The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rose McGowan on Harvey Weinstein’s Guilty Verdict, and Neuroscience on the Campaign Trail

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

After a Manhattan jury found Harvey Weinstein guilty of two of the sex crimes he was charged with, Ronan Farrow sat down with the actress Rose McGowan, one of the women to speak out against the movie producer, whom she has said raped her in 1997, at a film festival. McGowan tweeted about the assault in 2016, not naming Weinstein but leaving no doubt as to whom she was accusing. “Could you have imagined at that point,” Farrow asks her, that “we’d be sitting here talking about Harvey Weinstein getting convicted?” McGowan takes a long pause. “No. But I did think there could be a massive cultural shift. That I knew.” McGowan later went on the record for Farrow’s reporting on the Weinstein case, which received a Pulitzer Prize and helped to launch the #MeToo movement. “It’s been an odyssey for both of us,” she said. Plus, using E.E.G. sensors and heart-rate monitors, a company investigates how political candidates engage our attention and emotions. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week, Harvey Weinstein was convicted in New York City on some but not all of the charges against him. It was nevertheless a cathartic moment for the many women who have accused him of sexual assault. That's about 100 people at this point. Ronan Farrer broke the Weinstein story for the New Yorker, sharing the Pulitzer Prize with reporters for the New York Times. And after the verdict, he sat down with the actress Rose McGowan for an episode of his show, The Catch and Kill podcast. Thank you for doing this today. I feel like you're the person more than anyone else that I wanted to hear from today just because of how long you've been in this pushing for some kind of accountability. Yeah, it's been an odyssey for both of us. Yeah, and here we are sitting here today. What a day. What were you doing when the verdict came across? I last night stayed up until five in the morning, staring at my computer because I knew, and I had been for a week, you know, I was tasked with, you have to write something if he's found not guilty. You have to write something if he's found guilty. And it just, it just spun my brain out. I couldn't. I actually started crying and it felt asleep. people five in the morning. I was like, forget it. And I slept through it. I woke up at 11 and checked

my phone. And I was like there were a ton of messages and I was braced myself. And then I realized, much like through the entire trial and the jury deliberations, very few people reached out to me at all. So just by sheer volume, something could happen because that's when they come out. So you looked at your phone this morning, braced for the worst. And then when you saw what had happened, what went through your mind? Honestly, Joy. And then I thought, I wonder if he's going to hire a hypnoticill me.

That was my other thought. And then I thought, should I have coffee this morning? In 2016, McGowan tweeted that she had been raped by a studio head in 1997. She didn't name Harvey Weinstein at first, but her remarks left no doubt whom she was talking about. That made her a target of Weinstein and the many people who work to conceal his actions and keep his victims quiet.

As an actress, McGowan's breakthrough was in the movie Scream when she was just 23 years old. She had gone to Hollywood on her own when she was just in her teens after an extremely difficult upbringing in a religious cult. You've spent all this time in the cult and then as a runaway and then even in your early experiences of Hollywood sexism, kind of hardening yourself, developing defense mechanisms. And then you get to Sundance 97. How did that change your life? You hear a lot about rape victims feeling guilt and shame.

I never felt guilt or shame because I know I didn't do it. It was so clear-cut. I was at a breakfast meeting and this happened. I was not on a date with this person. I was not, like luckily I didn't have to unpack that part of it too, you know. But it did. It altered my life in such a monstrous way. Because also at this point, I was already well-known.

And I had done a movie that was making a billion dollars for his company. So I was quite well-known. And then all of a sudden you get raped and blacklisted. So then what do you do? What job do you go get? You're trapped. You're stuck. And that day was a terrible fucking day.

Rape kills, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. And you really have to make the point and choice, which I had to do after being raped, of how do you give birth to the person that was you that's now dead inside of you? How do we get this out? Because either that or is going to kill you from the inside. In 2016, six years after we had that weird first meeting, you started becoming much more public about your allegation. There was a viral hashtag, why women don't report. And you offered your own thoughts about that. Do you want to read what you tweeted? A female criminal attorney said because I'd done a sex scene in a film,

I would never win against the studio head. Why women don't report? Because my ex sold their movie to my rapist for distribution. Because it's been an open secret in Hollywood media, and they shame me while adulating my rapist. It is time for some goddamn honesty in this world. How premeditated were those tweets? Not.

