The actress and activist Rose McGowan turned herself in to a magistrate’s office in Loudoun County, Virginia, on Tuesday, responding to a felony warrant on charges of drug possession. “The police officers and magistrate were very polite and kind,” she told me. The charges stem from an incident that took place on the night of January 20th, when McGowan landed at Dulles International Airport, in Virginia, planning to attend the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the next day. According to a police report, at 2:32 A.M. on January 21st, airport personnel called the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police Department. A staff member cleaning a plane had recovered McGowan’s wallet—containing, the staffer and his supervisor said, two small bags of white powder, which registered as cocaine in later tests.
Later that morning, an airport police detective, Jerrod Hughes, called McGowan and asked her to come collect the wallet, not disclosing what had been found in it. McGowan told me in an interview on Sunday that the call had frightened her, because she was unsure if Hughes was a real officer. (Hughes did not respond to a request for comment.) Several months earlier, McGowan had tweeted about being raped by a “studio head,” and had included details that seemed to point to the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. (McGowan recently publicly confirmed that she had been referring to Weinstein. Through a spokesperson, he has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.) When McGowan decided to attend the Women’s March, she was nervous that she was being followed by private investigators hired by Weinstein, McGowan said. She decided not to go to the airport to meet the detective and to leave the city on a bus with other marchers. The following day, she said, she received an Instagram message from a user she did not know. “You left your wallet on your Saturday flight with your 2 bags of coke,” it said. (The account was deactivated shortly after, though McGowan retained screenshots of the message.)
On February 1, 2017, the Magistrate’s Office in Loudoun County, Virginia, issued a felony warrant for McGowan. McGowan told me that her fear and doubt caused her to hesitate to respond for months. “I was going to ASAP,” McGowan said of the decision to turn herself in, “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 September, before the existence of the warrant for McGowan was public, Weinstein held a meeting with his private investigators that was focussed on the efforts to arrest McGowan, according to a source who was at the Weinstein Company at the time. Weinstein suggested leaking the information to the New York Post. A reporter from the Post, who declined to comment and asked not to be named in this story, followed up with McGowan shortly thereafter to inquire about the warrant. Fearing that the Post reporter would publish a story, McGowan tweeted that she was facing charges in Virginia. “I beat him to it,” she said.
McGowan and her attorney, Jim Hundley, argue that the drugs could have been planted, given the spans of time during which unknown individuals may have had access to the wallet. “Depending on when and where the wallet was lost, individuals other than Ms. McGowan had access to the wallet for somewhere between approximately 5 hours 40 minutes and more than 11 hours,” Hundley wrote in a memorandum to the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman, asking that the charges be dismissed.
McGowan told me that she had brought a slim card wallet with her on her trip to Washington. During the flight, she did not take her wallet out of her bag, she told me. “I had it in the side pocket of my backpack, and I left it on my seat as I went to the bathroom,” she said. After disembarking, she was standing at baggage claim and decided to call a car using the service Lyft, she said, when she noticed that her wallet was gone. She filed a lost-luggage claim and tweeted at United Airlines, asking for help recovering the wallet.
McGowan conceded to me that she has used drugs in the past. “I own stock in a marijuana company, so that’s my jam,” she said. (McGowan’s medical-marijuana card was in the wallet when police recovered it.) At the time of the Women’s March, she said, she had no interest in cocaine. “Imagining I’m going into sisterly solidarity, I can think of nothing more opposed to that, energetically, that I would want in my body at that moment.” McGowan vowed to continue her advocacy for victims of sexual assault. Of the wave of high-profile men who have been accused of abuses, she said “More will fall.”
McGowan was released this afternoon, on a five-thousand-dollar personal-recognizance bond, and will be arraigned on Thursday morning, at which point she will likely be assigned a court date. “I will clearly plead not guilty,” she said.
