“IT’S GOING TO BE STAGGERING, THE AMOUNT OF NAMES”: AS THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN CASE GROWS MORE GROTESQUE, MANHATTAN AND DC BRACE FOR IMPACT
The disgraced financier “collected people,” said a source. Could some of them be implicated in his crimes? Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz (“He’s a bad person”) and David Boies (“He’s a liar”) are already at war over the case.
The Jeffrey Epstein case is an asteroid poised to strike the elite world in which he moved. No one can yet say precisely how large it is. But as the number of women who’ve accused the financier (at least, that’s what he claimed to be) of sexual assault grows to grotesque levels—there are said to be more than 50 women who are potential victims—a wave of panic is rippling through Manhattan, DC, and Palm Beach, as Epstein’s former friends and associates rush to distance themselves, while gossiping about who might be ensnared. Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, architect of the original 2007 non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein off with a wrist slap, has already been forced to resign.
The questions about Epstein are metastasizing much faster than they can be answered: Who knew what about Epstein’s alleged abuse? How, and from whom, did Epstein get his supposed $500 million fortune? Why did Acosta grant Epstein an outrageously lenient non-prosecution agreement? (And what does it mean that Acosta was reportedly told Epstein “belonged to intelligence”?) But among the most pressing queries is which other famous people might be exposed for committing sex crimes. “There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Courtney Wild, one of the Epstein accusers who gave emotional testimony at Epstein’s bail hearing. “In due time the names are going to start coming out.” (Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to a request for comment.)
Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel's ruling. The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. “Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.”
Epstein remained a fixture in elite circles even after he was a registered sex offender. A few years ago, for example, he was a guest at a dinner in Palo Alto hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden. At the dinner, Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg.(“Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,” Zuckerberg spokesman Ben LaBolt told me. “Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”)
In an email, Elon Musk responded: “I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so, Epstein is obviously a creep and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine. Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah [Riley], as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing. We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.” A Musk spokesperson also emailed: “Elon never introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg and does not know either person well enough to do so. They simply happened to be guests at a neuroscience dinner organized by Reid Hoffman.”
One source who’s done business with Epstein told me that Epstein’s 21,000-square-foot townhouse on East 71st Street welcomed a steady stream of the Davos crowd in the past decade. The source said Bill Gates, Larry Summers, and Steve Bannon visited the house, which has been called one of the largest private residences in Manhattan. “Jeffrey collected people. That’s what he did,” the source said. Gates and Summers did not respond to requests for comment.
Thus far, the name most publicly associated with Epstein’s alleged crimes is famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who’s been waging a public battle with David Boies for years. In April, Boies’s client Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation after Dershowitz called her a liar (a strategy similar to that of seven of Bill Cosby’s accusers). In the days since the FBI arrested Epstein at Teterboro Airport a week and a half ago, Dershowitz has been going on television and dialing up friends and reporters to profess his innocence and label Giuffre and Boies liars. “I want everything to come out! I’m not afraid of anything because I did nothing wrong,” Dershowitz told me on the afternoon of July 15.
He called me a minute after I had emailed him for comment. He said he’d been friends with Epstein since 1996, when they were introduced at a party on Martha’s Vineyard by Lynn Forester de Rothschild. “She begged me to meet him. She told me, ‘here’s this smart academic.’” A few days later, Epstein invited Dershowitz to Les Wexner’s 59th birthday party at Wexner’s mansion in New Albany, Ohio. “It’s a tradition that Jeff invited the smartest person he met that year. He told them I was the smartest.” They remained close for years. Dershowitz strenuously denied ever participating in Epstein’s underage sex ring and said he’d only been in Epstein’s presence with his wife. “I got one massage!” he told me. “It was from a 50-year-old Russian woman named Olga. And I kept my shorts on. I didn’t even like it. I’m not a massage guy.”
Dershowitz said he secretly (and legally) tape-recorded settlement conversations with Boies and that the phone calls capture Boies admitting that Giuffre’s allegations aren’t true. “Boies is a bad person,” he told me.
