Men of the Year: How Ronan Farrow Creates a Safe Space (from GQ)
Spearheading reporting that catalyzed the #MeToo movement, he won a Pulitzer Prize this year and something more: a reputation as the most fearsome investigative journalist in America.
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.
Continue Reading Article: https://www.gq.com/story/ronan-farrow-creates-safe-space
= new reply since forum marked as read
and hopefully, just getting started. Just got a PhD this past week too!
