Rose McGowan Turns Herself In to Police Over Drug Warrant

Charmed star Rose McGowan turned herself in to authorities on Tuesday in response to a warrant for her arrest. The warrant alleges that cocaine was found in her wallet, which was left at an airport in Washington, DC. McGowan claims that the drugs may have been planted in her wallet, and the incident may be part of a conspiracy linked to her sexual assault allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

Via The New Yorker.

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.”

Get the rest of the story at The New Yorker.

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