BRAVE EB

Rose McGowan

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780008291105
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"My life, as you will read, has taken me from one cult to another. BRAVE is the story of how I fought my way out of these cults and reclaimed my life. I want to help you do the same." -Rose McGowan

A revealing memoir and empowering manifesto – A voice for generations

Rose McGowan was born in one cult and came of age in another, more visible cult: Hollywood.

In a strange world where she was continually on display, stardom soon became a personal nightmare of constant exposure and sexualization. Rose escaped into the world of her mind, something she had done as a child, and into high-profile relationships. Every detail of her personal life became public, and the realities of an inherently sexist industry emerged with every script, role, public appearance, and magazine cover. The Hollywood machine packaged her as a sexualized bombshell, hijacking her image and identity and marketing them for profit.

Hollywood expected Rose to be silent and cooperative and to stay the path. Instead, she rebelled and asserted her true identity and voice. She reemerged unscripted, courageous, victorious, angry, smart, fierce, unapologetic, controversial, and real as f*ck.

BRAVE is her raw, honest, and poignant memoir/manifesto—a no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches account of the rise of a millennial icon, fearless activist, and unstoppable force for change who is determined to expose the truth about the entertainment industry, dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multibillion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny, and empower people everywhere to wake up and be BRAVE.

PART ONE

CHILD OF GOD

Here’s the thing about cults: I see them everywhere.

If you’re deep into the Kardashians, you’re in a cult. If you watch your favorite TV show and go online and you’re in chat rooms with everybody else who’s obsessed with that show and you’re breaking it down episode by episode, you’re in a cult. If you’re bingeing, scrolling, absorbing from one news source more than any other, especially if it happens to be fair and balanced, you are in a cult. You’re living your life through other people. If you blindly vote for so-and-so, you’re in a cult. If you’re deep into your country’s propaganda machine, you’re in a cult. Look around you and see where the cults are, because they are everywhere. Anywhere there is group thought and group mentality: you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult.

The first step to deprogramming yourself from a cult is realizing you are in a cult. I would know, I escaped from two of the most iconic cults of all time.

For those who knew me as an actress, I must inform you that I was never that person. I was playing the part of someone who played parts. I was trapped by rigid societal ideals and gender expectations placed on me by people who shouldn’t have been allowed near me (or you). I got such a deeeeeeeeep mind fucking. I rejected brainwashing early on in life, but later, Hollywood’s Cult of Thought actually got me.

My life altered irrevocably the day I turned into a pixel, beamed up to an orbiting satellite and beamed back down, blasted across living rooms, bedrooms, lives. My job was to take you away from your struggles for a while, to make you feel empathy, to make you feel at all. I took my job seriously. But like in most cults, because I was a woman, I was considered to be an owned object. I was sold for the pleasure of the public. Deeply programmed men (and women) made money selling my breasts, my skin, my hair, my emotions, my health, my being. I was not taken seriously, nor was I respected. Not by most of society, and certainly not by the Hollywood cult with its massively industrialized Madonna/Whore complex.

Imagine if your value to the company you work for was measured by how much semen you could extract from anonymous masses of men. ’Cause you know, if strange men masturbate to your movies, you must be of some value. Sounds like a sex worker, right? You’re not too far off.

Imagine that every word to come out of your mouth for nearly seventeen years, day after day, month after month, angle after angle, take after take, was something an all too narrow-minded male wrote for you to say. It’s meta and it’s deeply abnormal.

It took me a long time to figure out that I was in another cult, because I was too busy being other people, not myself. By telling the story of my life, I am reclaiming it.

But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In a stone barn, in the tiny Italian countryside town of Certaldo, delivered by a blind midwife, as the story goes, I came into the world. There’s an American saying: “Shut that door! Were you born in a barn?!” I guess I never have to shut doors if I don’t want to. I have that prerogative. I suppose sometimes you’re just earmarked for weirdness from birth, and I think I’m one of those.

The barn was on the property of the duke of Zoagli, known as Duke Emanuele, who, upon joining the Children of God, donated his estate and land to Children of God. His sister Rosa Arianna lived on the property, but loathed all the Children of God members living there. My parents named me after her, Rosa Arianna, I think to make her like them. Didn’t work.

It was incredibly beautiful there in the rolling hills outside Florence, the dark green cypresses and silvery-green olive trees, vineyards, and orchards, those enormous old terra-cotta jars holding red geranium flowers. I suppose if you have to be in a cult, it was as good a place as any.

Nah, it was better, and even at a young age, I saw the beauty and knew it was wildly extraordinary. I connected to its nature as an escape from what I was born into. As a result, I’ve always been drawn to shapes, colors, and light patterns, and the Italian countryside has haunted me my whole life, in a good way.

From my earliest memories I recall hearing a lot about a terrifying old man named “Moses” David Berg, our fearless leader in the Children of God. He would send his directives out in cartoon pamphlets called “Mo Letters.” Whatever Moses David wrote, that’s what was done. Each time there was a new letter it would be as if the ruler of the universe had spoken. (Kind of like the head of a studio in Hollywood.) And I guess as the self-appointed prophet he was, Moses David turned out to be the King of Creeps. But the others didn’t know that yet. Some would never know.

