Ronan Farrow hit rock bottom on a September day in 2017. He’d spent the previous ten months reporting out sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and it seemed it had all led to nothing. He’d been all but fired by his bosses at NBC, who’d refused to run the story—and then refused to renew his contract—and he’d been forced to move out of his apartment because of threats to his personal safety. Worse, he’d found out that The New York Times’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were working on the Weinstein story, too, and he was in danger of being scooped. Sitting in the back of a cab, Farrow phoned his partner and had a teary conversation. “I was just sort of wailing, ‘I swung too wide! I gambled too much! And now no one’s even going to know that any of this happened!’ ” he recalls. “I didn’t know whether I was ever going to have a job in journalism again.”
Needless to say, Farrow remains gainfully employed. A month after his taxicab call, The New Yorker published his Weinstein exposé, helping give birth to the #MeToo movement and kick-starting a cultural reckoning. A few months after that, Farrow (along with Kantor and Twohey) won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. And the scoops kept on coming. This year his reporting on other powerful men behaving piggishly has helped lead to the downfalls of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and CBS CEO Les Moonves. Farrow’s ability to get people to tell him—and, through him, the world—about traumas they may never have confided to anyone is a rare talent. “One of the important principles I enter those conversations with is transparency,” he explains. “I say, ‘I’m a reporter here, and I want to break this story, but also, separately, here’s what I see you being up against, and here’s how I think we can navigate it in a way that’s really journalistically fair but also respects you.’ ”
It’s the third, or maybe even fourth, act for Farrow, who turns 31 this month. The son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, he graduated from Bard College at the age of 15 and, seven years later, from Yale Law School. He served in Barack Obama’s State Department, first as an aide to Richard Holbrooke, trying to untie the Gordian knot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then as an adviser to Hillary Clinton on global youth issues. In 2014, after leaving government and winning a Rhodes scholarship, Farrow launched his own show on MSNBC—allowing all of us to see one of the best minds of our generation destroyed by dayside cable. “Reading headlines in the middle of the day, watched by two people, one of them my mom,” Farrow says of the experience. It was perhaps his first brush with what might be considered failure.
After his MSNBC show was canceled, Farrow became an investigative reporter for NBC News and the Today show. It was in that role that he pitched a piece on sexual harassment in Hollywood, and before long he began receiving a number of leads on Weinstein. Until then, he’d enjoyed a cordial relationship with the studio head, having met him a few years earlier at a weekend confab that Charlie Rose hosted in Aspen. (“It’s even possible maybe Bill Clinton was there,” Farrow recalls, “a real Who’s Who on this issue.”) After that, Weinstein would send Farrow screeners. “I had kind of a friendly, positive impression from afar,” Farrow says. That impression of Weinstein changed dramatically once Farrow began reporting on him. And once he finished that reporting, our impression of Farrow changed as well.
Indeed, Farrow has become more than just an award-winning investigative reporter. To some, he is an avenging angel, a real-life superhero. “[D]o we women have a bat signal for Ronan Farrow[?]” one admirer recently asked on Twitter. (“Basically yes,” Farrow tweeted back, and gave out his New Yorker e-mail address.) Farrow’s travel is now watched, and the mere prospect of him doing a story can move markets. “There’s the very peculiar dynamic of doing sort of business-related or Wall Street reporting,” he complains, “and a tweet about a rumor of you doing a story on a company literally knocks half a billion dollars off the company’s stock value”—indeed, speculation around Farrow’s reporting caused a CBS stock plummet that was ultimately worth more than a billion dollars before the story even hit the web.
But it’s not the prospect of harming a major corporation’s bottom line that bothers Farrow. It’s the prospect of not doing right by his sources. “I keep my head down, and I do the work, and it’s pretty hard work,” Farrow says, “but harder for the sources I’m working with than it is for me. And anytime one of those sources feels that I’m a person that they can trust and come to if they have a significant story, and anytime someone knows that I will work carefully and meticulously to interrogate those claims but also create a space where they feel safe in coming forward with them, those are things I’m deeply grateful for. That’s what’s made this run of reporting possible.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2018/January 2019 issue with the title "Ronan Farrow."