by Rose McGowan
For four years I barely had contact with anyone other than those on the set of Charmed. I was not in my right mind. I didn’t know myself anymore. I’d lost my epicenter. I was rudderless. I was a prime target for abuse, but I didn’t know that then.
That night at the party in the South of France, I didn’t know anything about this director, other than that he directed those movies. After a while I went over and sat next to him. We instantly connected. There was something electric about that night.
This man would become the most significant relationship in my life besides my father. And later he would outdo even my father in cruelty. But I didn’t know that yet.
The day before I’d met him, I’d been on the plane bound for France. I was bored, and the lady next to me handed me a women’s magazine. I had a flashback to the days when I had consulted those magazines to see what adult women did. In the magazine there was a quiz: “What kind of man do you want?” I took the test and at the end it pronounced that I wanted somebody adventurous, funny, wildly intelligent, et cetera. Cool.
When I met this man, I thought he was all those things. What I didn’t realize is that these quizzes would serve better if they asked what you do NOT want in a partner. Because there are many, many things I didn’t even know I did not want. Like the quiz, I had always thought more about what I wanted. Knowing what you don’t want is more important than what you do want, because the reality is, we rarely dream as big for ourselves as the universe can; by knowing what your nos are, you get to the yes, and the yes is bigger than you maybe even imagined. It would have served me well to have steered clear of the controlling, manipulative, and violent.
Our relationship began very platonically. He told me he was married but unhappily. That he came from a very traditional family where no one had ever gotten divorced. He stayed up all night long working and would sleep during the day, when his wife lived her life. He said they had separate houses on a giant compound in Texas and would separate after the kids were grown. As it turns out, it’s the whole rigmarole that married men always tell you, like a broken record. I just didn’t know that then. I believed him. And the lost me fell for it.
He magnetized me, instantly. I thought he was so handsome. Another thing that attracted me to him initially was that he had this real childlike way of looking at the world. I never had that and it fascinated me.
RR told me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He couldn’t believe I was so smart and funny. He didn’t know women could be funny. He couldn’t believe I was an actress. He told me how special I was. It was so gratifying that someone saw me, or at least I thought he did, for assets beyond my looks, for not being the cliché of an actress: conceited, frivolous, dumb, all the things that a lot of actresses, especially aspiring ones, are accused of being and, sometimes, are. You say “actress,” and people roll their eyes in Los Angeles. I did feel ashamed that I was an actress—I wanted him to see me as being on his level. I was so desperate to prove that I wasn’t like all the people in Hollywood, because he told me how evil he thought they all were. But evil is everywhere, and just because he didn’t live in Hollywood didn’t mean he didn’t benefit from Hollywood and its permission to men to behave horribly.
This man in the cowboy hat sold his lifestyle as superior to mine: he said he’d lived a pure life where he’d never done drugs and never partied or lived wildly, which is why he found himself in such a successful situation at his age. I believed him. In my head, his career was much more important than mine; certainly the world valued him a lot more. My career was just something I did, something I was, frankly, embarrassed about. I’ve recently realized that I was the powerful one all along. But most of these powerful men, well, it’s unlikely they’re going to help you see that. Theirs is the career, yours is the hobby.
For three weeks after Cannes, RR and I had no communication. Then one day I texted him, and he texted me at the exact same moment. This was something we did continually, from that moment on. It felt like a sign that we were incredibly, deeply connected. He would send me a T-shirt of his with his scent on it, packed in a ziplock bag, and I’d send one of mine back to him. We fell fast and we fell hard. It was exhilarating, and so much more interesting than just pretending; this was supposedly real life now.
Please take heed: when someone tries to insert himself into your life very quickly and rushes to tell you he loves you, that should be a big warning sign. And as much as you want to hear it, as much as you’re hungry to be seen with a capital S, as much as you’ve been lonely and just waiting for this, understand that very often these are the men who will turn on you.
By the time RR revealed his true identity, I was so deeply in love that I couldn’t adjust to what was going on. He was so amazing to me at the beginning, such a gentleman, that I figured it must have been my fault, that I must have done something wrong, for him to turn cruel, to stop respecting me. No. It was his plan all along, conscious or subconscious.
I’ve found that when someone tells you they love you too fast and overwhelms you and wants to move in right away, it’s a trap. Know a man like that most likely wants to own you and control you in order to make himself feel powerful and significant. Know that things will change. Try to look out for the warning signs and the red flags because there are many, and women tend to really discount them. I didn’t see what was plainly clear—see, it’s not just society that gaslights you, it’s ourselves. We need to protect girls from these kinds of situations by telling them from birth that they are worth just as much as boys. I wish I’d known that. That our careers and endeavors matter just as much, that we have just as much potential and power residing in our bones—if not ten times as much. If we raised our girls correctly and didn’t fill their heads full of fairy-tale weddings and Prince Charmings, full of beauty magazine bullshit advice about what a man wants and how to please a man and how to keep a man, a lot of girls wouldn’t fall for these dangerous men, wouldn’t fall into these dangerous situations. We could save a lot of lives. As for me, I had never been wildly in love before, not like this, not out of control. I still had one final season to go on Charmed and was annoyed that work got in the way of us being together. We were totally engrossed with each other. I looked at him as my lover, my friend, my life. We were obsessed with each other.