“I never said that,” Boies responded when I asked about Dershowitz’s version of the phone calls. “What Alan does is he plays a second or two out of context; he never lets anybody listen to the whole thing.” Boies also dismissed Dershowitz’s claim that he never met Giuffre at Epstein’s house. According to Boies, Epstein’s former employees said in sworn depositions that they saw Dershowitz at the house multiple times without his wife. “This Olga woman doesn’t exist. Epstein’s barely kept women around who were over 25. It’s a figment of Alan’s imagination,” Boies said.
On Wall Street, Epstein is a subject of mystery—and fear. “I knew Jeff. He came across as very smart, very sophisticated,” one hedge fund manager told me. “He always had a good read on people. But manipulative people are good at that.” Another person who’s been in meetings with Epstein told me: “He’s very clever.”
How Epstein obtained his fortune is a matter of feverish speculation. His claim to a billionaire-only client list now seems laughable to the bankers I spoke with. One Wall Street source with direct knowledge of Epstein’s business said one source of Epstein’s income was providing “tax advice and estate planning” to rich clients, like Apollo Global Management founder Leon Black, presumably because Epstein had experience with offshore funds after basing his office in the Virgin Islands. In 2015 Black made a $10 million donation to Epstein’s foundation. (Black declined to comment.)
In the absence of much other information, the reigning theory on Wall Street currently is that Epstein’s activities with women and girls were central to the building of his fortune, and his relations with some of his investors essentially amounted to blackmail.
Similarly, DC is on edge. “Epstein bragged about his contacts in Washington,” Boies said. Reporters are likely to dig into why the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Epstein and kept the deal secret from his victims. One theory circulating among prominent Republicans is that Epstein was a Mossad agent. Another is that the George W. Bush White House directed Acosta not to prosecute Epstein to protect Prince Andrew on behalf of the British government, then the U.S.’s closest ally in the Iraq war. “The royal family did everything they could to try and discredit the Prince Andrew stuff,” Boies told me. “When we tried to follow up with anything, we were stonewalled. We wanted to interview him, they were unwilling to do anything.” (Prince Andrew could not be reached for comment).
Of course, the two Epstein friends that people are most curious about are Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, both of whom have denied anything untoward. During the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton’s campaign consulted Bill’s post–White House Secret Service logs because they were worried Trump would bring up Bill’s close association with Epstein and wanted to get ahead of the story, a source told me.
For those in Epstein’s orbit, the stakes of exposure are bound to get higher as more and more women come forward. Every day seems to bring new horrors about Epstein’s alleged depravity. At a press conference on Tuesday, Courtney Wild’s lawyer Brad Edwards said that after interviewing dozens of Epstein’s accusers, it appeared Epstein spent almost all of his time abusing underage girls. “It was his full-time job,” Edwards said. “We have not found anyone who has provided information about a legitimate business he was engaged [in].”
This article has been updated to include a comment from Elon Musk, and to clarify Epstein's relationship to Leon Black.
Trump’s Family Fortune Originated in a Canadian Gold-Rush Brothel
Michael Prochazka of Parks Canada, holds a photograph of Front Street in Bennett, British Columbia from 1900. The town is where Donald Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Trump, opened the Arctic Hotel.
Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump ran a restaurant, bar, and brothel in British Columbia.
Buried in a ghost town in Canada’s subarctic are the roots of the family fortune that paved Donald Trump’s path to prominence.
Only shards of glass bottles remain on the lake shore in Bennett, British Columbia—remnants perhaps of the lively establishment operated by Trump’s grandfather that was known for good food, booze and ready women. A church sits further up the slope, its lonely spire peeking out from a thicket of pines.
Friedrich Trump, circa 1918.
Source: Wikipedia
Bennett was once a thriving transit point for prospectors in the Klondike gold rush at the turn of the 20th century, and Friedrich Trump made a killing running a restaurant and bar. The nest egg he generated in just two years grew into the fortune that has supported his grandson’s bid for the U.S. presidency.
“Who else can say that someone running for president of the United States of America owes his fortune to your hometown?,” says Scott Etches, 55, a shop owner hawking Trump t-shirts in Whitehorse, Yukon, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Bennett. “It doesn’t matter whether you support or oppose Trump. It’s actually a great history.”
More than a century after Trump’s grandfather left the Yukon, Canadian developers and entrepreneurs are torn over whether to exploit the connection to one of the most recognized surnames on the planet. A luxury wilderness resort is planned for Bennett, complete with a lodge that would look just like Trump’s watering hole.
