Rose McGowan doubts that Harvey Weinstein has spent a day in prison.

The 52-year-old actress was a leading activist after sexual misconduct allegations first emerged against the disgraced movie mogul in 2017 but suspects that Weinstein - who is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault and is facing further jail time after being convicted in a New York retrial last year - might not be imprisoned in New York City.

Speaking on Paul C Brunson's We Need To Talk podcast, Rose said: "I would love to see a picture of him in prison. I suspect he's been in a mansion in Connecticut. That's my theory.

"I don't know if he's ever spent a day in prison. Hollywood, baby. I don't know, maybe."

Rose accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 and thinks that the ex-Hollywood mogul was a "thug".

The Jawbreaker star said: "I think he was a thug. Not the Mafia boss of the cool kind with the suit, like Marlon Brando, Godfather type, but more like a street way."

McGowan also likened the film industry's "protection" of Weinstein to her own upbringing in the Children of God cult.

She explained: "They calculated that he was thanked more times than God at the Oscars. Harvey Weinstein was their god. This was far worse than the cult I grew up in."

Rose has lived in Mexico since leaving Hollywood during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 but has expressed hope of returning to acting in the future.

The Scream star said: "I would love to still have some kind of career to be able to do something in the arts and something creative again."

Rose explained last year that she had moved to Mexico because she was looking for "silence" away from Hollywood.

Speaking as part of a panel at 90s Con in Connecticut, she said: "My father lived in Mexico for 35 years and mi gusta Mexico. Te quiero much, mi amores. It is an incredible country. It is so wildly geographically diverse, culturally diverse and just very, very special. There's so much joy.

"My favourite word in Spanish is alegria, which means joy, and there's so much of that there and colour and passion and fun and different ... just different. And you know I had to talk for a lot of years, kind of more than normal people might.

"At one point, you know, as Paige was a social worker and I was raised in a commune growing up in Italy to be kind of a volunteer, and I kind of thought, 'Well, I can also do this in real life. Away from this.'

"There's a point where I just got really talked out. I just wanted to listen. I wanted silence, and I wanted to listen more than I wanted to talk."