We got together in my Spanish house, where we hid out from the paparazzi, the fans, the world. I couldn’t go anywhere without being followed, recorded, spied on, at this point. I had lived in my own bubble even before he showed up, so it was easy to keep what happened between us in my house secret. He was very concerned about his public image, and he loved being known as the guy who stayed together with his wife. One of my biggest regrets in life is not comprehending the damage we were causing, not comprehending collateral damage, not comprehending my damage.
His wife and kids were in the faraway state of Texas and easy for me to ignore, just like he did. I didn’t mention their relationship. He didn’t, either. In my head it didn’t exist. I didn’t want to know. I took my cues from him. He would tell me things like he had moved out and then gone back to her. He had gotten married at nineteen, too young to know better. He made it sound like the only thing keeping him with her was the fact that no one in his Catholic family had ever had a divorce, and I thought to myself, You just need to be a braver man. Why would you live your life in a way that wasn’t true to yourself? This was very selfish of me. But also, I think he was living true to himself. By cheating on her. But the me-me wasn’t really there at this point. I was so scared all the time. Scared he’d leave, scared the man I had waited for would go. I had no idea what I needed at this point. Yuck. I was needy, a broken person, and I felt whole with his love shining on me. I am embarrassed by all this now. There’s an old song that goes “Looking for love in all the wrong places.” Yeah, that about sums it up.
I found out too late that to have a secret relationship really suits a manipulator. He encouraged me to cut off all contact with my friends, not
that I had many locally in Los Angeles, and with my family. Nobody could know about us. I simply disappeared from the outside world, even more than I already had because of Charmed absorbing my life.
This relationship had all the hallmarks of my mother’s relationships. And I thought I was soooooo different. Nope, even worse than not different, I was now a cliché. I wish I could go back in time and get myself the hell out of there and not be involved in hurting others. Nope, I was in for five and a half years of gaslighting.
Some months into our relationship he told me he was writing the lead female part for me in his next movie, which was going to be a double feature with Quentin Tarantino. They had both grown up in the 1970s seeing these pulp movies called grindhouse movies, which played in theaters as a double feature. They were played together with these fake trailers in the middle, as an art piece. They were best friends and pigs in shit. RR’s film was going to be called Planet Terror, which in retrospect is the perfect title for a lot of my life with him, and Tarantino’s was to be Death Proof. They were salacious, but as female-exploitation flicks go, they’re pretty great art; they’re punk and fucked up. But yeah, objectification was on high. And so was intense abuse of women, both in reality and symbolically.
RR started coming to visit the set of Charmed at Paramount studios, and we would meet up in my trailer. People saw, but because he was a writer-director who had started writing a part for me, it was okay to be semiseen in public.
I profoundly regret and publicly apologize for my part in this. I carry a deep, deep regret for the pain and heartache I caused. Also, not insignificantly, I could have saved four years of my life and my own heartache and pain. But at the time I was warped in the head.
As I had with so many people, I told RR about my assault at Sundance early on in our relationship, the first or second night we saw each other. I still was consistently having nightmares where I’d sweat through the sheets and wake up yelling, and I was still shaking because I saw my Monster at an amfAR charity event. I was seated next to the Monster at the event. I met RR later that evening. I was in shock. RR of course said the traditional macho thing: “I’m going to beat him up.” Of course he never did, never would: you see, RR was a faux tough guy. As most bullies are. But I didn’t know that quite yet. I believed him and really looked forward to the day when my perpetrator would get punched.
I was really excited about working on the film together, Planet Terror, for a couple of reasons: one, because it sounded like a dope film, and two, I wanted to get back into film through the back door, in a way that the Pig Monster couldn’t sabotage. I thought if I came out in a Rodriguez or Tarantino film, I’d be protected. I couldn’t be hurt by the blacklisting anymore. I could finally work at a level that matched my interests and tastes. I’d been starved mentally for years, robbed of varied roles and experiences by a bitter relentless Swine. Speaking of swine, turns out Tarantino knew about my “settlement” with the Pig Monster before I even got cast in Death Proof. A movie he made me audition for three times. The first time I met Tarantino, and for years after, every time he’d see me, he said, “Rose! I have your movie Jawbreaker on laser disc! I can’t tell you how many times I used the shot where you’re painting your toes! Your feet are in tight focus and your face is blurry. I’ve used it so many times!”
Let me break down what Tarantino is really saying:
“I have your movie Jawbreaker on laser disc!”: He went out of his way to buy a collectible, at least ten more dollars for the laser disc.
“I can’t tell you how many times I used the shot where you’re painting your toes!”: Tarantino has a known foot fetish. To him seeing a naked foot is the equivalent of a breast person getting turned on by nipples.
