A permanent reminder. Asia Argento sent a clear message to her former friend Rose McGowan while getting a symbolic tattoo of vengeance.
The Italian-born actress, 43, showed off her new ink in a series of photos posted to her Instagram Stories on Saturday, September 29.
“Bye bye @rosemcgowan,” she wrote on a picture of her foot being inked with a dagger by tattoo artist Marco Manzo.
She showed off the finished product in a subsequent Story with a snap of the dagger above a sole drop of blood on the side of her foot, on which she wrote “Significato: vendetta consumata” — an Italian phrase meaning “consumed revenge.”
The Executrix actress further hinted at her plans for retaliation against the Charmed alum with a Bible passage from Romans 12:19: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written. Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Argento has been feuding with McGowan, 45, since the Jawbreaker star released a statement about the sexual assault allegations made against Argento by former child actor Jimmy Bennett.
“It is a shame that @rosemcgowan is not prepared to accept when she is wrong,” Argento tweeted on September 7.
Her message came nearly two weeks after the Brave author released a statement accusing Argento of sending her partner, model Rain Dove, texts in which the Marie Antoinette star revealed that she had slept with Bennett, now 22, and had been receiving inappropriate pictures from the musician since he was 12 years old. “Rain also shared that Asia had stated that she’d been receiving unsolicited nudes of Jimmy since he had been 12. Asia mentioned in these texts that she didn’t take any action on those images,” McGowan said at the time. “No reporting to authorities, to the parents, or blocking of Jimmy’s social media. Not even a simple message ‘Don’t send me these images. They are inappropriate.’”
Bennett claimed to The New York Times in August that Argento, who played his mom in the 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, assaulted him in a hotel room in Marina del Rey, California, in 2013, by kissing him and performing oral sex.
Court documents between lawyers for Argento and Bennett obtained by the publication also claimed that she had arranged to pay him $380,000 in exchange for his silence.
Argento denied the claims with a statement to New York magazine on August 21. “I am deeply shocked and hurt having read the news that is absolutely false,” she said at the time. “I have never had any sexual relationship with Bennett.”
She later accused Bennett of sexually assaulting her on the evening in question, saying that he “attacked” her.
Bennett’s lawyer, Gordon K. Sattro, responded to her claims with an exclusive statement to Us Weekly in September.
“If I were to sum up the letter from Asia and her attorney in a single word it would be ‘hypocritical,’ with a close second being ‘non-sensical,” he said. “We read this statement as a self-serving and slanderous one which is offensive, not only to my client, but in all likelihood to victims both silent and outspoken, everywhere. It would seem that Asia is implying that her truth is the actual truth because of her perceived position in this all too important movement and a delusional view of her own importance to it.”
The #MeToo activist, who had bonded with McGowan after they both went public with accusations of sexual misconduct against producer Harvey Weinstein, threatened to sue McGowan over her response to the scandal with a tweet on September 17: “Dear @RoseMcGowan. It is with genuine regret that I am giving you 24 hours to retract and apologise for the horrendous lies made against me in your statement of August 27th. If you fail to address this libel I will have no option other than to take immediate legal action,” she wrote.
Dear @RoseMcGowan. It is with genuine regret that I am giving you 24 hours to retract and apologise for the horrendous lies made against me in your statement of August 27th. If you fail to address this libel I will have no option other than to take immediate legal action.
— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) September 17, 2018
When she was met with no response, the would-be X Factor Italy judge, who was fired from her upcoming role on the show amid the allegations made against her, tweeted that she had informed the British law firm of Mishcon de Reya to seek substantial damages for “deception, fraud, coercion and libel.”
On Thursday, September 27, McGowan issued an apology for her statement to Twitter: “On August 27 I released a statement about Asia Argento, which I now realize contained a number of facts that were not correct,” she wrote. “The most serious of these was that I said that the unsolicited nude text messages Asia received from Jimmy had been sent since Jimmy was 12 years old. In fact, I had misunderstood the messages Asia had sent my partner Rain Dove, which made clear that Jimmy had sent Asia inappropriate text messages only after they met up again when he was 17 (still legally a minor in California, but notably different from a 12 year old).”
Argento was not fully satisfied with the correction, responding on Twitter that while she appreciated the apology, it hadn’t come soon enough. “if she had issued it earlier, I may have kept my job on X-Factor and avoided the constant accusations of paedophilia which I have been subjected to in real-life and online,” she wrote, adding, “Now go on, live your life and stop hurting other people, will you Rose?”
