How Mia Farrow’s son ignited #MeToo
Catch And Kill Ronan Farrow Fleet €28 ★★★★★
Ronan Farrow was an up-and-coming reporter at US TV station NBC when, in late 2016, he told his boss he wanted to research a story about the Hollywood casting couch. Actresses were hinting at misdemeanours, but when Farrow followed up their allegations, they’d decline to talk.
But then Farrow called actress Rose McGowan, who’d recently tweeted that she’d been raped by a man people ‘adulated’. McGowan told Farrow her rapist was Harvey Weinstein, former head of Miramax, the studio responsible for such hit films as Shakespeare In Love, Pulp Fiction and Sex, Lies And Videotape ‘Would you name him on camera?’ Farrow asked. ‘I’ll think about it,’ McGowan replied.
From there began an extraordinary year, documented in Catch And Kill, during which Farrow persuaded woman after woman – though traumatised and terrified of repercussions – to document how Weinstein had raped, abused, intimidated and assaulted them.
Yet the more compelling and concrete Farrow’s evidence became, the more his originally encouraging bosses started warning him off, apparently under pressure from Weinstein’s team. Meanwhile,Farrowwasrepeatedly threatened and followed by private investigators. Friends urged him to buy a gun. Once, trying to throw his pursuers off the scent, he hid in
a church. ‘We’ve been watching you,’ said a ‘heavily accented’ voice in his ear. Luckily, it was just an elderly woman and her daughter
who were fans of his TV work.
This riveting and unremittingly shocking account alleges that corruption and collusion with
Weinstein was everywhere, from the media to Hillary Clinton, whose presidential campaign Weinstein backed.
Farrow stresses that he isn’t the hero of this story – that honour goes to Weinstein’s brave victims. Yet, as a journalist, he understands that he needs to explain his personal compulsion to vindicate them. The son of actress Mia Farrow and director Woody Allen, his family was torn apart after his younger sister Dylan alleged that Allen abused her when she was seven (Allen, who denies the
‘Unrelentingly pacy, Catch And Kill would, ironically, make a brilliant film’
allegations, eventually married their adopted sister).
Farrow’s investigation was finally published by The New Yorker, winning him a Pulitzer Prize. Weinstein (whom he never meets face to face but who, when Farrow at last calls to put the allegations to him, answers the phone with ‘mock excitement’, wheezing ‘Wow! What do I owe this occasion to?’) was charged. His trial begins in January.
Unrelentingly pacy, Catch And Kill would, ironically, make a brilliant film. But even now, in post-Weinstein Hollywood, it’s doubtful that will ever happen.