“There’s so much history, so many stories around here—Trump is just one of them,” says Nelson Lepine, who runs the development arm of an indigenous group leading the project.
The Trump family’s gold-rush story began when Fred, as he was known, left Germany at the age of 16 with little more than a suitcase. He headed to New York to work as a barber before venturing west in search of riches. Following stints in Seattle and now-defunct Monte Cristo, the gold fever carried him to Bennett, where he and partner Ernest Levin built the Arctic Restaurant, which touted itself as the best-equipped in town.
It was open around the clock with “private boxes for ladies and parties,” according to an advertisement in the Dec. 9, 1899 edition of the Bennett Sun newspaper. The boxes typically included a bed and scale for weighing gold dust used to pay for “services,” according to a three-generational biography by Gwenda Blair, who traced the origins of the Trump family’s wealth. Of course, in the rough-and-tumble frontier towns of that era, the Arctic’s business model built on food, booze and sex was common.
The new central guest lodge that will open to the public in Bennett.
Photographer: Ben Nelms/Bloomberg
The Arctic sat a stone’s throw from Bennett Lake in the heart of the township, amid a row of similar establishments and a sea of white canvas tents set up by prospectors. It was constructed of milled lumber and stocked fresh oysters, extravagant luxuries in a place where supplies were brought over arduous overland routes.
“I would advise respectable women travelling alone, or with an escort, to be careful in their selection of hotels at Bennett,” according to a letter penned by “The Pirate” in the Yukon Sun on April 17, 1900. For single men, the Arctic offered excellent accommodations but women should avoid it “as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”
Trump quickly saw where the real profits lay amid the gold-rush frenzy. An estimated 100,000 prospectors set out for the Klondike, of which only a third actually made it, and a mere 4 percent ever struck gold. Given those odds, Trump’s willingness to lay down his pick was “a shrewd move," according to Blair. “He was mining the miners.”
Bennett was a key hub for prospectors, who trudged from Alaska across frozen mountains and floated rickety rafts down the treacherous rapids of the Yukon River to Dawson City in search of elusive gold. The town lost its allure with the construction of a railway link from Skagway, Alaska to Whitehorse, allowing miners to bypass Bennett.
In response, Trump dismantled the restaurant and its precious lumber and rebuilt it in Whitehorse. A photo in Blair’s book shows a mustachioed Fred Trump in a white apron. He’s standing at the bar near a wall of drapes behind which women, known as “sporting ladies,” entertained miners in privacy.
Trump was a rich man when he left Whitehorse in 1901 to return to his native Kallstadt, Germany, where he later deposited savings of 80,000 marks in the village treasury, Blair recounts. Unable to regain German citizenship, he returned to New York with his riches. That amount—equivalent in purchasing power to about half a million euros in 2014—ended up funding the Trump family’s first residential real estate investments in the New York area, later carried on by his son Fred and grandson Donald.
Trump, who claims in his memoir that his grandfather was Swedish, told the New York Times in August that Blair’s portrayal of Friedrich’s business was “totally false.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, didn’t reply to two voice mails and an e-mail requesting comment.
Clockwise from top left: A float plane in dock at Yukon River south of Whitehorse; St. Andrew's Church built in 1899 stands in the abandoned gold rush town of Bennett; Hiking the Chilkoot Trail in Bennett; Various liquor bottles and glass from the late 1800's lay on the ground in the abandoned gold rush town of Bennett.
Photographer: Ben Nelms/Bloomberg
The Yukon’s rolling hills, cerulean lakes and aurora displays have long been a magnet for intrepid travelers, canoeists and hunters on pricey expeditions. Capitalizing on its indigenous history and links to a business tycoon like Trump could forge a tourist mecca, according to a 2014 plan drafted by the economic development arm of a First Nation community, the Carcross Tagish Management Corp., along with the Parks Canada government agency.
Justin Ferbey, then-chief executive officer of the Carcross group who is now Yukon’s deputy minister of economic development, said he tried to get a resort proposal into Donald Trump’s hands. The plans called for a luxury wilderness camp in Bennett, including a replica of the Arctic Restaurant to serve as the central guest lodge.
