Rose McGowan appeared on Tuesday morning’s edition of Good Morning Britain ahead of her acceptance of GQ’s Men of the Year Inspiration Award. McGowan will be the first woman to receive the distinction, and she had plenty to tell Piers Morgan in response to his #MeToo grilling. Foremost, she spoke out against Asia Argento, the noted Harvey Weinstein accuser who was recently accused of a 2013 sexual assault by former child actor Jimmy Bennett, who received a $380,000 settlement as reported by the New York Times.
McGowan has already publicly distanced herself from Argento, and while speaking with Morgan, McGowan declared that there was a slight silver lining to Bennett’s case, which was “showing that boys have voices, and boys get hurt, too.” In response to Morgan’s question of whether McGowan believed Argento was lying, the Charmed actress firmly answered, “Yes.” She also revealed that Argento had only told her she was being “extorted” by Bennett, and McGowan further elaborated in the context of the #MeToo movement:
“MeToo is not just for women, I’ve had so many men share their stories of abuse, it’s never happened before in history and people are freaking out and trying to analyse and crunch the data, my response is to let it breathe, let people have their voice. If I feel like walking down the street naked, no one has the right to rape me. When I take my girlfriend, who is masculine presenting, to a gay club, often times she gets grabbed. Everybody has the sovereign right to their body.”
And when Morgan took a skeptical attitude regarding due process and sexual misconduct accusations, McGowan declared her belief that coming forward is a difficult feat that lessens the possibility of false accusations:
“I don’t know if we know if careers are over because it’s been such a short period of time … The hell you go through just to speak truth really whittles down the false accusations. You can cut off the rot and let the good people come up. All we need to do is to have a collective conversation.”
McGowan alluded in the above excerpts to how she’s dating non-binary model Rain Dove, who has alleged that Argento called the model a “monster” for turning over texts about Bennett to police. There’s still the possibility that Argento, whose episodes of Parts Unknown were recently removed from CNN’s library, could face legal repercussions, given that it’s a crime for an adult to have sex with anyone under age 18 (Bennett was 17, and she was 37 at the time).
Watch McGowan’s full Good Morning Britain appearance below.