FACING FACTS
Ronan Farrow shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Ahead of his first Australian speaking appearances, Farrow discusses the power of investigative journalism with New Yorker editor David Remnick.
Ronan Farrow, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, discusses the power of investigative journalism with New Yorker editor David Remnick.
DAVID REMNICK: “Ronan, I’m so happy to say, you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for your reporting on the Harvey Weinstein story of sexual harassment and what became the MeToo movement. We [Farrow and the New Yorker] share this, because it’s an institutional award as well, with the New York Times, and I wonder if, when you started reporting this, did you have any sense of where it would all go?”
RONAN FARROW: “I think it was clear to all of us from the beginning how significant this was, what a deep vein of untold stories we were tapping into, and the breadth of this, that very rapidly it became apparent this was not just a story about Harvey Weinstein, or a story about Hollywood. This was about a set of systems used to silence survivors of sexual abuse.”
DR: “Why did it happen now? As, you know better than anybody, more than decade ago, Ken Auletta tried to write about Harvey Weinstein specifically, and he wrote a pretty tough piece, but we couldn’t get to the core of it, where women are concerned, because, quite frankly, sources weren’t ready to come forward. I’m sure many, many reporters tried to get at what they either knew or suspected was the case outside of Hollywood as well, on the factory floor. Why did this happen in 2017/2018?”
RF: “You’re absolutely right. Ken Auletta did wonderful work, David Carr did wonderful work. Janice Min, the long-time editor of the Hollywood Reporter, described this as a ‘white whale’ of journalism. People were circling this. I do think the landscape changed. Much as I would love to take credit for this, I think it was over-determined, in a way. [Bill] Cosby’s accusers coming forward. Honestly, my sister [Dylan Farrow] coming forward at a time when that message was not well received, with an allegation of abuse against a powerful guy. These were blows to the system.”
DR: “Now, it’s no secret that there’s a lot of discussion about the MeToo movement on a lot of levels, and individual cases. In politics, for example, what happened with Al Franken and the destiny he met is still pretty controversial.”
RF: “You know, people have been really pilloried for trying to talk about the fact that there are shades of grey in these allegations. And that there have been a number of different types of allegations, with different levels of severity.”
DR: “It’s understandable that they’re pilloried for it.”
RF: “I think that this is a set of truths that was buried for so long, that we’re just grappling with the initial wave of: ‘Okay, we’re telling the truth for the first time.’
And I actually think that our profession has been pretty good at self-regulating.
You look at something like the Aziz
Ansari blog post that went viral and very rapidly was dissected and determined to be something quite different from the
Harvey Weinstein allegations. I think people are pretty sophisticated and they are drawing those distinctions …”
“Over and over again, when I read about you, which is, since we work together, it’s an odd feeling …”
RF: “You’re so tired of reading about me, I know.”
DR: “But reading about you, [there’s this] notion … that the fact you were in a show-business family, that somehow gave you an advantage in terms of sources and sourcing. Is that true?”
RF: “I think when you call someone up and you say: ‘Hey, relive the worst experience of your life in clinical detail and re-traumatise yourself and take a huge risk talking to a reporter about it’, saying I’ve got family members who work in your industry is not a huge source of comfort. It was not something that entered into a lot of the conversations early on.”
DR: “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I would see you on the phone with sources and your capacity for empathy was remarkable, your patience and all the rest. And I get the sense that this comes to you in a way that’s, I would say, natural, but began early on with you, in political terms and in reporting terms. When you were a kid, I think you used to go on trips with your mother to places like Sudan, obviously not beach vacations, but places that had real political import.”
RF: “Yeah, no-one was on holiday in Sudan at the time that I was there. It started even earlier than that, in one sense, because I was raised in this family with all of these adopted siblings from every corner of the earth, with tremendous adversity in their backgrounds. Men and women who had been abused terribly and had lived without language or love in the most abject kind of poverty imaginable.”
DR: “And with disabilities of all kinds.”
RF: “Severe physical disabilities, psychological handicaps and conditions that last a lifetime.”
DR: “How many kids?”
RF: “I’m one of 14. And the end result of a family like that doesn’t look perfect. It’s not the nuclear family. Those problems don’t go away.” DR: “And it’s not a quiet family.”
RF: “It’s not a quiet family. But I’m so immensely proud of the fact we all banded together and we have each other, and we are truly a family. And the world’s problems, because of that, were at my doorstep from a very early point. And then from the earliest point at which I was looking at what to do professionally, I had inculcated in me my Mom’s Catholic schoolgirl altruism. And I was afforded wonderful opportunities, because she was doing advocacy, internationally, to watch that.” DR: “Where was she going? What was she doing?”
RF: “She was going to refugee camps across Africa. And doing really substantive work, you know, here’s the lack of access UNICEF has to a refugee camp in whatever African country, can I use my celebrity to broker greater access for them? I mean, more than just a photo op. I was pretty young, in my teens. My trajectory was odd, because, this is very annoying, I had this Doogie Howser thing of I started college at 11, and then I …”
DR: “Why did you start college at 11?”
RF: “Because I’m a nerd, David.”
DR: “You were a nerd, but were you in a hurry to get out of a noisy and complicated house, too?”
