What does Ronan Farrow want next?
Ronan Farrow is currently the most wonderful wunderkind in the United States, at least on the Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Former news chat show host for the MSNBC network, Rhodes Scholar and former foreign service officer, recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for exposés on nasty sexual misconduct which brought down both Harvey Weinstein and the attorney general of New York, author of a new book of foreign policy deep thoughts and gossip. And all at age thirty and half! Not only does Farrow embody the anti-Trump zeitgeist right now, he has a freehold on the future, whether inside the next Democratic administration or in broadcast media.
His ma is Mia Farrow; his paternity, complicated. Legally, dad is Woody Allen but his mother suggested five years ago that his biological papa might in fact be her ex-husband Frank Sinatra. In the protracted tabloid mess of Allen running off and marrying his adopted daughter, Ronan’s sister Soon-Yi Previn, and Mia Farrow’s accusations that Allen molested their stepdaughter, Dylan Farrow, Ronan is, unsurprisingly, estranged from his dad.
Before all that, Ronan was raised in Mia Farrow’s household with eleven siblings, eight of them adopted from overseas. A frequent travelling companion for his mother on her jet-set humanitarianism as a UNICEF Good Will Ambassador, Ronan developed a global sense of responsibility for the world’s problems.
After graduating from Bard College at the astonishing age of 15, he worked for UNICEF then took a degree at to Yale Law School, an institution which is something like the Vatican for the Democratic Party. (Bill and Hillary are grads.) After working as a foreign service officer–more about which in a minute– he started but did not finish a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, then went on to host his own daytime news show at the Democratic-oriented MSNBC network.
Although Farrow was seemingly incubated to serve the Democratic Party, he has been impressively nonpartisan with his investigative reporting. In fact both his big exposés have revealed sexual misconduct by men who were major Democrats.
The Weinstein allegations disgusted everyone but surprised few; the producer’s conduct was widely whispered about and well-known in Hollywood. The real challenge for Farrow (and for the New York Times team that he was racing against for the scoop) was to find enough women to go on record publicly and credibly and then to withstand the pressure coming from Weinstein’s massed phalanxes of attorneys.
Much more surprising were the allegations against liberal feminist Eric Schneiderman, who resigned his elected position as New York State Attorney General just hours after Farrow’s scoop of abusive behavior to women, co-authored by Jane Mayer, hit the New Yorker website. (And I would admire Farrow’s scoops even if one of Schneiderman’s two named accusers were not an old friend of mine.)
Unsurprisingly, the #MeToo moment has been more disruptive in the Democratic Party and its constituencies than among Republicans. For instance Al Franken, the comedian who became a Democratic Senator of his native Minnesota, resigned quickly after various alleged sex-pest misdemeanors came........





















Toi Staff
Sabine Sterk
Gideon Levy
Penny S. Tee
Mark Travers Ph.d
John Nosta
Daniel Orenstein