Earlier today Ed wrote about actress Rose McGowan being kicked off Twitter. Earlier today Twitter safety clarified that McGowan’s account was “temporarily locked” for including a phone number in one of her tweets. That tweet was deleted and her account was restored. Soon after, McGowan came out swinging with a series of tweets directed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. McGowan claims she repeatedly told the head of Amazon studios she had been raped by Harvey Weinstein:

it’s on pic.twitter.com/A8HoYqa2Sc

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

1) @jeffbezos I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof.

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

2) @jeffbezos I had already sold a script I wrote to your studio, it was in development. When I heard a Weinstein bailout was in the works

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

3) @Jeffbezos I forcefully begged studio head to do the right thing. I was ignored. Deal was done. Amazon won a dirty Oscar.

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

4) @jeffbezos I called my attorney & said I want to get my script back, but before I could, #2 @amazonstudios called to say my show was dead

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

5) @jeffbezos Be the change you want to see in the world. Stand with truth. #ROSEARMY #Amazon

— Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

Let’s walk through these statements. First, about the assault, McGowan was one of the actresses mentioned in the New York Times story last week, but the story only said that she had agreed to a settlement with Weinstein stemming from an incident at the Sundance film festival in 1997. Yesterday, Huffington Post reported on Ronan Farrow’s failed attempts to get NBC News to publish his Weinstein story. Included in that account was a paragraph noting that McGowan had given Farrow his first big break on the story, an on-camera interview in which she stated she’d be sexually assaulted by Weinstein:

Farrow scored his first major reporting coup in January: an on-camera interview with actress Rose McGowan during which she accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her when she was 23 years old. The Times has reported that McGowan settled her sexual assault claim with Weinstein for $100,000 in 1997. Ultimately, McGowan withdrew her permission for NBC News to use the footage after she’d received legal threats from Weinstein.

As for her claim that she told Amazon’s studio head about the assault, McGowan announced last year that her script had been sold to Amazon. The head of Amazon studios at the time was Roy Price. Price posted a photo of himself with McGowan last summer:

You come talking that trash we'll pull your card. Tough face contest lost to @rosemcgowan #eazye #rosearmy pic.twitter.com/DZPMdZPZ0w

— Roy Price (@RoyPrice) July 15, 2016

I didn’t follow the reference to Amazon’s “dirty Oscar” but the Daily Mail reports that’s a reference to Manchester by the Sea:

Price is still an employee at the company, and was by Bezos’ side at the Academy Awards in February.

That is when Amazon won the ‘dirty Oscar’ McGowan wrote about, which seems to be a reference to Casey Affleck’s Best Actor win for ‘Manchester by the Sea’ earlier this year.

He took home that award despite two women accusing him of sexual harassment, with a clearly perturbed Brie Larson making no effort to hide her displeasure when she was forced to handover the hardware to Casey per tradition as the previous year’s recipient of the Best Actress award.

McGowan did not identify Casey by name, but the only other Oscars that Amazon has won are the Best Original Screenplay award for Kenneth Lonergan and Best Foreign Language Film for the Iranian drama ‘The Salesman.’

So far it doesn’t seem that Bezos or Price have responded to any of this. I’m generally not a fan of hashtag campaigns (and I suspect I wouldn’t care for McGowan’s politics), but in this case I’m rooting for #RoseArmy. She really does seem to have been making a sustained effort to get the word out on this for over a year, even putting herself in legal jeopardy for a chance to speak up. It’s true she later pulled back on that interview with Farrow but only after months of waiting in vain for NBC to publish and what must have been a sustained campaign of threats coming from Weinstein’s lawyers. With it seeming more and more likely that the company itself could collapse, maybe that interview from January will be released sometime soon.

Update: Roy Price has taken a leave of absence, not apparently because of McGowan’s accusations but because of another story that broke today. From the Hollywood Reporter:

In the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged years-long sexual harassment and assault, a producer of one of Amazon Studios’ highest-profile TV shows is ready to talk about her “shocking and surreal” experience with Amazon’s programming chief Roy Price…

On the evening of July 10, 2015, after a long day of promoting Man in the High Castle at Comic-Con in San Diego, Hackett attended a dinner with the show’s cast and Amazon staff at the U.S. Grant Hotel. There she says she met Price for the first time. He asked her to attend an Amazon staff party later that night at the W Hotel (now the Renaissance) and she ended up in a taxi with Price and Michael Paull, then another top Amazon executive and now CEO of the digital media company BAMTech.

Once in the cab, Hackett says Price repeatedly and insistently propositioned her. “You will love my dick,” he said, according to Hackett, who relayed her account to multiple individuals in the hours after the alleged episode.

So this story is now spreading beyond Harvey Weinstein and taking out other executives.