Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow

From Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow in his new book, Too Famous:

For NBC, this—Farrow as crusading investigator—was a confusing development on a number of fronts. First, NBC had fired him. And yet here he was proposing a major investigative effort—an odd bit of not getting the we-don’t-really-think-much-of-you message. And, at best, he was a mere rookie reporter, with scant journalism background and little support in the organization—and he wants to do what?

And then there’s the Allen thing. Certainly, in conventional reporting terms, you’d naturally question the appearance of bias here. This person whose life story was bound up in one of the most controversial charges of sex abuse of all time was now asking—demanding—to represent the network in a dicey sex abuse exposé. (In Catch and Kill he dismisses even the suggestion that there might be legitimate concerns about bias as preposterous.) And there was yet another, sotto voce, aspect of this. Many in the news division didn’t believe the Farrow family’s Allen story. This had become something of a generational divide. Younger people seemed to blindly accept the Farrow version, while older people—and these were older media people running NBC News—were skeptical. Some, in fact, believed the story to be flatly false and that it only achieved younger generation credibility in a Trumpian way, with the baldness and magnitude and repetition of the Farrow family claims.

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What if none of the accusations against Woody Allen are true? Allen, after nearly thirty years, continues to deny every meaningful detail of the claims, with no one else coming forward to support them, and with the Farrow children divided over their veracity. But not only that, what if Ronan Farrow has pursued the vendetta against his father knowing it was a likely fake? The account by Ronan’s brother Moses (starkly refuting almost every one of his mother’s central claims about the alleged molestation), who was fourteen at the time of his mother’s accusations against Allen and present at the time of the alleged incident—Ronan was five— certainly suggests you would need to be willfully blind not to have major doubts.

Read more here:

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/michael-wolff-roasts-ronan-farrow-and-defends-woody-allen-in-new-book-too-famous/