Meryl Streep responded to Rose McGowan’s claim that she knew about Harvey Weinstein’s abuse

In light of the sexual harassment and abuse allegations turning Hollywood on its head, actresses have decided to wear all black everything to the 2018 Golden Globes as a show of solidarity. Rose McGowan criticized the black dress silent protest and called Meryl Streep out by name, suggesting that Streep is a hypocrite for previously and consistently working with Harvey Weinstein. Streep has responded in a powerful way, explaining that she never knew that Weinstein sexually assaulted McGowan, nor that he harassed or abused any other women.

McGowan has since deleted her original tweet, which read:

“Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @GoldenGlobes in a silent protest. YOUR SILENCE is THE problem,” McGowan tweeted on December 16th, 2017. “You’ll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real change. I despise your hypocrisy. Maybe you should all wear Marchesa.”

McGowan responded via Twitter that the Marchesa line (Weinstein’s estranged wife’s fashion label) was “beneath me,” but has yet to respond to the Streep comment.

Here is Meryl Streep’s statement (via People) in its entirety:

“I wasn’t deliberately silent. I didn’t know. I don’t tacitly approve of rape. I didn’t know. I don’t like young women being assaulted. I didn’t know this was happening. I don’t know where Harvey lives, nor has he ever been to my home. I have never in my life been invited to his hotel room. I have been to his office once, for a meeting with Wes Craven for Music of the Heart in 1998. HW distributed movies I made with other people.

HW was not a filmmaker; he was often a producer, primarily a marketer of films made by other people — some of them great, some not great. But not every actor, actress, and director who made films that HW distributed knew he abused women, or that he raped Rose in the 90s, other women before and others after, until they told us. We did not know that women’s silence was purchased by him and his enablers.

HW needed us not to know this, because our association with him bought him credibility, an ability to lure young, aspiring women into circumstances where they would be hurt.

He needed me much more than I needed him and he made sure I didn’t know. Apparently he hired ex Mossad operators to protect this information from becoming public. Rose and the scores of other victims of these powerful, moneyed, ruthless men face an adversary for whom Winning, at any and all costs, is the only acceptable outcome. That’s why a legal defense fund for victims is currently being assembled to which hundreds of good hearted people in our business will contribute, to bring down the bastards, and help victims fight this scourge within.

Rose assumed and broadcast something untrue about me, and I wanted to let her know the truth. Through friends who know her, I got my home phone number to her the minute I read the headlines. I sat by that phone all day yesterday and this morning, hoping to express both my deep respect for her and others’ bravery in exposing the monsters among us, and my sympathy for the untold, ongoing pain she suffers. No one can bring back what entitled bosses like Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and HW took from the women who endured attacks on their bodies and their ability to make a living[…]And I hoped that she would give me a hearing. She did not, but I hope she reads this.

I am truly sorry she sees me as an adversary, because we are both, together with all the women in our business, standing in defiance of the same implacable foe: a status quo that wants so badly to return to the bad old days, the old ways where women were used, abused and refused entry into the decision-making, top levels of the industry. That’s where the cover-ups convene. Those rooms must be disinfected, and integrated, before anything even begins to change.”

Weinstein’s sexual misconduct has long been called an “open secret,” and we can understand why so many women, including McGowan, are confused that Streep wasn’t aware of his predatory behavior. However, just as we’re calling upon the world to believe victims, we must also believe women when they say that they had no idea they were working with an abuser.