Trump either didn’t bite or never saw it, though the project has proceeded without him. Four wooden platforms overlooking the lake are nearly complete and will be fitted with luxury tents housing antique furnishings, wrought-iron bed frames, and high-end mattresses. Guests, limited to eight at a time, will dine at a central guest lodge with a modern kitchen made of old-growth fir reclaimed from a Klondike mine. A four-day, all-inclusive package—including a float plane transfer—is tentatively priced at C$1,675 ($1,250) a person. A soft opening is planned for next summer with full operations by 2018.
A valley near the Chilkoot Trail south of Carcross, Yukon, Canada.
Photographer: Ben Nelms/Bloomberg
“They’ll be wined and dined; we’ll serve top-notch foods. But you’ll still be connected to nature—there’ll only be one piece of canvas between you and the bears,” says Lepine, CEO of Carcross Tagish. “It’s the kind of experience people are really seeking out.”
Lepine and Michael Prochazka, a product development officer at Parks Canada, aren’t as keen as their predecessors to play the Trump card. The central lodge with its arched facade, gabled roof, scrollwork and pine cladding bears a striking resemblance to photos of Trump’s eatery. Prochazka says it’s not a replica of the Arctic, more an archetype of designs common at the time.
The ‘Arctic Restaurant’ shop in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. The shop is in the same location that Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump owned and operated a hotel and restaurant under the same name.
Photographer: Ben Nelms/Bloomberg
Meanwhile in Whitehorse, Etches has a different take on the Trump connection potential. In a shopping mall on the site of the former transplanted restaurant, he’s rented a tiny storefront called “The Arctic.” A sign outside notes the birthplace of the Trump family fortune. Inside, he sells T-shirts, black and white prints, and posters like “The Arctic Under New Management. No Liquor, Whores or Gambling Until Further Notice.”
While Etches acknowledges that sales fall “a bit short” of covering his C$200 in monthly rent, he still believes the Trump story is a potential boon for the region.
“We could get every single American tourist on the Alaskan highway pulling over just to see where that fortune was made,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether they support or oppose Trump. They’d still come off the highway and spend money.”
01/29/2017 03:48 pm ETUpdated Aug 17, 2017 ON GALELLA VIA GETTY IMAGES Fred Trump and Donald Trump on May 10, 1985 at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City.
Donald Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan riot.
Most of the national media studiously avoided printing that simple declarative sentence since Donald Trump decided to run for president. Most of the country’s politicians have remained strangely silent on the topic.
Public commentators did not connect the dots even as President-elect Trump attacked the civil rights hero, John Lewis, when having a Klan sympathizer for a father would seem to be highly pertinent in explaining his behavior.
Yet the factual evidence seems strong. Trump’s father Fred was arrested in New York City in 1927, when a group of Klansmen got into a brawl with police officers during a Memorial Day parade in Queens. There is a document trail, and the names, dates, and addresses match up. The NewYorkTimes published a story about the riot and the seven men who were arrested; Fred Trump is mentioned by name. His address is given at 175-24 Devonshire Road, Jamaica, New York City, and the federal census of 1930 shows that Fred Trump resided at that address. The newspaper does not identify him as a Klan member, or clarify whether he was wearing a Klan robe—as were many of the demonstrators―but he did get arrested, and all seven men were represented by the same attorneys. Two days after the brawl, Fred Trump was discharged from custody, with no explanation that can be discovered from public records. The Times further reported that a police commissioner planned to investigate the Klan riot.
After the website Boing Boing reported the story in 2015, Donald Trump denied it, and he has not publicly discussed it since then.
The NewYorkDailyNews, the WashingtonPost, the NewYorkTimes and a few other news outlets mentioned the connection briefly in 2016, and then they dropped it. Throughout the campaign, most of the media maintained a deafening silence, as did most of the nation’s politicians in both parties. If Fred Trump was a full-fledged Klansman, no one seemed interested in pursuing the story. A diligent researcher might have at least tried to find the commissioner report in the city archives. Journalists and politicians displayed the most determined zeal in investigating every aspect of Hillary Clinton’s email in 2016, and 20 years ago they showed the same zeal in investigating the Clintons’ investment in Whitewater.
Yet the family history of the Republican Party’s nominee merited nothing close to that scrutiny. And this is the immediate family, the man’s own father, not some distant ancestor from another century, a father with the power to shape the boy’s most profound assumptions about the world. Moreover, Donald Trump has often expressed his admiration for his father. Thoughtful adults can hear the echoes of one hundred years ago in the president’s encouragement of violence at campaign rallies, his prejudices against minorities, and his use of violent language.
