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Rose McGowan says director Robert Rodriguez used her alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein as a 'tool for mind games' against her, but he denies it

Rose McGowan said that Robert Rodriguez used her experience of being allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein against her in a "Grindhouse" scene, but he denies it.

  • Rose McGowan wrote in an upcoming memoir, previewed by Vanity Fair, that director Robert Rodriguez used knowledge of her alleged Harvey Weinstein rape against her in the filming of 2007's "Planet Terror," which Weinstein produced.
  • Rodriguez denied McGowan's claims in a statement to Business Insider, saying there were "some key factual errors" in McGowan's account.
  • Rodriguez said in October that he cast McGowan in "Planet Terror" to get back at Weinstein for the alleged rape.
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In an upcoming memoir previewed by Vanity Fair, Rose McGowan wrote that Robert Rodriguez, her former romantic partner and "Grindhouse" director, used McGowan's confiding in him about her alleged raped by Harvey Weinstein as a "tool for mind games" against her (as Vanity Fair described it).

McGowan wrote that Rodriguez used his knowledge of the alleged rape against her in a "Grindhouse" scene in which Quentin Tarantino,

In October, Rodriguez said that he cast Rose McGowan in "Planet Terror" to get back at Harvey Weinstein for the alleged rape, which she had told him about. Rodriguez said Weinstein subsequently tried to "bury" the film, which had a tepid box office performance for Dimension Films.

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In his statement on Thursday, Rodriguez said that he stood by his October statement. He added that the attack scene McGowan described was always in the script and that McGowan never expressed concerns with performing it.

Read Rodriguez's full statement below:

"It is unfortunate that Vanity Fair reporter Evgenia Peretz did not reach out to me for comment or clarification, even after my widely reported statement in October 2017 regarding Rose McGowan and Harvey Weinstein. It is deeply disappointing that the fact checkers at publishing house HarperOne did not reach out to me either. As a result, there are some key factual errors in the piece.

These inaccuracies may appear to put me at odds with Rose, but I have no quarrel with her. It’s when publications don’t fact check these basic things, you end up with something inaccurate that then has to be disqualified. And I don’t want to have to disqualify it because I agree with what Rose is trying to do overall, which is continue to push for change both in our industry and beyond.

That said …

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  • I did not sell the movie to the Weinsteins, they had a first look on my next project, and I owed them two more after that. (Grindhouse, Spykids 4 and Sin City 2 fulfilled my obligations to them.)
  • I met Rose in April of 2005. The Weinsteins began funding Grindhouse by at least the first week of November of 2005 because I was shooting the fake Machete trailer for the film on November 16, 2005. I then started scouting locations and designing the production for Grindhouse with key crew members, hired and paid for by the Weinsteins, before Thanksgiving 2005.
  • Full preproduction on Grindhouse with the entire crew began on January 23
  • The scene described in the Vanity Fair article where the rapist taunts the character played by Rose (before she turns around and stabs him in the eye and kills him) was in every draft of the script since the first draft issued to cast and crew dated January 24, 2006. Furthermore, that very scene wasn’t even filmed until 5 months later, on June 28, 2006. Again, if there was any objection to the scene there was plenty of time to address it. It was never brought up as being an issue. In fact, the point of the scene was always to be empowering because it’s when her character turns the tables against her oppressors."

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