"In the early 1990s, McGowan, then relatively unknown, was involved for two years with a man she refers to as William, who, she claims, kept buying her exercise equipment and fashion magazines in an effort to persuade her to get thinner. She developed an eating disorder in her unsuccessful efforts to get her weight down to 84 pounds (38 kg) like the women in the magazines. "I never was able to get below 92 pounds (42 kg)," she wrote later. "I felt like a failure."[60]
That relationship and the eating disorder ended in early 1993 when McGowan met Brett Cantor, a part-owner of Hollywood's Dragonfly nightclub.[61] Cantor was brutally stabbed to death in his house that July, and McGowan stated that it left her "shattered". The killing remains unsolved.[60]
McGowan had a three-and-a-half-year relationship with rock musician Marilyn Manson. After a formal engagement lasting two years, McGowan ended the relationship in 2001 over "lifestyle differences".[62]
Prior to the release of Grindhouse, there was speculation that McGowan was dating director Robert Rodriguez.[63][64] In May 2007, it was reported that they confirmed their relationship while appearing hand-in-hand at the Cannes Film Festival.[65] On October 12, 2007, it was announced by Zap2it.com that McGowan was engaged to Rodriguez.[66] They reportedly split in October 2009.[67]
In July 2013, after one year of dating, McGowan became engaged to artist Davey Detail.[68] They married on October 12, 2013 in Los Angeles.[69] In February 2016, she filed for divorce from Detail, citing irreconcilable differences.[70] The divorce was finalized in November 2016.[71]"
The New York Times revealed, in October 2017, that she received a $100,000 settlement from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in relation to an alleged sexual assault in 1997.[72] "Women fight on," she wrote afterwards. "And to the men out there, stand up. We need you as allies." It was alleged that the encounter had taken place in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival.[72][73] More than two decades later, she described the incident as rape.
On October 10, 2017, McGowan accused actor Ben Affleck of lying for saying he was "angry" over Weinstein's alleged abuse of women but failing to indicate whether he knew about it even though she had told him Weinstein had acted inappropriately towards her.[74] Via Twitter, she also attacked other men in the movie industry, tweeting, "All of you Hollywood 'A-list' golden boys are LIARS....You all knew."[75][76] She later clarified that she told Affleck, while crying, that she had "just come from Harvey's and he said, 'Goddamn it, I told him to stop doing that.' It's not like I'm raging at Ben Affleck. I never said to him, 'I was just raped.' It's just more to illustrate the point of this continual thing of everybody knowing and everybody being part of it, unwittingly or proactively."[77]
On October 12, McGowan alleged that Harvey Weinstein had raped her, and that Amazon Studios dropped her project after she complained.[78] On the same day, McGowan said that Twitter suspended her account for 12 hours after she repeatedly tweeted about Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct, including toward her.[79] Twitter explained that McGowan's account had violated its privacy policy because one of her tweets included a private phone number. The New York Times reported, "Many Twitter users expressed outrage over Ms. McGowan's account being locked." After the tweet was removed, her account was unlocked several hours before the 12-hour ban was set to expire.[76] Through his lawyer, David Boies, Weinstein at one point hired the private intelligence agency Black Cube to spy on McGowan and to stop outlets such as The New York Times and The New Yorker from reporting their investigations on Harvey Weinstein.[80]
On February 7, 2018, Jill Messick, McGowan's manager at the time of the alleged rape in 1997, died by suicide.[81] Messick's family blamed Weinstein, the media, the public, and McGowan for her death.[82]