Rose McGowan opens up one year after Harvey Weinstein’s guilty ruling

Rose McGowan opened up on the anniversary of Harvey Weinstein’s guilty ruling saying she’s managed to find some peace in the last year. She was one of the first women to speak up against him. He is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence.

On Wednesday, February 24, was when the guilty ruling completed a year. Weinstein was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of two of five charges relating to sexual assaults. “I was sick,” McGowan told Fox News in an interview on Feb. 24, a day she now calls an “anniversary of freedom.”

“All of the time I had to fight in battle and these monsters, what they were doing to me behind the scenes and to others, people don’t know what that was like, what we lived with…the stress,” McGowan recalled of the years leading up to Weinstein’s conviction and the #MeToo movement that subsequently began.

She says that knowing Weinstein’s locked up has provided her a sense of relief she didn’t think was possible for decades. “I feel great,” McGowan now says. “This is the first time, especially since 1997, I have a free existence without this giant, obese monster on my back. I had to live with him shadowing me, terrorizing me, whether it be paying off journalists to trash me for years or hiring spies to infiltrate my life and steal my book.” “I can honestly say that while the case still goes on, I am largely free,” McGowan continued. “I’m shocked I’m still alive because people like me don’t live.”

McGowan had previously accused Harvey Weinstein of rape in 1997. She then filed a lawsuit in 2019 accusing Weinstein as well as his attorneys Lisa Bloom & David Boies of working to discredit her to undermine her claims.

Recently, she said she sent a message to her fellow Weinstein accuser, Jessica Mann, “I texted her and I said, ‘Happy anniversary. You did it, we did it. One year with that monster off our backs. Thank you,'”.  She received kind words from Mann.

“Tonight I’m going to go and sit on the beach in the stars and almost full moon. This has been the best year of my life,” she shared while recalling the events of last year. She’s backed Tara Reade who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault and continues to show relentless support to women voicing the wrongs meted out to them.

“For me, it wasn’t the “Me Too movement.” It was a cultural reset. When you clean your closet out you make a big mess, then it gets clean,” she said. “It’s kind of like that for society. We needed that, and for me, for years society had a lot of awful thoughts about me and I had some thoughts for them. I think we’ve all come out the better for it.”

Weinstein continues to face rape, forcible oral copulation, and other charges in the state of California after five women said they were attacked during events in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills from 2004 to 2013. He is awaiting extradition for trial due to the ongoing pandemic.

It is simply inspiring to see women speak up and support other women, that is how we as a society can usher into the era of equality and justice.