I always knew there's going to be something and what I do have is a good instinct for timing like a good instinct for timing when to throw the Molotov cocktail in the world. I was in the bathtub. I was in the bathtub and I was scrolling through my time and it was kind of at night, I think, if I remember. It just saw the women why they didn't report

and the men that wrote on their two, why they didn't report and it made me, I was like, these women are so brave because people are brave. I'm going to be brave. It's time. Going back in your mind to that moment of being in the bathtub and deciding I'm going to send these tweets, could you have imagined at that point that we'd be sitting here talking about Harvey Weinstein getting convicted? Hmm, what a good question.

No. But I did think that there could be a massive cultural shift. That I knew. I still remember the first call we had at end of 2016 or beginning of. of 2017, where it was clear that we both had probably too much knowledge about the dark underbelly of how some of these systems work. And we're both grappling with how do we all confront that? And how do we communicate this with other people when we know, like, it would say everybody's hair on fire, the stuff we know. Yeah. Then we sit down for that interview in February 2017.

And it's a moment I'll never forget because you weren't yet naming him later. You did name him on the record for me, which was very significant. But you were very explicitly talking about what had happened that day. And with an almost Cassandra-like premonition of equality to what you were saying, you were talking about a looming war over these issues. Yeah. I was right. You were right.

What was it like in the fall of 2017 finally seeing those stories break? That whole period was just like I had hit the ground running and I was exhausted. I was so tired. But I was like I knew that people would want to just bury it and go back to the way things were desperately.

And I was like, cannot let that happen, cannot let that happen. You know, it takes a lot to break a glass ceiling. You have to punch it really hard. repeatedly. It's not just a one punch. You appeared outside of the trial on day one. Tell me about that. That was very surreal. I didn't want to see him. Some of the other women stood on the side while he walked in. They wanted, I think some of them said that they wanted him to look at them, and I knew he wouldn't. I've also, I've just seen that face quite enough for the rest of my natural life, thank you.

Why participate in that press conference? Why talk that day? Honestly, because I knew. the other women would get more coverage if I was there. And also, I wanted to be inclusive and be just part of that and them, not just on my own. But it was also important just because, you know, his attorney, Donna Rotano, is trying to run the narrative. So they have to do anything you can to press back at the narrative. It sounds like a lot of this was bracing... For the worst.

For the worst outcome that was so familiar by now. Yeah, I wasn't even like that upset about it. just like, I was stressed. I was expecting the worst and expecting to have to deal with just a bunch of the stupid, like, articles like, yeah, status quo is back. But you can't do that. It doesn't work that way. You can't, like, go back on thought. Harvey Weinstein was convicted of two sex crimes, but not of the more serious predatory sexual assault charge that would have flowed from the jury buying into the idea that he had committed more than one sex crime in the first degree, that this was a pattern.

Those results are complicated for a lot of people. Yeah. How do you feel about it? You know, those cases and the type of cases had never been won in a court of law in America, right? The kind of ones where the relationship goes on afterwards, there's not a history of that winning. So that's why I was kind of like, why were those specific ones? brought. It's extremely difficult. Well, it's interesting in this case, though, because one of the charges on which he was convicted was Jessica Mann's allegation, which was explicitly from the

beginning and throughout her testimony, a case in which she acknowledged an ongoing relationship. It's very significant in that respect. It's extremely significant. That a jury acknowledged, oh, you can have an act of sexual violence of some kind. I mean, hers was rape in the third degree is what they found him of, which is without physical compulsion, but it is a sex crime, and also have an ongoing relationship. Yeah, which is a very, you know, the American jury system, like, is pretty revolutionary in a lot of ways. You know, I mean, that women can be married and get raped, you know, you can be in a relationship and get raped by your partner, same sex, anything, like any, you know, that is huge.