Historians know that the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866 by ex-Confederate officers, was created to intimidate black Southerners, especially those who wanted to vote, as well as the region’s ethnic and religious minorities. Since the 1860s, the Klan has spread all over the United States, with chapters in every region, and its targets have expanded to include immigrants, gays, and women who work outside the home. In the 1920s, the Klan grew dramatically in the cities of the North, often in response to the arrival of Catholics from Eastern and Central Europe. Accordingly, the Klansmen in Queens protested their presence in 1927 in New York City.
But in the public mind, the organization is still associated largely with the South. Perhaps that is one explanation for the silence on Fred Trump, Donald’s origins in the urban North. Maybe it is still too hard to face up to bigotry and prejudice anywhere outside the South.
We can easily imagine what would have happened if there had been the faintest rumor that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Al Gore had a Klan sympathizer in the family—page one stories and protracted coverage in the media, politicians holding forth, bristling with the assumption that the allegation was probably true. Carter, Clinton, and Gore would have been judged unfit for public service, and their careers would have ended long before they reached national office.
Maybe there are other explanations for the silence about Fred Trump, beginning with shame, a deep embarrassment that the Klan has lasted so long and spread throughout the country, including New York. Perhaps it was the hope that the son would turn away from the spectre of a man who had been arrested at a Klan riot. Maybe it was the well-meaning but naïve belief that Donald Trump could not win the election.
Now he inhabits the White House. Let us hope that the country’s media and political leadership recover their usual probing interest in the President’s background, his motives, and his veracity. The future of the Republic may depend on it.
By the time that he was five, Ronan had witnessed his parents’ epically bitter break-up, his father’s new relationship with his 22-year-old sister (Farrow’s adopted daughter) Soon-Yi (the cause of the vicious split), and the allegations that his father had sexually abused his seven-year-old adopted sister Dylan Farrow. A court case and custody battle ensued in the relentless glare of the world’s media.
These were, to say the least, formative experiences, but there were plenty more to come in Ronan’s childhood. First off, his mother adopted five more children after the split with Allen, bringing her brood to 14, some of them disabled or suffering from serious illness. One, named Tam, died of heart failure when Ronan was seven.
By the time he was 11 the young Farrow was at university studying for a degree, a double major in philosophy and biology. At 16 he was enrolled at the prestigious Yale law school. In the meantime he’d been travelling with his mother to places like Sudan, Liberia and Angola on humanitarian missions.
Allen made a living out of joking about his fears of the world beyond the urban sophistication of Manhattan and spent a lifetime in analysis discussing his neuroses. His son seems made of sterner stuff, but that was still a lot to process for a child. Yet, if anything, the 15 years that followed have been even more incident‑packed.
Next he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he began a philosophy doctorate. All along he was writing journalism for a variety of publications, and after Oxford he hosted his own TV show, Ronan Farrow Daily, on MSNBC and then an investigative section on NBC’s Today. It was while working on the NBC show that he began looking into rumours and allegations that the film producer Harvey Weinstein had sexually abused a number of women. When NBC showed its reluctance to take on Weinstein, Farrow took his story to the New Yorker, and the rest is history. In any case, for his considerable efforts Farrow and the New Yorker shared with the New York Times a Pulitzer prize, the highest award in American journalism.
And if all that’s not enough, Farrow has just published a hefty 400-page book called War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. It’s a sober and rather thoughtful account of his experience working for Holbrooke and how the creeping militarisation of US foreign policy has undermined and curtailed diplomatic initiatives with self-defeating results. That’s why he’s sitting before me in the Soho hotel, in a natty black suit and immaculately pressed shirt with sunless white skin and striking blue eyes – to talk about the book.
The day before I meet Farrow, the New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman had announced his resignation, after a piece by Farrow and Jane Mayer in the New Yorkerdocumented allegations that Schneiderman, a vocal critic of Weinstein and staunch defender of women’s rights, had himself assaulted several women. Just before that, another story by Farrow had presented evidence that the private intelligence agency Black Cube, which was employed by Weinstein to gather negative information on his accusers, had also been recruited to find damaging information on proponents of the Iran nuclear deal in the Obama administration. A day later President Trump announced that he was withdrawing US support for the deal.