I remember a lot of hairy legs, men’s and women’s, like in the cartoons where you only see the adults’ legs because that’s your perspective as a child. I remember a lot of singing, praying, clapping, and snapping. Yes, snapping. I was told I had to sit on the floor all day and learn how to snap my fingers, otherwise God wouldn’t teach me to drive when I was sixteen. I didn’t understand anything about sixteen and driving, but even then I could tell finger snapping as the key to doing anything was patently absurd.

One night, a ghostly looking woman in a white robe came into the room I was in. She was like a shadow holding a candle—there was no electricity. It was storming outside and I remember the wooden shutter slapping against the old glass window. I had been worried the window was going to break, but I was now distracted by the woman in white who sat by my feet. The wind was whistling through cracks in the stone and I was having trouble hearing her. The wind stopped and she looked straight into me and said, “Have you let God into your heart?”

I sat up, looked at her, considered carefully, and shook my head no.

The woman pinches my foot and twists my skin. I am not going to cry out because I know that’s what she wants. For this refusal there was punishment. Corporal punishment, slaps and spankings, because “spare the rod, spoil the child.” She twists harder. I bite the inside of my lip so I don’t cry. I stare back, silently defiant.

The woman says it again, this time in German, “Hast du Gott in dein Herz gelassen?”

I think about it and say, “No. Not today. Try tomorrow.”

She slaps me across the face. Hard.

Even at that tender age, I reasoned that if I invited him into my heart, it would be their God I was letting inside. It would no longer be my God, whom I was very protective of. And their God was cruel. What they were preaching made no sense to me, their actions not squaring with their words. That was not a reality I wanted to exist in.

Later my younger sister Daisy urged me to just say yes, that it would go easier for me, but I kept taking the punishment instead. I was, as my name foretold, quite thorny, whereas my sister was a little golden-haired, sweet child. I would stare at her and wonder how she got that way and how she couldn’t see what was going on. It was a strange sensation growing up behind these walls and being told I did not belong to the outside world, but I also knew I didn’t belong to the world within.

When that woman or another woman or another man, all strangers, returned the next night and the night after, I always had the same response: “No, no, I have not let God into my heart.”

Slap.

One night I could hear the woman’s German whispers and her feet doing a quiet kind of stomp on the floor. I knew I was going to get hurt again.

“No.”

Slap.

When she was gone, I saw that she left her Bible on my sleep mat—all the kids slept on flimsy orange or blue plastic mats. I hid her Bible behind a cabinet. Each day I’d tear out a new page, put a small piece in my mouth, work it around, add more, and spit it out, turning it into little mush blobs. Then I would take the Bible blobs and form them into tiny animals. I hid them behind the cabinet and would visit them now and then when I could steal a moment. They were my toys, one part saliva, one part Jesus.

I figured if I literally ingested their God, maybe I could answer, Yes, I have let him in. Maybe they’d stop punishing me.

The smacks, the pushes, enforced the message that you were not allowed to be imperfect. When I was about four, I had a wart on my thumb. I was toddling down this long hallway when one of the doors opened. I remember the shaft of light and all the dust motes dancing. A man with shaggy blond hair picked me up, looked at my hand, and said, “Perfection in all things.” He held up a razor blade and sliced my hand with one swipe, winking at me as he sat me back down. “Perfection in all things,” he said again before shutting the door and leaving me in the hallway. I didn’t cry, I was too stunned. Blood ran over my hand and I made a dripping mess of the hallway. The blood coursed over my fingers, the red strangely pretty. Like my hand, I was numb. I knew not to react because, one, that was something they wanted from me, and, two, I thought maybe there was something to this perfection thing. I walked on.

The hallway assault is what started a narrative that fucked with my head for years, that of perfection as self-protection. I told myself if I were just perfect enough, I’d be okay. If I were just perfect enough, I’d be left alone and no one would want to hurt me.

From then on, I willed myself to be as perfect as possible because I didn’t know what would happen to me if I wasn’t. I was terrified of having an aberration in any way. I was sure that having any kind of flaw would spell doom. But first I had to figure out what all my flaws were. And so began a habit of being extremely hard on myself, seeing myself from the outside in. I started to look at my hands and feet daily to make sure I didn’t have any bumps growing. There were no mirrors that I can remember in the cult. When I would later arrive in a culture that was so externally focused—America, and then Hollywood—this caused a tear in the fabric of my being.

The funny thing was that in almost direct opposition to the message the cult sent us about perfection, my father was preaching to me and my siblings that we were not, under any circumstances, to develop an ego. Our focus was to be on our internal development, the development of our souls and our intellects. I suppose we were supposed to be perfect physically, but remain humble in the face of our perfection? I was never really sure. All I knew was that I was not supposed to think good thoughts about myself. That God would punish me for thinking that I was awesome.

