Rose McGowan reveals she cashed in savings and fled the US before coronavirus hit

She was on one of TV’s biggest shows — but turned her back on Hollywood as feeling like an “accomplice” to the industry’s worst tendencies.

While most of the world stays home during lockdown, Rose McGowan has fled Manhattan for the jungles of Mexico to ride out the pandemic.

The outspoken actress-activist-singer-songwriter spoke candidly about falling on hard times, cashing in her retirement fund, and why she had chosen this locale to shelter in place.

“I’m in a place called Coba (on the Yucatan peninsula). I knew (COVID-19) was going to get really bad in America and I had a moment to figure out where I wanted to be. My lease was up in New York so I came here to Mexico where I’m living for a third of the price,” she said. “It’s beautiful here.”

McGowan famously fought disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and was one of the first in a long line of women to publicly accuse him of sexual assault. But the repercussions have taken an enormous financial toll.

“I had to sell my house and everything in it. It was a beautiful house, a beautiful property that I put so much love into, but I had to pay legal fees to fight Harvey and I needed to hire really big attorneys to make sure my book (Brave) would get published,” she said.

Her Hollywood Hills home sold for just under $US2 million in 2018. It seems the proceeds from the sale were not sustainable and she had to take further measures.

“So, about six months ago, I cashed out my retirement. Of course, the government takes a huge cut but I didn’t have any liquid money left,” she said. “The only other job I’d had besides Hollywood was when I was 14 years old and working in a funeral home. So, what do I know about making a living?”

McGowan was known for roles such as Charmed (2001-2006), Grindhouse (2007) Machete (2010) and Conan The Barbarian (2011).

McGowan (right) with her Charmed co-stars, Holly Marie Combs (left) and Alyssa Milano.

“Financially, I’ll be OK for a year but I have to figure out how to make money, how to survive. I stayed in Hollywood for so long because I was homeless as a teenager and I was so scared of being homeless again, so it became a driving fear in me.

“But finally I had to be fearless and be like, ‘If I was homeless again, could I survive it?’ The answer is yes. I don’t have schizophrenia, I don’t have a mental disorder, so I could survive. And so that realisation took away that worst case scenario fear for me. It really freed me, though I’m hoping for a (safety) net to appear.”

Although she wasn’t surprised by her mistreatment in Hollywood over coming forward (before there was a semblance of safety-in-numbers propelled by the #metoo movement), it hurt. “When I went after Harvey and was blacklisted, I took scraps of work but I knew that no one was going to hire me eventually because that’s how it is in Hollywood,” she said.

“It’s really sad and it’s really too bad. I get a lot of questions like, ‘Who in Hollywood has supported you?’ And I am like, ‘No-one!’

“I was dismissed. I was treated very badly. I’d go to an event and the women actresses would scoot away from me as if my blacklist was something they could catch.”

McGowan is one of Weinstein’s most high-profile accusers.

Understandably, nobody was happier than McGowan when the sentencing came down for Weinstein on March 11, confirming the former mogul would spend the next 23 years in jail for first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape.

“When he was found guilty I realised it was the first time I’d ever agreed with anything he said, which was, ‘I can’t believe this happened in America.’ I was like, ‘You and me both!’” McGowan said.

“I was in utter shock (he was found guilty) because the cases they’d tried in Manhattan were the weakest cases. The DA in Manhattan had suppressed a previous arrest with Weinstein (with somebody wearing a wire), and so those cases had never been tried successfully in any court in the world and I think Harvey thought he was going to get off because of that.

“That’s why he was sleeping through the testimonies. One of his core victims, Jessica (Mann), was having a full breakdown and he slept through it,” she said. “He probably thought, ‘I am guaranteed to get off here.’

“And thank God that times have changed enough that the jury saw through that old-fashioned sl*t shaming, saying, ‘These women are whores, and that they wanted this.’”