Suddenly global news and Farrow’s preoccupations seem indistinguishable, as if international diplomacy and sexual abuse by powerful men were all part of a great interlocked conspiracy. Did it seem to him that his interests were converging into one enormous story?
With his mother Mia on a Unicef mission to Sudan in 2004. Photograph: Shehzad Noorani/UNICEF via Getty Images
“I was in a briefing with a number of reporters and a source recently,” he says. “And one of the journalists present said: It’s not stories plural, it’s all one big story. And I think there’s some truth to that. With respect to the reporting I’ve been doing specifically, you’re looking at the very same systems of power and the abuse of power and the suppression of stories that are employed by powerful men in Hollywood and powerful people in politics.”
The book is a compelling mixture of political analysis and personal anecdote written in a reflective, almost nostalgic tone that betrays none of the doubt and uncertainty or zeal and tunnel vision that are the common characteristics of youth. Instead his sympathetic but critical portraits of Holbrooke and Clinton seem the product of a mind that is old before its time. The prose is steeped in a kind of worked-at maturity, a moral seriousness of the sort that his father instinctively made fun of. If Allen was always the overgrown child, ridiculing the responsibilities of adulthood, then Farrow is the premature grownup, earnestly trying to make the world a better place.
In his book Farrow records an outburst from the flamboyant Holbrooke in which the veteran diplomat took his acolyte to task for his inflated sense of self. “I know you think you have destiny. That you’ll do great things,” Holbrooke told him. Had he ever thought of himself in those terms? “I think the point was he was really describing himself,” he says.
Yes, perhaps, but was he not also describing you? “I don’t particularly view myself as someone who must ascend to a particular status or place in history. I would be foolish to claim that I am not ambitious. I am someone who works around the clock. But it’s a very different kind of ambition to Richard Holbrooke’s. I always have a little voice on my shoulder from my childhood, and probably from my mother and the kind of family she built. It was very much rooted in altruism and I admire that tremendously and I would not have the strength to do it myself, but it did give me this sort of inherited sense of public service.”
He does indeed appear to be a workaholic. His private life is low-key, when he’s not hanging out with celebrities, though he is said to be in a relationship with former Obama speechwriter and popular liberal podcaster Jon Lovett. But, as he says, it’s public service that he prefers to focus on and one aspect of that is a warning, voiced in his book, that the world is going backwards because of diminishing US foreign influence.
To many people around the globe that diminishment can only be a good thing. But Farrow makes a strong case for the benefits of long-term strategic American diplomacy of the kind, he says, that is being crushed by the White House. To those who see any American influence, however benign, as a sign of imperialism, Farrow has a chastening message.
“There’s a lot of positive leadership in the world today,” he says, “but the problem is that we’re not witnessing the withdrawal of America from diplomatic leadership and the succession into that space of Angela Merkel. We are witnessing China nipping at the heels of the western powers and coming into its own in a lot of ways in diplomatic leadership but still very much evincing a retrograde set of attitudes on human rights.”
He talks about China’s leadership deserving close scrutiny, which is a much more restrained turn of phrase than the language he was using back in 2008, when he declared the Beijing Games “the genocide Olympics”, as a result of China’s malign role in Sudan. Now he notes how hard the Chinese are working, making investment in infrastructure in countries around the world where “the US doesn’t even have ambassadors any more”.
As an infant with, from left, sister Dylan, father Woody Allen and mother Mia Farrow. Photograph: Rex
He writes in his book of how Trump has accelerated this process, but also how it’s been a growing part of US politics under several administrations, including that of Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama. Farrow argues that Obama centralised power at the expense of diplomats in the state department, and talks about a “celebrity general” culture, with the military gaining too much influence on decision-making abroad, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But he also praises Obama for the Iran nuclear deal that Trump has just torn up, the thaw in relations with Cuba that Trump is threatening to reverse and the Paris climate change accords, which Trump has already committed to leave.
Although he’s too diplomatic to say it, Trump is the embodiment of everything that Farrow abhors. It seems at best paradoxical that a nation that has been thrown into self-analysis as a result of the Weinstein revelation could have voted for someone who revelled in the language of sexual harassment.