“People have been pilloried for trying to talk about the fact there are shades of grey in these allegations”
“No, I mean there was turmoil and trauma and pain in my childhood, but I don’t think that’s what I was outrunning. I think if there was an insecurity that fuelled that, it was having a chip on my shoulder about these immense, high-profile figures around me. And wanting desperately to make my own mark on some level. It was all very egodriven. But the commitment to public service was sincere and was a through-line right from that early point and, also, was the origin point of my print journalism. Because I started writing op-eds when I was in Sudan and a number of other African countries. And I would just submit them to the Wall Street Journal. And for a while I was doing a column a month for different papers.”
DR: “What did you think you were going to be and do? You mentioned that you went to college at 11. You were at law school by, how old?”
RF: “I got in at 15, 16, then I deferred for two years to do more UN work and to start working for Richard Holbrooke, my mentor of many years, this great diplomat.”
DR: “So, your new book – you have a new book out – called War on Peace, which is all about diplomacy, the failure of diplomacy, your experience with Richard Holbrooke, your experience with diplomats that you portray in almost tragic terms, as kind of the last of their breed. Tell me about how you started seeing that diplomatic world at its best and its worst.”
RF: “Because of the public service-minded background that we just talked about, I went off to Afghanistan to work for Holbrooke, who had then taken on this job as the President’s diplomat-in-chief trying to end that war. He had been famous for ending the war in Bosnia and desperately wanted to do it again. And he was an immensely complicated figure, massive ego, fights with everyone all the time, alienated everyone …”
DR: “Talk to me about getting hired by Richard Holbrooke. There’s a great scene in the book, I think there’s a shower involved.”
RF: “Everyone who dealt with him over the years had some kind of a bathroom story related to him. Hillary Clinton gleefully, for all the years after, recounted this story of him following her into a women’s room in Pakistan.”
DR: “We should say this was when Richard Holbrooke is running the Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio for Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, under Obama. He would excitedly continue policy briefings into bathrooms the world over, even women’s rooms … and you’re 20 at the time?”
RF: “Around 20. And I actually had been in a wheelchair for a while, and was just recovering. And he knew this, but he was …”
DR: “You’d had an infection from a trip to Africa.”
RF: “It was left untreated while I was doing a lot of that travelling, and I had many surgeries, and he knew that I was just off crutches. And yet he handed me all of his luggage and said: ‘We’re going to my place in Georgetown’, and I’m hobbling after him. And we get to his place. He’s asking me: ‘How would you overhaul assistance to Afghanistan? How would you negotiate with the Taliban?’ He had this sort of visionary quality where he believed: ‘If I bring in outside voices who are nonconformist and don’t have the government experience, I can shake things up.’ And he had tremendous confidence in good ideas. And so, it was a sincere exchange we were having and it continued … upstairs in his townhouse, and he goes into a bathroom, leaves the door ajar … pees, turns on the shower, is unbuttoning his shirt and pokes his head out and says: ‘Uh, I’m just gonna keep going with this.’
“And we’re then doing a job interview over the hiss of the shower. And I thought: ‘Wow, well, now I have my Richard Holbrooke bathroom story.’
“So this is one reason why I think I tell this whole story of this whole transformation of America’s place in the world. That we are increasingly a nation without negotiators, without peacemakers, that shoots first and asks questions later, or not at all. I tell it through the lens of these very colourful characters. And they really are the last standard-bearers of what they say is an endangered profession. And Holbrooke’s story is particularly instructive, because of the parallels of history you just talked about.”
DR: “One of the newsier aspects of this book is you had a very good interview with Rex Tillerson, late of the State Department under President Trump. And what’s amazing about it is that no-one has tried to slash the diplomatic budget or the emphasis on diplomacy or the foreign service more than the Trump administration. What’s the rationale there?”
RF: “Since the Clinton administration, to an extent, and especially since 9/11, we have been chipping away at diplomacy. It gives us clear lessons. When we do this, it is a disaster. We closed embassies, we closed agencies even, during the Clinton era, [those] that have responsibility for huge swaths of American foreign policy. What Trump has done is taken these failed trends and doubled down on them. He has turned a slow glide down into a nosedive.”
DR: “Toward what end? What’s the rationale? What does Rex Tillerson say to you to rationalise that?”
RF: “So, what’s interesting about this conversation with Rex Tillerson, which is one of his last and most candid interviews before his firing, is that he does a little bit of a mea culpa. He says that he was inexperienced and didn’t know he was supposed to advocate for his own institution’s budget. He also says, for the first time, that behind closed doors he pushed back and tried to fight the budget. He lays a lot of blame on the White House. He says that the State Department is empty and there are ambassadorships around the world unfilled because the White House.”
DR: “So what is the solution to all of this, if you don’t mind speculating? And what, in an ideal world and with a different President and a different mindset, has to happen for diplomacy to improve and for the value of diplomacy as such to be raised up in American government?”
RF: “A big chunk of the book is devoted to these purges of the State Department right now, that the flow of talent into the diplomatic profession is drying up. That embassies are empty everywhere. Offices are empty in the State Department. There is no-one at home to make peace or make deals. And everything is being run through the military. But it also talks about how easy it is to reverse course on this once you have leadership committed to large-scale diplomatic endeavour.” DR: “Right, thank you, and congratulations again on the Pulitzer Prize.” RF: “Thank you, David.”
To watch this conversation, part of the New Yorker Interview video series, go to video.newyorker.com/series/the-new-yorker-interview.
Ronan Farrow will speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 30, and the Antidote Festival at the Sydney Opera House on September 1.
“America is increasingly a nation without negotiators, that shoots first and asks questions later, or not at all”