Ronan Farrow Says Weinstein Investigation Made Him ‘Radioactive’ to People Like Hillary Clinton Who Are ‘Beholden to Powerful Interests’

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Journalist and prominent #MeToo investigator Ronan Farrow says that his relationship with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “cooled” after it became clear he was looking into sexual harassment and abuse accusations against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, a big-time Clinton donor.

“It’s remarkable how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centres of power or the sources of funding around them,” Farrow told the Financial Times, in an interview published on Friday.

FT Associate Editor, Life and Arts Horatia Harrod sat down for lunch with Farrow to discuss #MeToo and “the perils of taking on the powerful.” It is a remarkable look into the pressure felt by Farrow as he pursued men of power, abusing that power, who were working hard to stop him.

Harrod offers a succinct but gripping summary of Farrow’s experiences, told to her in a members only bar in London’s Soho. He felt he was being followed: he was, by an Israeli private intelligence firm. He went to a gun range, having taken advice to arm himself. His concern eventually became so great that he “deposited key recordings and transcripts of his interviews in a Bank of America vault,” writes Harrod. She describes the note atop the evidence pleading it be released in the event something happens to him.

The two discussed the implications of his work in exposing misconduct at NBC, and his exposing of the effort to bury stories by the network. She described his answer as “dispassionate” when talking about whether executives at the network should face consequences. It was just after that part of the interview that Clinton’s name came up.

“Things were more personal when it came to Hillary Clinton,” Harrod writes. “In 2011, when Clinton was secretary of state, she appointed Farrow as her special adviser for global youth issues; the pair worked together ‘for years’, he says. But when word got around that Farrow was looking into the Weinstein story, he felt that his relationship with the politician — a beneficiary of donations from the producer — started to cool.”

Harrod asked Farrow whether that was a “painful revelation”.

“It’s remarkable how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centres of power or the sources of funding around them,” Farrow answered. “Ultimately, there are a lot of people out there who operate in that way. They’re beholden to powerful interests and if you go up against those interests, you become radioactive very quickly.”

On Saturday, the Washington Examiner pointed out how this story recalls comments made by Farrow in 2018, in an interview for Good Morning America.

“Hillary Clinton had scheduled an interview while it was at the height of the Weinstein reporting and her folks got in touch and said, ‘We hear you’re working on a big story,'” Farrow told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. “[They] sounded very concerned and tried to cancel that interview.”

“Over the Weinstein stuff?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“Over the Weinstein stuff,” Farrow confirmed.

“Oh, I’m surprised at that,” added Stephanopoulos, who has donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

“It was surprising,” Farrow said.

Again in October of this year, Farrow discussed with Buzzfeed the Clinton reaction to the Weinstein story, which he outlines in his book Catch and Kill, and accused Clinton’s publicist, Nick Merrill, of pressuring him to drop the story.

Earlier this month, Farrow said on Bill Maher‘s Real Time that Juanita Broaddrick “credibly” accused Bill Clinton of rape, and that the allegation was “overdue for revisiting.”

In their 2018 write-up, the Washington Examiner closes by noting that “The Clinton camp has not issued a statement following Farrow’s ‘Good Morning America’ interview.”

In the Financial Times profile published on Friday, Harrod writes that “Clinton’s spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.”

The more things change…