“I think if anything those two facts are closely related and quite consistent,” he says. “I think a lot of survivors of sexual violence and particularly women felt that the election of Donald Trump was a rebuke or a return to a time in which these sorts of stories were not heard or cared about. And I think the political backdrop absolutely informed the frustration of survivors who finally felt they couldn’t wait any longer to speak.”
It’s typical of the answers he gives during our interview: articulate, heartfelt and yet a little rehearsed. The effect is like listening to a series of right-thinking summaries – perfectly reasoned but a touch preachy.
But then Farrow has been at the frontline of a moral crusade that has not only inspired millions of women across the world but also features people – mostly women – who have suffered real and sometimes appalling abuse. That position comes with a certain responsibility and Farrow wears it with a solemn authority. For example, when I ask him if he is now being approached by many people with stories of abuse, he says: “I do field a fair amount of incoming leads and I’m profoundly grateful for that, and anyone reading this story, if you have an experience or a bit of knowledge that is of international newsworthiness, please do email me. My email is on my Twitter account.”
That “international newsworthiness” is not ironic. It’s the plane on which he operates, and he’s not about to pretend otherwise. I suggest that the history and nature of journalism means that the emphasis is on getting the story rather than offering ongoing support to traumatised sources. Can a journalist who often works 18-hour days and admits to never seeing friends really provide much by way of aftercare?
“The answer is I absolutely feel an ongoing obligation to every source that was brave enough to help expose injustice, and that obligation doesn’t end on the day that the story is published. I think if you ask any of the sources who have worked with me on these very difficult stories – and these relationships are not always easy because these stories have an explosive impact on their lives – they’ll tell you I am there for them to take the late-night calls and there to work with them if there is fallout, and my heart breaks for them when there’s a high cost of telling these stories. But mostly I’ve found that I’ve had the opportunity to celebrate them healing as a result of telling these stories.”
With his mother at a gala event in New York last month. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock
As Farrow rightly points out, the cases he has reported on involve allegations of serious crimes that should not be confused with the “grey area” of bad dates and misinterpreted signals. He doesn’t agree with some of the more vehement activists who insist that all women who say they have been raped or sexually abused should be automatically believed.
“My job is to interrogate as thoroughly and as sceptically as possible every allegation that is in a story I’m reporting and to, in an almost legalistic way, stress-test those claims. And I have very difficult conversations explaining to the very brave sources in those stories that the best armour that they can have as a source is my sceptical interrogation of their allegations.”
Farrow remains measured and dispassionately meticulous in his analysis as we discuss the various complications that surround issues of sexual abuse – the power and influence of the abuser, the vulnerability of the abused, the harsh legal process. He only begins to look a little flustered when the subject turns to his sister Dylan’s allegations of molestation at the hands of their father, Allen, which Farrow himself introduces into the conversation.
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'I wasn't brainwashed': Dylan Farrow gives first TV interview about Woody Allen claims - video
When listing the various antecedents, including the Bill Cosby case, that led up to the #MeToo moment, Farrow cited his sister, who “came forward with a very difficult allegation against a powerful man that she had maintained for years but felt the need to speak about again”. I couldn’t help but notice that the unnamed “powerful man” was Dylan’s own father, Woody Allen, although in this most complicated of families, even that fact is open to question, courtesy of a comment made by Mia Farrow in a 2013 Vanity Fair interview. She told the writer Maureen Orth that Ronan was “possibly” Frank Sinatra’s child.
Ever since, people have drawn attention to the resemblance between Ol’ Blue Eyes and Young Blue Eyes. It’s more apparent in photographs than in the flesh, where it’s obvious that the person Farrow most looks like is his mother. In any case Dylan’s allegations, which now date back 26 years, remain the subject of dispute. Allen has always denied them. There isn’t room here to cover all the details, but suffice to say that it centres on a visit Allen paid to Mia Farrow’s home in Bridgewater, Connecticut in August 1992.
Dylan said soon afterwards and continues to say that Allen assaulted her in an attic. The Connecticut state attorney investigated but did not press charges and the New York department of social services found “no credible evidence” to support the allegations. However when Allen sought to gain sole custody of Dylan, Ronan and their brother Moses, the judge censured Allen and he was denied visitation rights with Dylan. He was only allowed to see her under strict supervision.
