Court dismisses Rose McGowan’s RICO lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and his lawyers
The federal judge dismissed the case after McGowan fired her attorneys and missed a court-ordered briefing deadline
Aux News Rose McGowan
Actor Rose McGowan’s RICO lawsuit against former film producer Harvey Weinstein—who is currently serving his 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault—has been dismissed by a federal judge.
McGowan filed the RICO lawsuit against Weinstein and attorneys David Boies and Lisa Bloom in October of 2019, alleging the three organized a scheme to spy on her and undermine her accusations in an effort to prevent her from coming forward. Although Judge Otis D. Wright dismissed most of her claims in December 2020, he permitted McGowan to proceed with two fraud claims, and allowed her to amend the RICO allegations.
After amending the complaint, Wright still ruled that the allegations did not measure up to a racketeering or organized crime level on November 9.
“Defendants’ effort to silence McGowan was a single, unified project with an end goal and an end date,” Wright held. “Thus, it is not the sort of continuous effort that is prohibited by RICO.”
For next steps, Wright ordered a briefing from McGowan concerning the remaining state charges and whether or not the federal court should handle the proceedings or if they needed to be refiled in state court.
However, on the eve of the November 24 filing deadline, McGowan’s lead attorney, Julie Porter, informed the court that McGowan had fired her over Zoom and she would no longer be involved in the case.
“I have diligently endeavored to communicate with Plaintiff about the Court’s questions. Plaintiff did not authorize me to take any positions on the questions the Court posed,” Porter said in the declaration. “On November 23, 2021, Plaintiff communicated to me during a Zoom meeting that she was terminating the attorney-client relationship, effectively immediately, and that Plaintiff no longer authorizes me or the other lawyers on our team to represent her. Plaintiff was very clear that she was terminating the representation.”
McGowan then represented herself in court, and received a new deadline for the brief. After missing the December 3 deadline, Wright has dismissed the case entirely. Any next steps taken by McGowan will take place in state court.
38 Comments
sucks that McGowan’s issues seem so tied to Weinstein and being gaslit and traumatized by an entire industry, because she is a very different person when you see her in early interviews. It doesn’t justify some of the crazy shit she has said, but I do feel sad that abuse grabs ahold of some people so deeply, and the horrible ripples the abuser causes throughout society.
abuse grabs ahold of some people so deeply, and the horrible ripples the abuser causes throughout society
ah yes, because victims are not allowed to experience joy and be really fucking complicated. nice take.
because victimsWell, one of them is a victimizer as well as a victim. nice takeI guess it’s easier to respond to what you imagined was said rather than what was in the post.
McGowan severed ties with Argento, this is an old photo. And those are the very ripples I mean. It’s also strange the vitriol towards these women who also further victimize is so much more heated than what people feel towards Weinstein himself.
Our boy ACC specializes in vitriol against women.
Is it? Is Harvey Weinstein not PRETTY MUCH the most universally human being in the continental US?Just speaking for myself, I haven’t heard anything about allegations re: Rose McGowan, but I am well aware that Harvey is finally rotting away in prison like he deserves. Maybe what you’re describing is a Twitter thing.
They are totally allowed to experience joy and clearly this has affected her mental health. She needs therapy. I don’t care if she wins 100 cases, her anger is embroiled in her entire body and perhaps rightfully so, but is she angry at Weinstein or herself? She accepted a payout for her silence then couldn’t live with that. She should start with forgiving herself and maybe the healing will begin. Yes Weinstein is a criminal POS but because he lives in her head rent free, she is losing to him over and over again!
While I don’t disagree with that, The fact that she’s now committed to being a Republican talking head kinda makes it hard for me to sympathize. What it sounds like to me is that she got extremely bitter at liberals after being thrown to the side following MeToo, and just went “fuck it, I’mma do me.”
I can recognize that she’s a complex person while also thinking she sucks.