Never once growing up was I told that I was intelligent, smart, or beautiful. I don’t know what that feels like. I was never told I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it. I was told I was worth nothing in the eyes of God. I was told I was going to be a whore. I was told I was dirty. And the thing is, I knew they were wrong, but the words still stung.

From an early age, I remember being furious that nobody would listen to me just because I was a child. It was so unfair. I hated being little and powerless. I would look at the people in Children of God and think, But all these things you’re all talking about, I could solve them in two easy steps if you adults would just listen to what I am saying, but nobody would listen to me. Because I was a girl. That set a real pattern for my life. I was a born dissenter—not for the sake of being contrary, but because if you could see things for what they were, identify the source of a problem and the solution, why wouldn’t you want to fix it? But nobody would listen to me. They just sat me at the little kids’ table. Not unlike later in Hollywood. Just a girl, after all.

My only friends during my time in Children of God were my older brother, Nat; my pet lamb, Agnello; and an old gray-haired farmer named Stinky Fernando. Stinky Fernando was deeply suspicious of bathing. You could almost chew his smell, it was so thick. I had to breathe through my mouth whenever he was around. One day I heard Stinky Fernando screaming. My father and some of the other members took him by his arms and ankles and threw him in a river. Much to Stinky Fernando’s surprise, his skin did not melt off.

Stinky Fernando took Nat and me into an old barn and showed us faded Playboy magazines while feeding us stale Kit Kats. A real treat. I wondered about the women in the magazines. They didn’t have hairy legs. It was confusing. I loved the rancid Kit Kats, though. I loved candy way more than I loved their God.

I bottle-fed my friend, the little lamb Agnello, and helped take care of her. My first pet. One night at the long dinner table I took a bite of food, and a thin woman with a mean face and center-parted hair started to laugh. Others joined in, and soon everyone was laughing. I didn’t understand what was funny until they told me it was Agnello being served. And so I realized my pet was being fed to me for dinner. I sat stunned while everyone at the long table laughed. I pushed my tears down and felt a coldness wall off my heart toward these people, something crystallizing into a stone of pure hatred as I looked at their monster faces. They had a particularly cruel streak, and they liked to destabilize the younger members. These were lovers of Christ, right? To this day, I’ve never eaten lamb again.

I started to become angry. Angry at the injustices that were adding up. Angry at the rules that seemed, and were, so arbitrary. I decided the best course of action was to light it up. And so, one day my older brother decided to light a stable on fire. He was mad, too. I for sure wanted to be there for that, so I ran after him to help. We were in the barn when my brother pulled out a book of matches. He started lighting them and flicking them at the hay on the stone floor. Whoosh. The fire leaped up the side of the walls and onto the ceiling. The roof was thatched hay and started popping above us. I tried stamping out the flaming pieces with my feet, but I was too little and it was too late. I stamped and stamped, but I couldn’t put them out. If I had known how to say fuck, I am sure I would have. The roof crackled more and it was getting very hot. I knew we were in big, big trouble if we went outside and were caught by the adults. But everything was on fire.

We chose to run.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you some hideous story of punishment for lighting it up, but I really can’t remember. I do remember the terror of being found out. It made me feel like my skin was about to fall off with fear. The movie scene of this would be:

A sturdy blond boy and an elfin girl are hiding from their father. Suddenly four hands grab them by the shirt collars, dragging them off. Turning down a path in a maze, the children are paraded past a gauntlet of leering cult members. The members drag the children to the Judge of All. The Judge of All is on a throne made of soft wood. There are young nude women, heavy breasted and round bottomed, on their knees, gazing up adoringly and reverentially at the dynamically dangerous leader. The leader tilts his head back, eyes shut. He’s being worshipped. He’s in heaven on earth. The women work oils and lotions into the leader’s skin, their hands using a feathering touch as they go, chanting with intention. The leader, the Judge of All, opens his eyes and points at the boy and girl. The shaming begins.

Sounds like a Hollywood film, right? Maybe it’s not too far off. In fact, my life as a performer began there in the cult. We were made to go out in groups to sing at local orphanages and hospitals, or on the streets, to perform. Singing Jesus songs on the streets of Rome with a hat in front of me, street busking. After the coins would stack up in the hat, a hand would come over my shoulder to take all the coins I’d earned. They let me carry the empty hat. Gee, thanks. It was my work that was bringing the money in and I was pissed at the injustice of having to give it up. I’d see regular families with the kids walking around with gelatos and candy and I’d wonder about their lives at home. Did they have a bed? We had plastic mats and I got cold at night. The girls wore pretty dresses; I had faded brown overalls and Jesus sandals. My hands and feet would get dirty and I’d try to hide them when other, cleaner children looked at me. For hours we would stand and sing those damned songs, under hot sun, in the rain, it didn’t matter. I was five or so. My little legs would get so sore from standing, but I knew I couldn’t sit or there’d be trouble.

We had to return with money or else there would be sanctions and punishments against our family. I could feel the stress of the adult members as the “Systemites” (that’s what they called people outside the cult) turned away and ignored us and the pamphlets we were selling. Li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• P. S.
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• About the Publisher