Ronan Farrow is the young son of Hollywood (New York branch) who has sided with his mother Mia Farrow in publicly characterizing his father Woody Allen as a sexual predator (and worse) — while saying Allen should be ostracized like Bill Cosby after abuse allegations. Ronan Farrow is also the writer that The New Yorker, one of the world’s most famous and highly regarded magazines, has tapped to cover the breaking story of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of serial sexual abuse. So Farrow, a Rhodes Scholar who had a short-lived talk show on MSNBC, is now investigating a case of a rich, powerful man considered both Hollywood royalty and a serial sexual abuser. It’s a description Farrow would apply to both his father and Weinstein. And Farrow is doing it for the famous magazine where Woody Allen published much of his comic writing. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.
“Too few women were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories,” Farrow writes in a story he has been researching for at least ten months. (The Weinstein story was broken by the New York Times — Farrow says his accounts corroborate much of what’s in the Times account.) Farrow penned a harrowing look for the Hollywood Reporter last year at how the media gave Woody Allen a lifetime pass on his alleged rogue behavior. That article was subtitled “the danger of unasked questions.” That won’t be the case with the Harvey Weinstein investigation, either in the media or the courtroom.
