Rose McGowan Alleges That Director Robert Rodriguez Played 'Mind Games' With Her

Rose McGowan has been one of the strongest voices alleging abuse by Harvey Weinstein and advocating for investigation since she broke an NDA to come forward late last year. Her memoir on how being attacked by Weinstein altered her life, Brave, is being released this month, and a recent excerpt accuses director and former boyfriend Robert Rodriguez of using knowledge of her rape to manipulate her on set. He disagrees with her account of events.

Vanity Fair published the preview, which recounts McGowan’s star turn in the Grindhouse double feature Planet Terror and Death Proof. McGowan’s co-star Quentin Tarantino played a character who attacks McGowan, and the excerpt implies that Rodriguez used the scene as “a tool for mind games”:

McGowan fell hard and fast, trusting Rodriguez enough to tell him about her experience with Weinstein. He proceeded to use the knowledge against her, she claims, as a tool for mind games, starting with a scene in which Tarantino, playing a character in his movie, attacks McGowan’s character. “I was in a backward world,” she writes. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” In what McGowan interpreted as the ultimate act of cruelty, Rodriguez “sold our film to my monster.”

In a statement written shared with Vulture, Rodriguez disputed McGowan’s words, calling them “inaccuracies” that “may appear to put me at odds” with her.

According to Rodriguez, Bob and Harvey Weinstein began funding the films in 2005, a year before filming began. In October, Rodriguez wrote an essay for Variety in which he claims that he cast McGowan as a way to spite the Weinsteins, and that they subsequently buried the material. In this new statement, he says that there was plenty of time for McGowan to reject the part if you she didn’t want to appear in a film funded by Harvey Weinstein’s company.

Rodriguez says he has “no quarrel” with McGowan and blames Vanity Fair for not reaching out to fact check or get his version of events.