by Ronan Farrow
CHAPTER 4:
BUTTON
Matt Lauer sat with his legs crossed just so: right knee over left, with a slight lean forward, allowing his right hand to grip the top of the same shin. Even in casual conversation, he looked as if he might effortlessly throw to a commercial break. When I tried to emulate Lauer’s relaxed-yet-composed seating position on air, I just looked like someone new to yoga.
It was December 2016. We were in Lauer’s office on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He sat behind his glass-topped desk. I was on the couch opposite. On shelves and credenzas, Emmys loomed. Lauer had worked his way up from local television in West Virginia to his current position as one of the most prominent and popular figures in network television. NBC paid him in excess of $20 million a year and ferried him by helicopter to and from his house in the Hamptons.
“It’s really good stuff,” Lauer was saying, of the most recent story in my investigative series. He had his hair buzzed close, which suited him, and tufty salt-and-pepper facial hair, which suited him less. “That leaking nuclear plant, where was it—”
“Washington State,” I said.
“Washington State. That’s right. And that government guy sweating bullets.” He shook his head, chuckled.
The story was about the Hanford nuclear facility, where the United States government had buried several Olympic swimming pools’ worth of nuclear waste left over from the Manhattan Project. Workers were getting sprayed with that waste with alarming frequency.
“That’s what we need more of on the show,” he said. We’d talked a lot about his belief in serious investigative reporting. “Plays well on set. And it rates,” he continued. “What have you got coming up?”
I glanced at the sheaf of papers I’d brought with me. “There’s one on Dow and Shell seeding California farmlands with toxic chemicals.” Lauer nodded appreciatively, sliding on horn-rimmed glasses and turning to his monitor. Emails scrolled by, reflected in the lenses. “There’s a series on addiction, one on truck safety reforms being blocked by lobbyists,” I continued. “And one about sexual harassment in Hollywood.”
His eyes snapped back to me. I wasn’t sure which story had caught his attention.
“It’s for a series about undercovered stories in Hollywood,” I said. “Pedophilia, racism, harassment…”
Lauer was wearing a neatly tailored suit with a gray windowpane motif and a striped navy tie. He smoothed it down and shifted his attention back to me. “They sound terrific.” He was eyeing me appraisingly. “Where do you see yourself in a few years?” he asked.
It had been nearly two years since MSNBC euthanized my cable program. “Ronan Farrow Goes from Anchor’s Desk to Cubicle,” a recent Page Six headline had offered. Turns out, my desk was in the background shot of MSNBC’s daytime news coverage. There I was, typing behind Tamron Hall and on the phone behind Ali Velshi. I was proud of the work I was doing for Today. But I was struggling to find a niche. I considered everything, even radio. That fall, I met with Sirius XM Satellite Radio. Melissa Lonner, a vice president there, had departed Today a few years earlier. Trying to sound bullish, I told her that I figured Today would be a better platform for investigative reporting than cable anyway. “Yes,” Lonner said, with a tight smile. “I loved it there.” But the truth was, my future felt uncertain, and it meant a lot to me that Lauer was giving me this time.
I thought about his question about the future and said, “I’d like to get back to anchoring at some point.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “That’s what you think you want.” I opened my mouth. He cut me off. “You’re searching for something.” He slid his glasses off, inspected them. “Maybe you’ll find it. But you’re going to have to figure out yourself. What you really care about.” He smiled. “You excited for next week?”
I was scheduled to fill in when he and the other anchors departed for the Christmas holiday.
“I am!” I said.
“Remember, you’re the new guy on set. Interaction is everything. Write your Orange Room tags with bait for conversation.” The Orange Room was the part of Today where we aired slideshows of Facebook posts, for some reason. “Personalize the scripts. If it were me, you’d mention my kids. You get the idea.” I scribbled a few notes, thanked him, and began to leave.
As I reached the door, he said wryly, “Don’t let us down. I’ll be watching.”
“You want this closed?” I asked.
