Rose McGowan’s memoir Brave, a book that the New Yorker claimed on Monday was the subject of an investigation by a private security agency hired by the film producer Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers, will be published on 30 January 2018 by HarperCollins.
An account of McGowan’s rebellion against the “Hollywood machine that packaged her as a sexualised bombshell”, the memoir traces how she escaped from the Italian chapter of the Children of God cult, how she was “discovered” on a curb in Los Angeles, and how she went on to star in films including Scream and Planet Terror, as well as the television series Charmed.
It will also, said the publisher, show how the actor’s fame “soon became a personal nightmare of constant exposure and sexualisation”. McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of raping her in a hotel room in 1997, said: “My life, as you will read, has taken me from one cult to another. Brave is the story of how I fought my way out of these cults and reclaimed my life. I want to help you do the same.”
HarperCollins called the book “a pull-no-punches account of the rise of a star, fearless activist, and unstoppable force for change who is determined to expose the truth about the entertainment industry, dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multibillion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny, and empower people everywhere to wake up and be BRAVE”.
— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) November 7, 2017
According to the New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow, Brave was allegedly the subject of an investigation by “an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies”. The agency was allegedly hired by Weinstein’s lawyers to “provide intelligence [that] will help the client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper” – the New York Times article that opened the floodgates for accusations of sexual assault against Weinstein – “and to ‘obtain additional content of a book that is currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the client’, who is identified as Weinstein in multiple documents.”
Farrow alleges that agents met McGowan under false identities in order to obtain information from her. The book containing the “harmful negative information” was Brave.
“The documents show that, in the end, the agency delivered to Weinstein more than 100 pages of transcripts and descriptions of the book, based on tens of hours of recorded conversations between McGowan and the female private investigator,” writes Farrow. His New Yorker article includes a comment from Weinstein’s spokesperson, which called “the assertion that Mr Weinstein secured any portion of a book … false and among the many inaccuracies and wild conspiracy theories promoted in this article”. Weinstein has also denied any accusation of non-consensual sex.
McGowan, who shared the jacket image of Brave on Twitter, told Farrow after his article was published: “Your words will line the halls of justice.”
