‘Sideways’ filmmaker Alexander Payne denies Rose McGowan’s underage sex allegation: ‘Simply untrue’

Filmmaker Alexander Payne is denying Rose McGowan’s allegation he groomed her for sex when she was 15 years old.

The “Sideways” and “Descendants” screenwriter-director said Friday in a guest column for Deadline.com that McGowan’s claims in a series of Twitter posts last month are “simply untrue.”

He said he didn’t meet McGowan until 1991, the year she turned 18 and he turned 30.

Payne, who was married to actress Sandra Oh from 2003 to 2006, said he’s admired McGowan for her commitment to activism in the #MeToo movement, but he couldn’t remain silent.

“What she has said about me in recent social media posts is simply untrue,” he wrote.

“Rose is mistaken in saying we met when she was fifteen, in the late 1980s. I was a full-time film student at UCLA from 1984 until 1990, and I know that our paths never crossed,” he wrote.

“She claims that I showed her a ‘soft-core porn movie’ I had directed for Showtime ‘under a different name.’ This would have been impossible, since I had never directed anything professionally, lurid or otherwise. I have also never worked for Showtime or directed under any name other than my own,” he wrote.

“Rose and I did meet years later, in 1991, during my first directing job, when she auditioned for a comic short I was making for a Playboy Channel series,” he said.

He wrote that while McGowan did not get the part, she left a note for him at the casting desk asking him to call her.

“I had no reason to question how old she was, since the role she read for required an actor who was of age. We later went out on a couple of dates and remained on friendly terms for years,” he wrote.

“While I cannot allow false statements about events twenty-nine years ago to go uncorrected, I will continue to wish only the best for Rose,” he said.

In a comment to Variety on Friday, McGowan said Payne’s response amounted to “lies.”

“I told Payne to acknowledge and apologize, he has not. I said I didn’t want to destroy, now I do. Why do these men always lie? I will now make it a mission to expose him. I am not the only one,” she told the publication.

McGowan became a major voice of #MeToo when she was one of the first women to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape.

In multiple Twitter posts Aug. 17, McGowan claimed Payne showed her a soft-core porn movie at his Silverlake apartment when she was 15.

“You are very well-endowed. You left me on a street corner afterwards,” she tweeted.

“I would even go up to this director at events and ask him, with a smile, ‘Remember when you had sex with me at 15?’” she wrote in a follow-up tweet.

She also shared a headshot photo of herself from when she was 15.

“I just want an acknowledgement and an apology,” McGowan, 46, wrote in that post. “I do not want to destroy.”