Harvey Weinstein accuser Asia Argento attacks #MeToo ‘allies

Actress who helped expose Weinstein’s serial sex abuse turns on fellow accusers, claiming ‘sanctimonious’ hypocrisy and betrayal.

Italian actress Asia Argento has turned on fellow Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan. Picture: AFP

An Italian actress who helped to expose Harvey Weinstein’s serial sex abuse has turned on her former MeToo allies, accusing them of hypocrisy and betrayal.

Asia Argento, 45, was one of the first actresses to publicly denounce the film mogul in 2017 for repeated rape and became a champion of the MeToo movement as the American producer was jailed for 23 years.

Other stars followed her in accusing Weinstein of assault or harassment, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Helena Bonham Carter and Angelina Jolie. But many then accused Argento of double standards when an actor claimed that she sexually assaulted him in 2013 when he was 17 and she was 37. Argento then claimed that Jimmy Bennett had assaulted her, and in an autobiography released this week accuses the actresses of turning their backs on her.

“The MeToo companions abandoned me one after another, pointing their fake, sanctimonious fingers at me,” she writes. “Who knows, maybe they were even happy to kick out someone like me, someone who didn’t fit in, who had always refused to conform to their bourgeois ideas.”

Argento singles out Rose McGowan, the actress and fellow MeToo protagonist, stating: “I will never forgive her for turning her back on me in my moment of need.”

Argento poses with US director Rob Cohen, whom she has accused of sexual assault.

In Anatomy of a Wild Heart, Argento says that she was sexually assaulted by the Fast and Furious director Rob Cohen when they made the action film xXx in 2002. During a stay at a hotel in Vienna she recalls taking Ecstasy with the director and spending the evening doing yoga with him before asking for a sedative as she prepared to return to her room. She says he offered her GHB, a date rape drug. Thinking it was a normal sedative she accepted and partially lost consciousness, she says, and has patchy recollections of being assaulted by Cohen. He has denied the accusation, calling it “bewildering”.

Argento adds new details about Weinstein’s assault in a Cannes hotel in 1997 when she was 21. She recalls him taking her after the incident to a dinner with Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Christina Ricci, who sat on Weinstein’s knee. “I had the feeling I was in a circle of hell,” she writes, adding she was terrified that “someone would read on my face what had just happened”.

She claims Weinstein assaulted her again, but she continued to meet him until the actor Michael Pitt warned her the producer had a hold over her. When Weinstein got in touch again, Argento’s partner, the chef Anthony Bourdain, interceded to stop him calling.

Argento, daughter of the horror film director Dario Argento, describes a turbulent childhood in which she says she was beaten by her mother, an actress, smoked her first marijuana joint at nine, and saw her first boyfriend die of an overdose.

Before her fateful meeting with Weinstein she starred in the film B.Monkey, directed by Michael Radford, whom she reports having had an affair with. She also claims she had flings with her co-stars Jared Harris, Rupert Everett and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

The Times