actually, and I think it will be significant. It kind of makes me sad because I'm not, I think I'm so used to being given scraps that I'm just so happy with what we got. And that kind of makes me both happy and sad. The most serious charge Harvey Weinstein was convicted of today, the one involving Mimi Halle,

is about a fact pattern that is strikingly similar to your own allegation and that of several other women who say Weinstein forced oral sex on them. What was it like reading or hearing about her testimony? Did you read it? I could see that being painful. Yeah, that one was almost verbatim, you know, except for the structure of the room. It made it like, they could say to me, me, like, oh, that was just oral sex. To have someone's face where you don't want it in the most vulnerable place and that face specifically,

It's a horror show, you know, and what she had to go through, I know what she went through, and what those other women went through, I know what they went through. There's pain here, there's trauma, there's consequence. But I do hope that, you know, for me, me, for me, for all of us, and for all the women that have and won't come forward because they saw what happened to us, you know. I hope their bodies rest a little easier tonight. I had a nightmare last night. I woke up sweating again, you know,

like I had to change my pajamas. And I get night terrors still. You know, and it's like, damn, man, come on. And I'm sure the trial spikes that stuff up, you know, the stress of it. But I do think, I'm hoping, really curious to see what will happen to the PTSD now. I don't know. I've never been on this side of it. It's all in the world.

Thank you, Rose. Thank you, Ronan. Rose McGowan talking with Ronan Farrow after the conviction of Harvey Weinstein. You can hear a longer version of that conversation on the Catch and Kill podcast, which just wrapped up a 10-episode run detailing Farrow's reporting over the last several years. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you live in a state with a primary on Super Tuesday,

you are up to your neck in campaign ads and probably have to be a new yorker. have been for quite some time. Those ads have something in common. They're trying to engage your emotions. Imagine all the progress we can make in the next four years. Mike Bloomberg started as a middle-class kid. If you feel stuck in the middle of the extremes in our politics and you are tired of the noise and the nonsense.

Real change never takes place from the top on down, but always from the bottom on up. The schmaltzy music, the inspiring life stories, it's all about getting your attention. And in the attention-grabbing business, technology is constantly being upgraded. Sue Halpern covers tech and politics for the New Yorker, and she's been learning about a technique that tries to peer inside the minds of voters on a second-by-second basis. It's called neuromarketing. Here's Sue Halpern.

Hi. We're going up to Spark. I was sick of the girl. A few weeks ago, I show up in the lobby of a nondescript building in Manhattan and take a rickety elevator to an old industrial space that have been converted into a kind of cool-looking startup. Okay, spark neural. Hello.

Hi, it's great to meet you. I'm there to meet someone named Spencer Gerald and learn about his obsession with the brain. You'll see here and in the lab a lot of brain art. What is brain art? This is a painting of a particular, type of neuron. And so, you know, I'm obsessed

with everything brain. And so even my art is brain. In 2017, he founded a neuromarketing company called Spark Neuro, which does a lot of work for big movie studios and advertising companies. What's new about companies like Spark Neuro

is that they can track subconscious reactions in people that people aren't even aware of. They hook people up to their equipment and study how their brains and bodies react as they watched movie trailers and advertisements. Okay, so I have to do, you have to do me. I'm here tonight to see how this works, and Gerald is allowing me to try out his methodology.

All right. First thing that's going to happen is we are going to put an EEG on your head. I'm in his lab, which kind of looks like a college library without the books. It's just a bunch of carols. I can't have your glasses for now, and we'll put them back on before. And some people just sort of arrived behind me, and they start hooking me up to all these machines. Parting your hair so that we can get directly to your scalp.

So it is important. They put a cap on my head that has EEG sensors to measure my brain waves, clip a heart rate monitor to my earlobe, and they put sensors on my fingers to see how much my hands are sweating, kind of like a lie detector test. All right, so now you're going to see two ads, a movie clip. For the demo, I watch movie clips and some old Super Bowl ads. There's a Mr. Clean ad.

