Sharing her side of the story. Meryl Streep has responded after Rose McGowan accused her of being silent about Harvey Weinstein’s behavior.
“It hurt to be attacked by Rose McGowan in banner headlines this weekend, but I want to let her know I did not know about Weinstein’s crimes, not in the 90s when he attacked her, or through subsequent decades when he proceeded to attack others,” Streep, 68, began in a statement to the Huffington Post on Monday, December 18. “I wasn’t deliberately silent. I didn’t know. I don’t tacitly approve of rape. I didn’t know. I don’t like young women being assaulted. I didn’t know this was happening.”
As previously reported, McGowan, 44, tweeted about Streep and the actresses who are planning to wear black to the 2018 Golden Globe Awards to protest sexual harassment on Saturday, December 16: “Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @goldenglobes in a silent protest. YOUR SILENCE is THE problem. You’ll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real chance. I despise your hypocrisy. Maybe you should all wear Marchesa.” The tweet has since been deleted.
Streep continued, “I don’t know where Harvey lives, nor has he ever been to my home. I have never in my life been invited to his hotel room. I have been to his office once, for a meeting with Wes Craven for Music of the Heart in 1998. HW distributed movies I made with other people. HW was not a filmmaker; he was often a producer, primarily a marketer of films made by other people—some of them great, some not great. But not every actor, actress, and director who made films that HW distributed knew he abused women, or that he raped Rose in the 90s, other women before and others after, until they told us. We did not know that women’s silence was purchased by him and his enablers.”
The Oscar winner went on to detail how the disgraced movie producer, who has been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women, “needed me much more than I needed him and he made sure I didn’t know.”
“Apparently he hired ex Mossad operators to protect this information from becoming public,” Streep said in her statement. “Rose and the scores of other victims of these powerful, moneyed, ruthless men face an adversary for whom Winning, at any and all costs, is the only acceptable outcome. That’s why a legal defense fund for victims is currently being assembled to which hundreds of good hearted people in our business will contribute, to bring down the bastards, and help victims fight this scourge within.”
Streep ended her statement by expressing her desire for change.
“I hoped that she would give me a hearing. She did not, but I hope she reads this,” Streep wrote. “I am truly sorry she sees me as an adversary, because we are both, together with all the women in our business, standing in defiance of the same implacable foe: a status quo that wants so badly to return to the bad old days, the old ways where women were used, abused and refused entry into the decision-making, top levels of the industry. That’s where the cover-ups convene. Those rooms must be disinfected, and integrated, before anything even begins to change.”
McGowan has yet to address Streep’s new comments.