In such circumstances, where there is no certainty over what took place (the court-appointed child sexual abuse expert at the custody case suggested it was likely that Mia Farrow coached her daughter – but the judge was critical of the expert’s report), I wondered what the responsibility was of society at large.
Since the Weinstein revelations, a number of actors, including Rebecca Hall, Colin Firth and Greta Gerwig, have announced that they would never work with Allen again. Is there a danger, I asked, that the presumption of innocence was being cast aside in a fever of (belated) righteous indignation?
“That’s absolutely not a fair characterisation of the facts,” snaps Farrow, suddenly flashing an inner steeliness. “There is an abundance of evidence that Woody Allen was engaged in a pattern with respect to underage women and that’s in the trove of documents the Washington Post uncovered; it’s in the civil proceedings that happened and the family court proceedings that happened in New York, where there was intense debate about the age of my other sister he was engaging in sexual relations with in our household. This was a serial fixator on underage girls. Now if your suggestion is that every single allegation worth reporting has to be a massive case of serial rape on the scale of Harvey Weinstein, I don’t agree with that premise.”
It’s relevant though because in the open letter from Dylan that was published online in the New York Times in 2014, in which she reasserted the original allegations against her father, she criticised the actors who stood by Allen and acted in his films. I restate the question, simply noting that there is as far as I’m aware no criminal case being mounted against Allen – so how should society treat him?
“I would say the individuals in that category are many. Harvey Weinstein is in exactly the same category. These are claims that have not been interrogated to the point of a final legal disposition.”
That’s true, but earlier he had told me that he was “talking to accusers of Harvey Weinstein right now who are being asked by law enforcement in various jurisdictions to be at the heart of criminal proceedings”.
Again, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Allen.
“Look, the jig is not up until we all lay down to die. There are going to be criminal repercussions for I think a number of men around whom there has been credible reporting on these kinds of allegations. And Woody Allen is in that category. I think people who ask the kinds of question you just asked very often haven’t read into the investigative reporting around it.
“If you look at Andy Thibault’s exhaustive reporting in Connecticut Magazineback in the day or Maureen Orth’s investigative reporting, it’s very clear that it is towards the end of the most heavily corroborated cases that have emerged publicly. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spoken out in support of my sister.
“I think in terms of society’s obligation to react to individuals who have not been convicted, like a Harvey Weinstein or a Woody Allen or for many years Bill Cosby, it’s absolutely correct to draw the distinction that you’re talking about a man who hasn’t been convicted in a court of law – until they have been. And I always note that distinction. The separate issue of whether people should boycott a person professionally is a personal decision. Clearly many people, including my sister, feel strongly that people shouldn’t work with these individuals. I’ve highlighted that survivors feel that way, and that it makes them feel invisible and marginalised when people validate individuals with a very serious cloud of suspicion over them, but I haven’t particularly called for a boycott of anyone.”
It’s a great speech, full of conviction and supporting argument. I can’t claim to know whether he’s right or wrong in his assessment of his father. What’s beyond doubt is that Allen acted in a profoundly creepy fashion in starting an affair with Farrow’s sister. It also, one can imagine, would have had a destabilising impact on a young boy working out his place in the world. As Farrow himself once noted: “He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression.”
With Richard Holbrooke (yellow jacket) and top brass in Kabul, 2010. Photograph: Morgan J O'Brien III
And Farrow, you sense, is a deeply moral person. He is also a deeply ambitious one. At the moment he’s setting the news agenda with a series of incendiary stories, and there’s talk of him getting his own investigative TV show. But I’m not sure that this young man who has already experienced so much will be content to restrict himself to journalism. If the opportunity arose, would he not prefer to have a big career in politics?
He’s ready, as ever, with a political answer. “I think quite aside from anything else,” he says, “I’ve made too many enemies through my journalism ever to run for political office in the United States.” In the post‑Trump world, I tell him, no one can say that. “That,” he concedes, laughing, “is possibly a fair point.”
“Thank you for your time,” he says, finishing the interview in the same way as he began it. My time? No, now is very definitely Ronan Farrow’s time.
War on Peace by Ronan Farrow is published by William Collins
•On 13 May 2018 this article was amended to remove the reference to intelligence agency Black Cube denying an allegation made by the New Yorker
