Alyssa Milano’s former Charmed co-star Rose McGowan accused her Wednesday of being the “Leader of Karens,” after a report that Milano called law enforcement on someone in her neighborhood with a gun.
McGowan shared a Daily Mail headline that accused Milano of “sparking massive police presence in her quiet California neighborhood claiming an armed gunman was on her property — but it was really a teen shooting at squirrels with an airgun.”
[quote] Who is the Leader of Karens? Alyssa Milano — Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan) September 23, 2020
However, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office told Yahoo Entertainment that Milano was not the person to report the man.
“The initial call came from someone else in the neighborhood who had spotted the man with the rifle in the open space,” the office’s Sgt. Marta Bugarin said in a statement. “Once deputies arrived and began searching the area, our dispatchers received calls from multiple people on multiple streets who provided information about the man with the rifle.”
Bugarin said the report that the culprit was really a teen with an airgun shooting at squirrels was true.
The Who’s the Boss? actress explained her perspective on what happened Tuesday on Twitter. She was already dealing with accusations, because she’s a supporter of the movement to defund police.
[quote] @Alyssa_Milano Apparently, rightwing media & trolls have decided that they should target me because my neighbor called the police after seeing a person dressed in black holding a rifle behind my home where I live with my young children and husband. Here is my statement and what really happened.
“On Sunday morning as we were all getting ready to watch the Giants game, a neighbor spotted ‘a man dressed all in black, walking in the woods between our properties with a gun.’ As that is a rare sight in our parts, the neighbor was understandably alarmed and she called the police,” Milano said. “We then received a call alerting us to the potential situation and that officers had been dispatched. My husband subsequently called 911 to check on when police would be arriving. When he was on the line, they arrived.”
Milano noted that the responding officers were “amazing” and made her family feel “safe and secure” until they figured out what was going on.
“I would like to thank the brave men and women of the Ventura County Sheriffs [sic] as well as all the other officers who came to protect and serve our neighborhood,” she said. “These are exactly the type of situations that police officers are trained for and responding to, and we will always support police having the resources they need for appropriate policing actions. We’d love to see equally trained non-police professionals respond to addiction and mental health crises and non-violent events so that these brave officers can do the jobs they are so good at handling, as they demonstrated this weekend.”
The actresses-turned-activists have publicly clashed over the years, after having played sisters on the Aaron Spelling show about sister witches from 2001 to 2006. Just last month, they had a back and forth over politics and what happened on the set of their show, among other things.
The show actually premiered in 1998 with Shannen Doherty as the co-star of Milano and Holly Marie Combs. McGowan joined the cast at the beginning of Season 4 and stayed with it until it concluded in May 2006.
Since then, both women have been increasingly vocal about political issues, such as the #MeToo movement. One of Milano’s next projects is Surge, a documentary about the record number of women who ran for Congress in 2018.
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