In August of 2020, Rose McGowan (Jawbreaker, Planet Terror) accused director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) of sexual misconduct when she was a fifteen-year-old aspiring actress. McGowan has been outspoken about the “cult” of Hollywood — the power dynamic and hidden atrocities that come with it. Unless you have been avoiding all social media and news outlets for the past three years, you know that McGowan was one of the first and most prominent victims to speak out against Harvey Weinstein. Facing backlash and bombarded with questions like “Why didn’t you make it public earlier?” or “Why did you continue to work for him?” and so on, McGowan released a four-part documentary, Citizen Rose, as a means of explaining herself once and for all.
This series was filmed in 2017, during the same time that the New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow was published, beginning the outing of Harvey Weinstein, who McGowan refers to as the “monster”. In 1997, just after starring in Scream, a 23-year-old McGowan was raped by the Hollywood producer. For the next 20 years, McGowan lived with this (widely known) secret.
Citizen Rose deals with the aftermath of “coming out” as a victim. The importance of this series is the raw pain and conflict behind a woman speaking out against power. There are parts of Citizen Rose which weren’t my personal taste, but the themes of the series are new and refreshing. Especially in film and television, we often see the act of violence itself, but rarely are we given the perspective of the victim after the fact. Usually, the focus is on the criminal justice system, or even the effect on the accused, but rarely the trauma and pain of the victim for years after the event.
McGowan’s story is a textbook example of gaslighting. McGowan was ignored, vilified, and called crazy because of these accusations. When the Farrow article came out, and people understood that she was telling the truth the whole time, she then had to deal with the aftermath of being gaslit for so long. We see her navigate the initial trauma, along with the continued trauma produced by the public. While I adore Ronan Farrow as an investigator and writer, it is heartbreaking that the criminal justice system and the public needed him to “verify” the accounts of McGowan and the other women, who were ignored for so long. And people still wonder why women, and victims of sexual assault, don’t speak out.