That means Tarantino paid extra money to jerk off to my young feet and told me about it loudly, over and over, for years, in front of numerous people, as if I should be so thrilled that he donated his solid-motherfucking-gold semen that is clearly better than all the other semen in the world and he gave it up for little ol’ me? It’s time men realized their semen isn’t all that.
RR said he was going to be my savior in the film industry and I believed him. He was my knight in shining cowboy hat. He drilled it into my head over and over, how lucky I was to be with him. I’m mortified that I had such deep programming—the man-as-savior thing—that I bought it. But who was buying it? Me, a lost and programmed Hollywood cult member.
RR was wildly jealous, which at first, like most, I took as being flattering. I took off a turtleneck sweater one night to show him my new bra and he asked me, “What kind of message are you sending with that bra?” I froze: “What? What are you talking about? I’m wearing a bra under a turtleneck.” “You’re sending a message to men in that bra.” “What? No, I’m not.” A huge fight and tears ensued as I tried to prove I wasn’t trying to lure men to bed with my bra.
If he saw an old photo of me with any ex-boyfriend, or heard any reference to one of them, it would set him off into a rage where he’d do something utterly brilliant like throw his laptop out the window. Obviously because of the press he knew whom I’d gone out with in the past, and it drove him crazy.
When he got angry, his eyes turned black, even under his eyes. Like my father’s did. He’s a big guy with big broad shoulders and when he was mad, it was beyond intimidating; it was terrifying. When he’d rage, it felt like my hair was blowing back from my head with the force of his anger. My hair blew back a lot. I took to hiding more of myself to avoid explosions.
It became a steady cycle of being accused of imaginary sins and me putting out fires constantly so he wouldn’t blow up at me. That’s how it is. You start hiding some of your past, doing all sorts of things to prove that you’re not what you’re being accused of.
You’re in reaction mode at this point. The gaslighter does this to keep you destabilized because if you’re always reacting to a flare-up or an explosion, or getting berated and you just want to avoid it, you start monitoring your words, monitoring everything, hoping pictures of you alongside a guy from your past don’t surface because there will be hell to pay.
He could be very, very vicious and very damaging. Something he said to me over and over was: “I got you at your ripest.” I got you at your ripest. Meaning he got me at the perfect age for beauty. That is so disgusting and so damaging to a girl’s brain. It filled me with anxiety and panic about aging, knowing that I was not going to be “ripe” for long, that I must do everything I could to stay this perfect being. Because if I wasn’t perfect, then what was I?
It quickly became normal, being stressed all the time, because I was still so in love. And intermittently RR would make up with me, of course, and be amazing for a day. I would see this purity of soul, this luminous and magical thing inside, so I wanted to catch it like a firefly. But then that firefly turned into Godzilla and breathed fire on me.
When RR later asked me to marry him, which was so monumentally absurd, I didn’t know what to do. All that was going through my head was, Don’t ask me in Texas, I fucking hate Texas. I don’t want to have this memory here, but he did ask. And I said yes mostly because I didn’t know how to say no.
My main reaction was thinking I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t know how to say no, because I never saw that reflected anywhere in popular culture. You virtually never see a woman saying no to a marriage proposal. All you see are girls freaking out, so overjoyed that someone finally wants to marry her. A man chose her. Oh yay.
I think politeness is a particular curse for girls and women. That’s what Dawn, the short film I directed, was about. My direction to the male lead in Dawn was simply: “Basically, she’s a mouse and you’re the king cobra and you’re hypnotizing her so she doesn’t ever even see what’s coming and you are going to do it by scrambling her brain.” It’s been done to me by men and it was done to me by Hollywood. It’s what we do to girls. We send them out into this world with politeness as the strap that keeps our hands tied behind our back
s. Then we meet wolves. It kills us. I read about a girl—her male neighbor kept offering to help her carry her packages, and when she repeatedly refused, he accused her of being the kind of girl who refused help. She finally relented and, of course, she wound up being attacked. That’s what politeness does.
In any case, I said yes to RR, even though I didn’t see us married. I did still love him at that point. The media went crazy over the engagement, of course. Perez Hilton, that oily gossip columnist, started writing “WHORE” across my face every day, but not RR’s.
We were living in his castle—seriously, he’d bought a place that the previous owner had turned into a castle, a former water tower, embellished with turrets and everything. RR had commissioned a gigantic painting of me on the ceiling above the stairs. I was nude. It’s pretty weird to have a six-foot naked version of yourself above your head. I was caught up there, at my ripest.
He played increasingly cruel power games. I had told RR I’d always seen myself having a little girl and naming her Cherry Darling. I never exactly saw myself having a kid with him or with anybody specific, but this daughter was real enough in my mind that I had written letters to her, stuff that she could read from me when she was older. And RR said, “I’m going to name the character I’m writing for you Cherry Darling. That way you can’t have a child with another man and call her that. This is our baby. It’ll last for all time. This is the child we’re making.” That really should have been a breaking point. His taking that name for the character was a serious form of theft. Because he was right: after that, I would never be able to name my child Cherry Darling.