Amazon's Alexa lost her voice this morning. And an ad for Amazon Echo. We have the replacements ready, just say the work. As I'm watching, the sensors are recording thousands of data points per second and putting the data through Spark Neuro's algorithm, which spits out a measurement of how strongly I'm reacting to what I'm seeing. So basically, the algorithm is about, attention. But then you also said it's about emotion. So attention, I understand, but emotion is

a pretty broad pool to be swimming in. So how do you figure that out? Firstly, it's important to distinguish that our algorithm is not reading your mind, right? It's understanding are you paying more attention or less attention? Are you having stronger emotions or weaker emotions? And to some degree, was the nature of those emotions. Emotion is incredibly complex, and it's an important actually for us to express that, to not oversimplify the science. And so what we rely a lot on is a measure that we refer to as emotional intensity, and that is how strong are the emotions you're feeling.

Gerald pulls out his laptop and shows me what he calls my emotional intensity graph, which looks kind of like an EKG machine, but it's a... actually reading my brain waves. And it's used the algorithm to graph my reactions over time. One of the clips that I watch, which in fact is something that I think Gerald uses a lot because it has a lot of emotional resonance, is a clip from a movie called Crash, which came out in 2004. Let's play the video. We see a man who's having an argument with a guy who's pulled up in a van. You know, you start to have a little bit bigger reaction

when they're screaming at each other and he's swatting the money away. The little girl's watching from inside. You saw her standing by the door, a motion spiked. She ran out the door, a motion spiked again. And she runs out to a man we assume is her father as the man from the van pulls out a gun and appears to shoot just as his daughter.

is jumping into his arms. So as we keep the playing, bang, gun goes off, and... Wait, wait, gun goes off and I'm like, whoa, no big deal. No big deal. But wait, but gun goes off and the guy is like crying and still not a whole bit. Well, so watch this. So now they zoom in on the father's face. And now you've just reached a whole new high.

Right. So things you reacted to, the grieving parents. The girl may be running out the door, things you did not react to, the gun going off or being fired because that you saw coming. Neuro marketing isn't new. Companies have been trying to measure subconscious reactions of people for decades. But in the last 10 years, it's really taken off. It's really important, though, not to oversell this technology. It's still very early days, and there is a lot of hype around it.

But neuromarketers tell you that what this does is solve a classic research problem, which is that when you ask people to tell you what they're thinking, a lot of the time they don't actually tell the truth, or they might not even know what they think. If ever been part of a focus group, you know that there's going to be some amount of group think. One person leading the pack. Are you saying what you think might be popular to say?

That we would classify a social desirability bias, especially problematic in politics. So politics, that's what I'm really interested in here, how neuromarketing could be used in the political sphere. In fact, some of SparkNuro's earliest successes with their algorithm involved politics. In 2016, before the company even launched, they got hired by a media group that wanted to learn what made political ads work or not work. Gerald told me that at the time there was a lot of interest in this question of,

what's your brain on Trump? And this group wanted Spark Nuro to test their algorithm on undecided voters in swing states. We would watch their emotion and attention responses as interpreted by our algorithms as they were watching different kinds of media, radio ads, TV ads, debate clips.

And then we would show them their graph right afterwards. And that opened up a conversation where we learned that among many of them, they weren't actually undecided. What Spark Nero found was that even though these voters said they were undecided, many of them were actually leaning towards Trump whether or not they were aware of it, and some of them were leaning towards Trump, and they really didn't want to admit it.

Looking back, Gerald feels the algorithm actually predicted the results of the election. I was personally skeptical of our own data. My VP of neuroscience was not. He actually started placing bets that Trump was going to win the election. And he ended up winning a lot of money. In addition to convincing Gerald that the spark neural algorithm worked, this was an example of how neuromarketing could identify trends that other kinds of polling and focus groups might not uncover.

You can imagine how a candidate might use this. They have a campaign ad that they want to test out, so they run it through a neuromarketing study. and then they can go in and change the ad based on what they find. Maybe they change how they're speaking to make it feel emotional, or maybe they use certain phrases they know will get people's attention or rile them up, all based on what they see in people's brains. I wanted to see this in action, so I've come to Spark Nero on the night of a Democratic debate.

