Ronan Farrow

Spearheading reporting that catalysed #MeToo, Ronan Farrow won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and something more: a reputation as the most fearsome investigative journalist in America

Journalist of the year

• ronan Farrow hIt rock bottom

on a September day in 2017. He’d spent the previous ten months reporting on 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.

He’d found out that a pair of New York Times reporters,

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 is gainfully employed. A month after that taxicab call, The New Yorker published his Weinstein exposé, helping give birth to the #MeToo movement. And the scoops kept on coming. This year his reporting 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 share truths 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.”’

As a result,

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 email address.)

It’s a weight he tries to carry gracefully – and gratefully: ‘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.’

I didn’t know whether I was ever going to have a job in journalism again