“I’ve got it,” he said. He pushed a button on his desk. The door swung shut.
Not long after, I sent a copy of The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults to Lauer’s house in the Hamptons. On air, I followed his advice in earnest. I stood in the Today show plaza and spread holiday cheer, breath clouding in front of me. I sat on the semicircular couch in Studio 1A with the other pinch hitters for intros and outros, and gripped my shin, and looked not much like Matt Lauer at all.
One morning, we closed out the show with a reel of outtakes and bloopers from the preceding year. We’d all seen the video: when we’d aired it once before, and then again at the show’s nondenominational holiday party. When the tape began to play and the studio lights dimmed, most of the team wandered off or checked their phones. There was just one senior Today employee who remained in front of the monitor, transfixed. She was one of the hardest-working people I’d encountered in television. She’d worked her way up from local news to her role that day.
“I don’t envy you,” I said. “Having to watch this over and over.”
“No,” she said, still fixed on the screen. “I love this. This was my dream job.” I was startled to see tears in her eyes.
A few weeks after my conversation with Matt Lauer, around the corner in the NBC News executive suite, I sat opposite the executive in charge of the Today show, Noah Oppenheim. That day, the views of Rockefeller Plaza from his corner office were obscured by fog and drizzle. I was flanked by McHugh and Jackie Levin, the senior producer overseeing our next investigative miniseries, the one I’d told Lauer about, on Hollywood. “So, what have you got?” asked Oppenheim, leaning back on a couch, and I prepared to give him an update.
Oppenheim, like Lauer, supported hard news. When he was tapped to run Today, he’d come to see me before he even had a desk, and told me to deal with only him, not the other executives at the show. He’d put me on the Today show more frequently and greenlit my increasingly ambitious investigations. When Ronan Farrow Daily became Ronan Farrow Rarely, it was Oppenheim who arranged to have me stay at the network and continue my Today show series. Oppenheim was in his late thirties, with affable, boyish features and body language that seemed forever in a slouch, waiting for you to lean in before he did. He had a quality I lacked and envied, which was this: he was insouciant, laid-back, cool. He was a doe-eyed stoner whose mellow seemed impossible to harsh. We’d laughed about his stories of getting high and ordering entire Thai delivery menus and we’d planned to spend a night in with edibles at some point.
Oppenheim was smart, with an Ivy League pedigree. Early in the 2000 presidential campaign, MSNBC personality Chris Matthews and his executive producer, Phil Griffin, who would go on to run that cable channel, encountered a snowstorm during a commute from New Hampshire back to New York and stopped off at Harvard. That night, Griffin and a colleague found Oppenheim, a senior who wrote for the Harvard Crimson, drunk in a corner. They ended up offering to put him on TV. “They stopped off at Harvard Square and started talking to some undergraduate girls at a bar,” Oppenheim later told a reporter. “They followed them to a late-night party at the newspaper building and one picked up a copy of the paper and read an article I’d written about the presidential race.”
That chance encounter with Oppenheim eventually led him from conservative punditry to producing on MSNBC, and then to a senior producer role on Today. But he always had wider ambitions. He co-authored a series of self-help books called The Intellectual Devotional (“Impress your frie
nds by explaining Plato’s Cave allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms,” read the jacket copy) and boasted that Steven Spielberg had given them out as holiday gifts, “so now I can die happy.” In 2008, he left the network and moved his family to Santa Monica to pursue a career in Hollywood. Referring to journalism, he said, “I had an amazing experience through my 20s doing that but had always loved the movie business, and movies, and drama.” He worked briefly for the media heiress Elisabeth Murdoch’s reality television empire, then transitioned to screenwriting. “I did that,” he said of reality TV, “then got antsy because it still wasn’t getting me to my real love: scripted drama.”
