“I remember running through a cornfield in thunder and lightning, holding my dad’s hand and running as fast as I could to keep up with him,” McGowan recalled to People. Her father was a cartoonist who drew tracts for the movement, she says, and when cult leadership began asking him to draw pamphlets advocating for child molestation, he took his children and one of his wives (who was not McGowan’s mother) and ran. (The version of the organization that still exists today has officially disavowed that doctrine.) But McGowan says that she herself was not molested during her time in the cult. “From about 3, every room I go into,” she told BuzzFeed in 2015, “I immediately look for what I would kill somebody with if I had to defend myself."Ĭhildren of God is most infamous today for its doctrine that children are sexual beings and that in order to raise children naturally, adults should have sex with them. However, she has also recounted feeling physically unsafe. McGowan says she did get an education of sorts while she was in the cult she’s fond of quipping in interviews that she was reading Edgar Allen Poe by age 4 or 6 but didn’t learn to tie her shoes until age 9. Men in the Children of God practiced polygamy the women would serve them and then go out to bars to seduce new recruits in a practice the cult leadership called “Flirty Fishing.” “At a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women,” says McGowan. “They were basically there to serve the men sexually,” says McGowan. Or registering that I was anything but a mind."įor women among the Children of God, the rules were much stricter than they were for the men. "So I grew up without actually registering that I was a girl or a boy. "I don't remember ever seeing any mirrors," she said. For McGowan, who loved glamour - “I basically just came out of the womb waving red lipstick,” she told People - the rules were disquieting. You were expected to be perfect as God made you: You were to purify your body, but do it naturally. While physical imperfections weren’t permitted, neither was makeup or glamour. I had a little wart on my thumb, and I remember walking down this hallway - a door opened and some adult grabbed me and just cut it off with a razor blade and stuck me back out in the hallway with it still bleeding.” McGowan says it was a controlling place to grow up, describing it as “a bit like the Medici court.” In a 2011 profile for People, she said, “You weren’t allowed to have imperfections. Until she was 9 years old, McGowan was raised in the Italian chapter of the Children of God cult, a group that began as a hippie peace-and-free-love religious separatist sect but would quickly become dogged by allegations that sexual abuse ran rampant in the confines of its compounds. McGowan spent her childhood in a restrictive polygamous cult Here’s how McGowan came to build that army. “I’m assembling an army,” she told BuzzFeed in 2015. That’s the story she’s bringing to its culmination in her upcoming memoir, Brave, the story she’s now preparing the public to accept. It’s a story that begins with her childhood growing up in cult that would be plagued by stories of child molestation, and continues into her career as an actress continually cast as sex objects the 2007 car crash and subsequent plastic surgery that made her a target of public mockery and her decision to turn her back on the norms of Hollywood and call on women to unite to upend them. ![]() ![]() Last week, when Twitter briefly suspended her, they boycotted the site in solidarity they’re tweeting with the hashtag #ROSEARMY.įor McGowan, the movement is an extension of the story she’s long been telling about her life, a story of fighting against the world’s desire to reduce her and other women to sexual objects. When reports emerged that Colony Capital was in talks to purchase the Weinstein Company, McGowan called on her supporters to boycott.Īnd her supporters are manifold and vocal. She circulated a petition calling to dissolve the board of the Weinstein Company. McGowan, who is best known for playing the mean girl in 1999’s Jawbreaker and one of the witches in the WB series Charmed, has spent the Weinstein scandal speaking out against both Weinstein and anyone who might be complicit in Weinstein’s actions. If there is any hero to come out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it’s Rose McGowan.
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