I am half an hour into lunch with Ronan Farrow, and we are yet to see a menu. Arriving first at the Union Club, a cosy members-only townhouse in the heart of London’s Soho, I alighted upon an impeccably discreet table in the tartan-carpeted bar. But tucked neatly behind an imposing pillar, we find ourselves untroubled by waiters. “We kind of have our own room here,” says Farrow, as we try to catch the eye of a passing member of staff. “We’re maybe too protected.”
Amid the rumpled, faintly bohemian clientele of the Union Club, the 31-year-old cuts a striking figure: perfectly coiffed, elegantly suited and still bearing a dusting of make-up from the morning’s television appearances. He has the aura of a Hollywood princeling — he is actually east coast entertainment royalty, the son of actor Mia Farrow and director Woody Allen — and looks less like a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist than a man playing one in a TV movie. Yet in recent years, Farrow has won a reputation as one of America’s most dogged reporters, relentless in the pursuit of powerful men alleged to have abused their positions.
The first to fall was Harvey Weinstein, in a story whose aftershocks are still being felt today. Farrow’s October 2017 New Yorker exposé, published five days after the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story, laid out multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault against the producer, supercharging the #MeToo movement. The following year, Farrow’s investigations for the New Yorker helped to topple Les Moonves, one-time chairman and chief executive of CBS, and Eric Schneiderman, former attorney-general of New York.