Yeah, and I’m not trying to justify that she is creating a lot of further harm and chaos herself, but I do think it’s important to recognize that the instability seems very apparent after the blacklisting. Being gaslit and intentionally being made to feel crazy for over a decade naturally results in a person behaving crazy. I don’t know any person who wouldn’t internalize that when it was on an industry level. And that’s the most maddening thing about abuse, it is all the stuff that comes with it. There just seems no proper justice to remedy how insidious and how much damage it further causes, and as a queer person I find it hard to feel resentment towards McGowan and the shit she has said, mostly I just feel sad for her.
Ditto
I think getting called out for transphobia is what really drove her to the other side, to the point where she’s now angrily defending Dave Chappelle.
I think her behavior at this point is the result of a complicated basket of experiences and emotions. We all now know what Weinstein was up to. McGowan I’m sure feels completely abandoned by all the nice liberals she knew in Hollywood, and considers them useless hypocrites since they didn’t want to jeopardize their own careers to stand by her, all while mouthing Me Too platitudes. Hard to blame her, frankly. Whatever reaction she’s had and what it’s done to her political perspectives shouldn’t be surprising.ETA: I’ll add that she’s never seemed quite right, so an overshoot on the reaction also shouldn’t be surprising.
This is my problem with gaslighting sounding so innocuous. What we’re seeing with Rose is the result of a kind of bent-world psychosis induced by multiple evildoers, their amoral minions and the cowardly silent observers all working together, each with their own rationales to actually change the color of the sky. Anyone would appear squirrely telling and retelling their tale to people whose sky has always been blue.I am also not merely satisfied that Harvey is in jail; I want all those who set up shields, those who enabled, specifically anyone who turned a blind eye, everyone who covered up and every single person that threatened or intimidated her to pay as well!
To paraphrase George Costanza: We’re living in a society! So we all have a responsibility to do the right thing or pay the price.
I know she suffered dreadful abuse but the continued hatred for LGBT+ people, stanning for Republican candidates, and now whatever this court mess was can’t help but make me think she’s becoming the real life version of Tim Heidecker’s character from On Cinema.
“I know she suffered dreadful abuse but…” I will allow it because she does things i dont like.
We have a tendency to imagine every victim is a good person even though bad stuff happen to bad people as well; I felt bad for Ted Cruz when Donald Trump insulted both his dad and his wife but at the end of the day, he’s still Ted Cruz.Rose McGowan has always craved attention on an unhealthy level, which is what made her such a tempting prey for Weinstein. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. And she’s still not one bit likable.
Teddy Boy Cruz managed to get over it.
Did he? I’m not sure Ted Cruz has ever gotten over anything. I suspect he recites a list of names before he goes to sleep…
I actually think it’s his wife. She’s a managing director at Goldman Sachs. I think she’s more dangerous that people think.
Baby Boy Ted would sell his mother to Attila the Hun.
Sure, but I’m sure he’d feel victimised and aggrieved as a result!
RICO is one of those things that seems to come up a lot, but every time it does I have to re-read what it even is and still not really get.
Ye Kickers of Knowledge…start your engines!
Here’s the legal explanation of RICO-If someone says it’s RICO, it’s not RICO. Doubly so if it’s some rando in the internet.
So the First Rule of RICO is There’s No Such Thing As RICO?
It’s only RICO if they follow it with … Suave
Why hello there fellow disciple of Popehat!
TBF I’m also a lawyer, but yeah the way Popehat puts it is the best way.
Is this the end of Rico?
But she could’ve won state!
I thought I read somewhere that the Dark Knight did a good job explaining and summing up RICO and its impact…basically (I’m paraphrasing the Dark Knight and not a legal textbook or anything) if criminals pool their ill-gotten booty (which I’m not sure why you’d do that but whatevs) then that allows you to charge all of them if you can only charge one of them, which I guess saves a lot of time in criminal investigations and prosecution? This assumes heavily that Christopher Nolan knows what the hell he’s talking about, and he’s a pretty smart guy (I still haven’t figured out what the fuck was happening in Tenet or Interstellar), but does he understand American organized crime law?