Gerald has arranged for about a dozen people to show up and watch the debate as they're hooked up to Spark Nero's technology. These are all likely Democratic voters that he found from his company's Facebook page. They all sit down, get hooked up in the lab, at the same time that we're in another room watching their responses on Gerald's computer in real time. Ah, okay. So we're looking at this participant. Now let's see how we respond to Bernie. Whoa. So right there, when he talked about working with Mike Lee on a bipartisan, legislation, they really like that. It just went way up.

They certainly had a strong emotional reaction. Right, and then it just dropped. What's important to know here is that a spike doesn't necessarily mean someone's reaction is positive, but people do tend to remember and connect with candidates who grab their attention and speak to them emotionally. Every time they go to Trump, it spikes. It's interesting because a lot of times the Democrats are saying they don't want to focus on Trump. They want to focus on, you know, what they're going to.

they're going to do, but clearly, at least with this one guy, it must peak his interest. He likes Warren. Yeah. Like every single, every little nuance he's responding to. You know, what's beautiful is we'll be able to then interview this person. Right. Right. This guy does not care about Tom Steyer. We actually don't know who he is until he walks into the room afterward.

His name is Michael Bradley Cohen. He's very clear that he wants us to put Bradley in there so we don't confuse him with the other Michael Cohen. Because you don't want to be Michael Cohen who's in jail. I don't want to be mistaken if you use me and then he calls you up. He's a white guy, 33 years old, an actor and a licensed New York City tour guide. You were very responsive to Bernie in the beginning. You really liked it when Wolf Blitzer asked him a question,

and Bernie said, I'm not going to answer that question. I'm going to answer the other question. Because it was classic Bernie. I think that Bernie has some of the best speaking voice and the best cadence on that debate stage. Unbelievable. Tell. You know, as we're watching your data, we commented that one of the reasons that you might have shown such strong emotional reactions to Bernie, might be because you like him or it might be just because of the way that he speaks.

Entirely. The pauses that he takes. No, no. The pauses that he takes. There you go. There you go. If you go as slow as Bernie goes sometimes, you're never going to lose track of what you're trying to say.

The sentence is shorter, but we all get the point. When Biden takes a deep breath, I almost go, oh. And your brain agrees. So your brain tuned Biden out, really. Every single time. I know for a fact that Camper's a lot. campaigns are already using neuromarketing. I talked to a company called Bellwether Citizen Response

who told me that they're doing neuromarketing work for candidates in this election cycle. But they wouldn't say who. And I understand that because this kind of creeps people out. In the last election, we saw that Cambridge Analytica, a company that was working on behalf of Trump, had used psychological attributes of people, traits underlying. fears to manipulate them towards a candidate or away from another candidate. There was a feeling at the time that this was underhanded or a kind of mind control. Even though Spark Neuro hasn't worked with campaigns yet,

Gerald says they might in the future. He hasn't ruled it out. So I wanted to talk to him about this ethical gray area that I was feeling. When it comes to questions of ethics, at some point I think this needs to be. a very broad question that involves a lot of people from a lot of different areas, from academia to industry and so forth. In the meantime, each leader of any given company that's doing work like this needs to figure out where to draw the line for themselves. We've been approached on two occasions by two different large tobacco companies and absolutely didn't even entertain the conversation. Now, is that the right ethical decision or the wrong ethical decision? It was the right

ethical decision for me. Any new technology has the potential for good or for bad, depending on the day, how excited or how scared I am may vary. For me, it's not a good enough reason to stop the advancement of the science. That work seems worth doing. You could make an argument that what we're seeing with neural marketing is just a more refined way of understanding what moves us politically. And it's a way for candidates to better understand the electorate. But if campaigns can tailor their messaging to make us care about things we might not otherwise care about or pay more attention to policies we might otherwise ignore, are we really still making our own decisions? And if we're not, where does that leave our democracy?

Sue Halperin writes about technology and election. for The New Yorker. And she spoke with Spencer Gerald, the founder and CEO of Spark Neuro. Sue is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and you can read her reporting at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Monfay Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.