Rose McGowan is cutting her book tour short after a confrontation with a transgender woman at a New York reading made headlines.
The “Charmed” actress made the announcement Friday on Twitter.
The incident took place Wednesday as McGowan was taking questions about her new memoir, Brave, from the crowd at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan. At one point during the star’s appearance, a transgender woman, who has been identified in the media as Andi Dier, asked the actress to clarify controversial remarks she’d made about trans women on RuPaul’s “What’s the Tee?” podcast in July 2017.
After the podcast episode originally aired, some on social media deemed McGowan a TERF, or a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” for suggesting that trans women hadn’t “developed” as women even though they “felt like a woman on the inside.”
“That’s not growing as a woman, that’s not living in this world as a woman,” she said at the time, “and a lot of the stuff I hear trans complaining about, yeah, welcome to the world.”
At McGowan’s Wednesday appearance, Dier’s inquiry quickly escalated into a shouting match, and she was eventually removed by bookstore security.
McGowan, however, continued to shout in her direction.
“I’m not worried, I’m fucking mad with the lies,” the actress told the crowd, as seen in video footage of the incident. “I’m mad that you put shit on me because I have a fucking vagina and I’m white or I’m black or I’m yellow or I’m purple. Fuck off! All of us want to say it. I just do!”
McGowan opened up about the incident on Thursday during a panel discussion with journalist Ronan Farrow at 92Y in New York, claiming that Dier was actually a “paid plant” sent by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. The actress is one of dozens of women who have accused Weinstein of sexual assault. In Brave, McGowan says Weinstein raped her in 1997.
“There was a plant last night at my first book reading … definitely a paid plant that got up and was screaming at me,” she told Farrow on Thursday, noting that she is scared of assassination.
A representative for Weinstein dismissed McGowan’s claims as “100 percent false,” telling Page Six, “It’s unfortunate that she is choosing to marginalize a community that is fighting to have their voice heard by claiming that the individual was a ‘plant’ of my client.”
“It’s simply untrue and disrespectful to the transgender community,” the rep added.