The only thing I processed was “ill-gotten booty”.
you’re welcome 😉
I’ll give it a try, although it’s been an eternity since I looked at any of the statutes. RICO was created as a tool against organized crime. To oversimplify, it works a bit like a conspiracy charge, where a bunch of people get together to plan a crime, and that planning is itself then considered a crime. The problem is that organized crime organizations build hierarchies and infrastructure to wall off parts of the organization from each other, which makes proving a conspiracy hard. The police might bust a given illegal betting parlor or brothel controlled by a crime family, but the family itself doesn’t fall, just those particular retail locations, which in time will be replaced. With RICO, if you can show that an ongoing criminal enterprise exists between a series of people or businesses, and then prove that part of that enterprise committed or threatened more than one racketeering crime (this is a long list of mob-sounding crimes, which for McGowan’s purpose would include extortion and intimidation), then the enterprise as a whole can be criminally or civilly liable for that crime. You don’t have to prove that every member of the enterprise was involved in planning those particular racketeering crimes, just that they set up and participated in an enterprise to do crimes, and crimes were then committed by that enterprise.Because of the way the statute is worded, it can and does get applied beyond the kind of things we normally think of as organized crime, since you don’t need to be a mobster to set up a criminal enterprise. It was used against Operation Rescue, for example, to try to curb anti-abortion violence and intimidation. As a result, people tend to imagine RICO cases all over the place, but the statutes involved are very technical and most of the time it doesn’t pan out. Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it, it’s very hard to get.In McGowan’s case, it seems the judge has ruled that at best, she might prove that Weinstein and the others she accused targeted her with a concerted criminal campaign, but that’s not an ongoing criminal enterprise under the statute, because she’s just one person.
It stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, and means pretty much what that sounds like. If an organization exists in large part to perpetrate crimes, then the members are all guilty of being in on it even if they didn’t commit the specific crimes in question (personally present at the robbery, etc.). This one was a huge stretch since there isn’t actually an organization to be corrupt. It’s a guy and his defense lawyers.
Really simple version: it’s hard to convict people of crimes. Ironically the better at crime they are – and in particular the more organised a group of criminals is – the harder it is to convict specific people of specific crimes. So RICO was invented, which basically bulldozes through the usual guilt-and-evidence stuff by saying “clearly you’re a wrong’un, and your friends are wrong’uns, so we’ll imagine you’re guilty of everything”. It works by saying that if you committed certain crimes, AND they can prove that you are in a concrete way associated with a criminal enterprise, then they can effectively top up the specific charges with a general racketeering charge, bringing a far stiffer sentence. They can do this even if you’ve already served time for the specific things they caught you doing; and although some of the specific things are themselves serious, others (copyright infringement, bribery, money laundering, trading in obscene materials, etc) might not by themselves have carried a high sentence. RICO also lets them bump up what would otherwise be state charges into federal charges (letting the FBI go after you), and allows private citizens to bring civil RICO suits against you (with tripled damages), and allows them to seize everything you have before trial, and then when you’re guilty they can take anything they argue was the result of your ‘criminal enterprise’, even if you got the specific things perfectly legally.
Basically it’s a massive howitzer. But it’s also obviously philosophically objectionable, so the trade-off is that it’s designed to be very hard to actually use – you need to show that there’s an actual ongoing enterprise with a continuing pattern of offences, not just independent crimes. IANAL, but I think that if McGowan could show that Weinstein and his PIs had an ongoing system to commit crimes against anyone who might be a witness against them, she might be able to make it RICO, but just showing that they commited specific crimes against her personally on some occasion isn’t enough.
The metoo movement exists because of a 2017 Alyssa Milano tweet…she never said that she came up with the hashtag, I think she used it saying that it was suggested by a friend…all of that happened because of her tweet and Rose McGowan is so full of hatred for Milano that she called her a racist for starting the movement that got McGowan any measure of justice at all with respect to Weinstein. That’s fucked up.
How many more women do you think got abused between the payout McGowan took in 1997 to stay silent and when the Me Too Movement really blew up in 2017?