

26 August 2019

Rose McGowan says it was "brutal" to see Harvey Weinstein's face every day after sexual assault allegations about him went public.

Rose McGowan

The 45-year-old actress was one of the first people to accuse the disgraced producer when she alleged he had raped her at the Sundance film festival in 1997 and she admitted it was hard to deal with seeing "omnipresent" Harvey, 67, everywhere as more women came forward with their own allegations.

Speaking to Sadie Frost in 'Sky's upcoming documentary 'The Power of Women', Rose said: "It was brutal seeing my attacker's face every day, his name every day. It was like a bullet, people don't know that.

"Most people - unless it's a family member that does it to you - you don't really see them anymore. This person was omnipresent in the world, just everywhere. I felt like I came within a hair's breadth of losing my mind."

However, Rose has insisted she doesn't want her life "to be defined" by Harvey.

She said: "I have reached a point of stability in my own life, but also you wouldn't want your life to be defined by someone who hurt you, they are not worth that.

"So many of us have our own demon in our lives. Some days its fine and some days it's not, the whole thing is super unusual, it's not normal."

Rose also explained that she is devoting herself to promoting gender equality and she believes that progress is being made.

She said: "My work is all about getting men and women to see each other as humans, and more like can a man see a woman as human and can a woman see a man as human and then we can get past all the gender stuff and can actually figure out that our lives are a lot more similar than we know.

"I think equality comes from when it's like "Oh, they're not that different, we do have the same goals and we do have the same aspirations, we do have the same wants and desires and hopes."

"I think I'd say within the last two years we're come a solid 10 per cent forward which is huge, it's a huge cultural shift.

"I don't know how long it's going to take but we all have to fight the good fight and wouldn't it be great to get to a day where we don't have to fight - we just get to exist."