Oppenheim had enjoyed a charmed ascent in each of his careers. He sent his first screenplay, Jackie, a morose biopic about the days between Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, to a studio executive who had been a friend at Harvard. “Less than a week later, I find myself sitting with Steven Spielberg in his office on the Universal lot,” he later recalled. The movie, which featured a lot of dialogue-free long shots of the woman in question pacing around with tear-streaked mascara, had been embraced by critics and, I was finding, less so by the public. “What was that movie he did again?” McHugh had said as we walked over to the meeting.
“Jackie.”
“Oof.”
Oppenheim had also co-written an adaptation of the young adult postapocalyptic adventure The Maze Runner, which made money, and a sequel to the Divergent series, which did not.
The years between Oppenheim’s departure from Rockefeller Plaza and his return had been challenging for Today. The anchor Ann Curry, beloved by audiences and not beloved by Matt Lauer, had been fired. Ratings slipped behind the competition, the more caffeinated Good Morning America. The stakes for NBC were high: Today was worth half a billion dollars in advertising revenue a year. In 2015, NBC brought Oppenheim back to Today to perform a rescue operation.
In June 2016, I’d gotten a green light from Oppenheim on a series I had dubbed, in the exaggerated manner of morning television, The Dark Side of Hollywood?, but getting support on specific topics had presented some difficulty. The earliest pitch I sent to the brass focused on allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, including the ones ultimately reported in the Atlantic about director Bryan Singer, which he has long denied, as well as claims about pedophilia raised by the actor Corey Feldman. An interview with Feldman had been secured: Today’s head of booking, Matt Zimmerman, had cut a deal whereby the former child star would perform a song and stay on to answer my questions. But Zimmerman had later called to say Oppenheim considered the pedophilia angle “too dark,” and we’d scrapped the plan.
The stories I proposed as replacements presented their own obstacles. Levin, the senior producer, told McHugh and me that a story about celebrities performing for dictators, referencing Jennifer Lopez’s seven-figure gig for Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, totalitarian leader of Turkmenistan, was a nonstarter in light of the network’s relationship with Lopez. No one seemed to even want to acknowledge a story I proposed about racial discrimination in Hollywood. Oppenheim finally said, with a chuckle, “Look, I’m ‘woke’ or whatever, I just don’t think our viewers want to see Will Smith complain about how hard he has it.”
Network television is a commercial medium. Conversations about the palatability of stories are commonplace. You pick your battles, and none of these were battles worth picking. We’d set aside the Hollywood series for a few months, reviving it late in the year, with an eye toward airing it around Oscar season early the next year.
As we sat in Oppenheim’s office that January, we mulled more potential topics, including a pitch about plastic surgery. Then I returned to one of my proposals that seemed to have withstood the development conversations so far: a story about the Hollywood “casting couch”—performers being harassed or propositioned for transactional sex at work. “We’ve been making steady progress,” I said. I’d already begun talking to a few actresses who claimed to have stories.
“You should look at Rose McGowan, she tweeted something about a studio head,” Oppenheim said.
“I hadn’t seen that,” I replied. I pulled out my phone and loaded a Variety article. The actress’s tweets slid by under my thumb. “Maybe she’ll talk,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”
Oppenheim shrugged hopefully.
CHAPTER 5:
KANDAHAR
A few days later, Harvey Weinstein was in Los Angeles, meeting with operatives from Black Cube. The operatives reported that they had been making headway, encircling agreed-upon targets. Weinstein’s lawyers had quickly covered the last payment, for Phase 2A, but they had been sitting on an invoice for Phase 2B for more than a month. It took several tense exchanges before another payment was delivered and the next, more intense, riskier stage of the operation began.
Our reporting at NBC was growing more intense, too. Over the course of January, the Hollywood series took shape. I had begun to report out a story on rigged awards campaigns, along with one about sexist hiring practices behind the camera and another about Chinese influence on American blockbusters. (The adversaries in Red Dawn turned North Korean in postproduction; doctors in Beijing saved Iron Man while sipping Yili brand milk.)
