Rose McGowan and her attorney Jim Hundley have requested that the charge against McGowan regarding an incident from January of this year be dismissed, as per the New Yorker. The charge concerned two small bags of white powder found inside McGowan's wallet on a flight to Dulles International Airport. During the flight, McGowan misplaced her wallet, and it was later recovered by a staffer and reported to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police Department. On February 1, a warrant was issued for McGowan's arrest.
The actress and activist, who is a central figure in the fight against film titan Harvey Weinstein, told the New Yorker that before the warrant, she received an Instagram message that read: "You left your wallet on your Saturday flight with your 2 bags of coke." The account that sent the message has since been deactivated.
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The arrest is suspicious, given that Harvey Weinstein spied on McGowan for almost a full year before she publicly accused him of raping her. The journalist Ronan Farrow detailed Weinstein's effort in a piece titled "Harvey Weinstein's Army Of Spies" published in early November. Weinstein hired an agency called Black Cube to survey McGowan as well as his other accusers. As part of these efforts, Black Cube sent an "operative" to pose as a journalist to speak with McGowan about her allegations against Weinstein. As the investigation went on, McGowan grew increasingly aware that she was being watched.
"It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’” she told Ronan Farrow for his piece on the Black Cube investigation. “Everyone lied to me all the time.”
In the case of the drug charge, McGowan says that when the warrant was issued, she was wary of its origin. (Rightfully so.)
"I was going to [turn myself in] asap,” McGowan said regarding the charge, “but then things started to get really weird. I knew I was being followed and that I wasn’t safe. I even hired a private investigator to investigate whether the warrant was real."
In the request that the charges be dismissed, Hundley points out that McGowan didn't have the wallet for a good five hours before it was discovered on the plane. It's entirely possible that the drugs were placed inside the wallet in these intervening hours. McGowan also told the New Yorker that at the time in January — she was in Washington for the Women's March on Washington — she wasn't doing cocaine. She added that marijuana is "her jam."
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