Ronan Farrow
Ronan Farrow (born December 19, 1987, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American journalist whose investigative reporting for The New Yorker helped expose allegations of sexual abuse and assault by film producer Harvey Weinstein. Farrow’s reporting gave impetus to the anti-abuse Me Too and Time’s Up movements and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
Farrow was the biological child of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. Raised in New York City by his mother, he was one of 14 children (including 10 who were adopted). At age 15, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Bard College. He entered Yale Law School the following year and received a law degree in 2009. In 2012 he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, and in 2018 he completed a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Oxford, where he attended Magdalen College.
Many of Farrow’s educational endeavours were concurrent with myriad other pursuits and accomplishments. By 2006 Farrow was serving as a UNICEF spokesperson for youth and traveling to conflict areas in Africa, including the Darfur region of Sudan. About this time, he also began appearing as a commentator on television news programs and publishing opinion pieces on humanitarian issues in the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times), and The Wall Street Journal. He spent two years in the U.S. Department of State as special adviser for humanitarian and NGO (non-governmental organization) affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Richard Holbrooke. In 2011 he was appointed special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for global youth issues and director of the State Department’s Global Youth Issues office, serving until 2012.
In an effort to attract younger viewers, MSNBC recruited Farrow for a weekday news program in 2013. The show, Ronan Farrow Daily, debuted in 2014, but it was canceled the following year due to low ratings. Farrow was moved to the network’s investigative team and began reporting on stories such as the U.S. opioid epidemic and sexual abuse on college campuses for a regular segment on NBC’s Today show.
In early 2017 Farrow began investigating abuse allegations against powerful film producer Harvey Weinstein. He published his findings in October 2017 in The New Yorker and soon after claimed that NBC had attempted to kill the story. Farrow’s reporting coincided with a similar investigation into Weinstein by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey at The New York Times. In 2018 the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded to both The New Yorker and The New York Times. Farrow’s exposé is credited with propelling the Me Too movement against sexual abuse as well as Hollywood’s Time’s Up movement against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.
Other exposés published by Farrow in The New Yorker include misconduct allegations against CBS executives and payments made by the National Enquirer’s parent company to suppress stories about Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. Farrow’s reporting has also earned the George Polk Award and the National Magazine Award.
Farrow’s family history frequently made the news, particularly allegations of abuse made by his sister Dylan Farrow against their father. In 2016 Farrow published a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter that expressed support for his sister and condemned the media’s “culture of impunity and silence” surrounding abuse allegations against powerful men in entertainment. Rumours also swirled around Farrow’s paternity, with some stories alleging that Mia Farrow’s former husband Frank Sinatra was his biological father. Many Farrow and Sinatra family members and friends disputed the claim.
Farrow published War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (2018), which draws on his State Department experience. The best-selling Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019) details his investigative work for NBC and The New Yorker on sexual abuse. A companion podcast to Catch and Kill debuted in 2019 and was nominated for a Peabody Award. In 2021 HBO launched a related documentary series with Farrow, “Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes.”