The sexual harassment story was proving to be a booking challenge. One actress after another backed out, often after involving prominent publicists. “It’s just not a topic we want to talk about,” went the responses. But the calls were kicking up dust, and Harvey Weinstein’s name was coming up in our research again and again.
One producer, Dede Nickerson, arrived at 30 Rock for an interview about the China story. We sat in a bland conference room that you’ve seen on a hundred Datelines, beautified with a potted plant and colored lights. Afterward, as McHugh and the crew broke down our equipment and Nickerson strode off to the nearest elevator bank, I trailed after her.
“I meant to ask one more thing,” I said, catching up to her. “We’re doing a story about sexual harassment in the industry. You used to work for Harvey Weinstein, right?”
Nickerson’s smile slackened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”
We’d reached the elevators.
“Sure, okay. If there’s anyone you think I should talk to—”
“I have a flight to catch,” she said. As she got in the elevator, she paused and added, “Just… be careful.”
A few days later, I hunched over a desk in one of the glass cubes set aside for private calls on the margins of the newsroom, dialing Rose McGowan, whom I’d reached over Twitter. We’d met once before, in 2010, when I was working at the State Department. Pentagon officials had announced she was visiting and asked if I’d join them for lunch, like they were looking for a language specialist and figured I spoke fluent actress. McGowan had met the officials on a recent USO tour. In pictures, there she was, at Kandahar Air Field or in Kabul, in neon, low-cut tees and skinny jeans, long hair blowing in the wind. “I looked like a stylized bombshell,” she’d later recall. McGowan was a charismatic screen presence, exuding a quick wit and an acid sense of humor in a series of early performances—The Doom Generation, Jawbreaker, Scream—that made her an indie film darling. But in recent years the parts had been fewer and schlockier. When we met, her last lead appearance had been in Planet Terror, a B-movie homage directed by her then-boyfriend Robert Rodriguez, in which she played a stripper named Cherry Darling with a machine gun for a leg.
At that lunch in 2010, McGowan and I hit it off. She whispered quotes from the film Anchorman, and I served them back. She knew I’d grown up in a Hollywood family. She talked about acting—the fun roles, and the sexist or exploitative ones, which was most of them. She made it plain that she was tiring of the business and its oppressively narrow view of women. The next day, she emailed: “Whatever I can do in the future, I will make myself available. Please do not hesitate to ask.”
In 2017, McGowan picked up my call from the newsroom. Her counterculture streak wa
s still evident. She told me Roy Price, the head of Amazon’s nascent movie and television studio, had greenlit a surrealistic show she was creating about a cult. She forecast a battle over the patriarchal power structures in Hollywood and beyond. “Nobody’s covered what Hillary losing means to women,” she said. “The war against women is real. This is ground zero.” She talked, unflinchingly and far more specifically than in her tweets, about her allegation that Weinstein had raped her.
“Would you name him on camera?” I asked.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. She was working on a book, and weighing how much to reveal in its pages. But she was open to beginning the process of telling the story before then, too.
The media, McGowan said, had rejected her, and she had rejected the media.
“So why talk to me?” I asked.
“Because you’ve lived it,” she said. “I saw what you wrote.”
About a year earlier, the Hollywood Reporter had put out a laudatory profile of my father, Woody Allen, with only a glancing mention of the allegations of sexual abuse leveled against him by my sister Dylan. The magazine faced intense criticism for the piece, and Janice Min, the Hollywood Reporter’s editor, decided to face it directly, asking me to write about whether there was merit to the backlash.
The truth is, I’d spent most of my life avoiding my sister’s allegation—and not just publicly. I did not want to be defined by my parents, or by the worst years of my mother’s life, of my sister’s life, of my childhood. Mia Farrow is one of the great actors of her generation, and a wonderful mom who sacrificed greatly for her kids. And yet so much of her talent and reputation was consumed by the men in her life, and I took from that a desire to stand on my own, to be known best for my work, whatever it might be. That left what happened in my childhood home frozen in amber, in ancient tabloid coverage and permanent doubt—unresolved, unresolvable.