The moment Rose McGowan unleashed on a transgender protester in an on-stage meltdown at a book reading on Wednesday two days before she canceled all public appearances has been captured in video.
The outburst happened at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square on Wednesday evening as McGowan gave a reading from her new book, Brave.
Among the crowd of fans was an Andi Dier, an angry transgender woman who attacked McGowan for not campaigning for the rights of trans women.
She shouted at the actress and had to be escorted out by security but her remarks set McGowan on a minutes-long, profane rant where she spoke about being ‘raped and strangled’ and claimed Investigation Discovery was a network ‘dedicated to women’s deaths’.
The following day, the star took part in an interview with prolific reporter Ronan Farrow where she claimed for the first time that she had been raped as a 15-year-old by a well-known, Oscar winning actor as well as by Harvey Weinstein, as she has been alleging for years.
After that appearance, McGowan, who is the star of a new documentary about her advocacy work and how she has been part of the Me Too movement, canceled all public appearances.
WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE AND CONTENT
Rose McGowan lashed out at a protester on Wednesday night during a reading of her book Brave at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan
Transgender protester Andi Dier ambushed McGowan from the crowd to complain that she wasn’t doing enough for the transgender community
In a tweet, she said she had given ‘enough’ to the cause and demanded an apology from Barnes & Noble.
She also alleged that Dier had been paid to lambast her and she abhorred her publicists and the ‘complicit’ audience for not standing up for her.
When first confronted by Dier at the book event, McGowan kept her composure and told her, as she screamed abuse, ‘sit down, you’re so boring’.
Dier complained that McGowan, while advocating for cisgender women’s rights, had done nothing for the trans community.
‘You don’t know my life. Sit down. Sit down. Sit down. Enough. Back off. Shut up you’re so boring. Don’t label me sister, don’t put your labels on me,’ she said.
Cheered on by the crowd, McGowan became angrier.
‘Don’t you f**** do that. Do not put your label on me, I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone,’ she said.
Then, as the protester was escorted away, the actress sprang out of her chair and proclaimed: ‘I do not subscribe to your language. You do not put labels on me or anybody. Step the f*** back!
‘What I do is for the f****** world and you should be f****** grateful. So shut the f*** up. Get off my back. What have you done? Cause I know what I’ve done. God dammit!’
Sitting back down, Mcgowan carried on.
Once her rant had started, the actress screamed for minutes about the ‘ID network’ which she said was ‘devoted’ to actress’s deaths and described being ‘raped and strangled’
McGowan leaped out of her seat as she became angrier, screaming ‘f*** off!’ towards the women who had attacked her
McGowan gave the woman a strong arm gesture as she was escorted away by security
McGowan’s rant continued until long after the woman had been escorted away
Afterwards, McGowan canceled all of her public appearances and said she’d been ‘assaulted’
‘I’m mad at the f***** lies, I’m mad at the stereotypes. I am mad that you put s** on me! Cause I have a f****** vagina!
‘And I’m white or I’m black or I’m yellow or I’m purple. F*** off! All of us want to say it, I just do. God dammit!’ she said.
McGowan claimed that Dier, a transgender woman from Long Island, had been paid to launch the attack. She denies it
In a second outburst, filmed later, she returned to the subject of how transgender women are abused but said their treatment was not the same because she, as an actress, had been systematically abused and sexualized as part of her job.
‘Trans women are women what I’ve been trying to say is that it’s actually identical the stats are not that dissimilar. You break it down it is a much f****** smaller population
‘There’s not a network however devoted to your f****** death. There’s not advertisers advertising tampons as a camera goes lovingly up a girl’s body as she’s being f****** raped and strangled. P*** off.
‘Until you can collect that f**** check, back up,’ she said.
Earlier at the event, she made reference to the ‘ID network’ which is the abbreviated name of Investigation Discovery.
To cap off, she fumed: ‘My name is Rose McGowan and I’m obviously f****** brave.
‘God damnit. It’s time to tell the truth. Isn’t boring? Isn’t it bored?’
McGowan went on the Stephen Colbert show afterwards where she gave an off-kilter interview
On Thursday night, McGowan told Ronan Farrow that she had been raped when she was 15
On Thursday, McGowan took part in an interview with Farrow, whose explosive reporting for The New Yorker led to Harvey Weinstein’s downfall last year.
During that interview, she claimed for the first time that not only had she been orally raped by Weinstein in 1997, but another actor raped her when she was 15.
That man is a well-known Oscar winner and McGowan said that because she was attracted to him at the time, she ‘filed it’ away in her head as a consensual sexual experience but realizes now it was an assault.
‘Let me tell you he worked for my rapist and won Oscars. And you know so this man he was very famous.
‘I think you know, when he took me home after he met me and he showed me a softcore porn movie he’d made for Showtime under a different name of course that’s when I learned what nam-myoho-renge-kyo was because it was involved with this softcore porn,’ said Rose, referring to the Buddhist practice.
‘And then he had sex with me and then he left me next to Cafe Tropicale in Silverlake standing on a street corner.
‘I’d always found him attractive, well not always that day. I in my mind, playing it back, I’d always felt like I had been attracted to him so I always filed it away under a sexual experience,’ she said.