Having come full circle, McGowan is finally in the throes of healing.

“Yes. The feeling of peace has come because now I know that this person can’t hurt me anymore and can’t hurt so many people that he hurt. He was a one man wrecking crew.”

She shook her head. “He destroyed so many lives.”

Weinstein and McGowan at the Grindhouse premiere in 2007.

She revisited that fateful morning when she alleges that Weinstein raped her. It was 1997 during the Sundance Film Festival.

“I was at a ten-in-the-morning breakfast meeting and it was in the middle of my second film for his company. I wasn’t trying to get the job, I had the job. I didn’t even know who he was, other than I’d heard his name as a producer, but I’d never met him.

“After you go through something like that, you’re desperate to go back to who you used to be, but that person is dead so what you have to do is figure out afterwards how to give birth to that dead thing inside of you.”

Speaking on a conference app, McGowan, 46, happily showed off her emotional therapy dog, ‘This is Pearla Kali!’” she laughed, holding up a young puppy.

Until recently, McGowan was sporting a shaved head, but now her hair is blonde and closely cropped.

“It was six years ago when I shaved my head. I basically forced the situation so I wouldn’t be able to do a movie because of how I looked. And the side effect of shaving my head was that I noticed men and women were listening to the words coming out of my mouth,” she said.

“I used to be told over and over and over, ‘You’re so smart for an actress.’ It was just so condescending. Why can’t I be smart for a person?”

The former actress has sported a shaven head for some time.

Her hair, or lack thereof, was a reaction to how she felt about the Weinstein assault and the ensuing fallout.

“I felt that my voice was taken from me for a very long time and I was an accomplice to that. I was working in Hollywood and doing job after job, and I spent more time not being myself than I did being myself. And also, I spent more time not being listened to or heard. And like I said, when I shaved my head, men and women could hear me.”

Now she can be heard on her debut album, Planet 9, a companion piece to her book, Brave, which came out in 2018.

“Planet 9 is something that I created when I was 10 years old to heal myself, just mentally to go somewhere else. I recorded it mostly during the time I was writing my book, Brave.”

Her music is softer than what you’d imagine.

“Yes, people expected a Rose McGowan album to be a hard rock thing where I’m yelling, but that’s not me. I like using my voice hypnotically.”

For McGowan, Planet 9 offers a respite for people from the fear the world is experiencing. “People are experiencing so much trauma and pain in the world and Planet 9 can help and heal people if they just shut their eyes and go on the journey,” she said.

Evidently, this is a challenging moment in her life but McGowan has certainly lived through worse.

“I am really enjoying just getting to be me for the first time in my life. During the last three years all that people saw was me being really angry and rage-pushing a movement forward, pushing different thoughts forward and having to fight all the time,” she said. “Well, who wants to do that? On Twitter is where I still go hard, and it’s not fun. I’d rather be lying in grass, staring at the clouds.”

McGowan outside court during Weinstein’s NYC trial in January this year.

She has been using some unusual methods to combat the fear inspired from the virus.

“Fear is like this hamster wheel in our head that just goes around and around and around. So one of the things I do is carry around paper that says, ‘F.U. coronavirus,’ because I don’t know how I am going to make money. I’m scared, so if I vomit it out on the page, it stops that wheel going around in my head.”

How has she been passing the time?

“Like a lot of people, I stand up, I sit down, I text, I FaceTime. I maybe write a little bit of something, I walk around in a circle and I lay down again. It’s really just that,” she said. “People say, ‘What did you do today?’ I say, ‘The same thing as I did yesterday.

“After this week of interviews promoting the album, I’ll probably fall into a semi-depression and stare at the wall again.”

Talking about her activism, McGowan said: “People think I do it for women but I actually don’t believe in traditional gender roles too much. I think the work that I do is about getting men and women really to back up and be human first.

“That’s what is most important.”

Rose McGowan’s new album Planet 9 is available now on Bandcamp.