Ronan Farrow facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ronan Farrow
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Farrow in 2018
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Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow
December 19, 1987 New York City
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| Other names | Satchel Farrow Seamus Farrow |
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| Occupation | Journalist |
| Years active | 2001–present |
| Partner(s) | Jon Lovett (2011–2022) |
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Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow (born December 19, 1987) is an American journalist. The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. Farrow has worked for UNICEF and as a government advisor.
Contents
Early life and education
Farrow was born on December 19, 1987, in New York City to actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. He is their only biological child. His mother's family is Catholic and his father is Jewish. His given names honor National Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige and maternal grandmother, Irish-American actress Maureen O'Sullivan. Now known as Ronan, he was given the surname "Farrow" to avoid confusion. His siblings have the surnames Previn, from those born or adopted during his mother's marriage to composer Andre Previn, and Farrow, for children she adopted after she and Previn divorced.
As a child, Farrow skipped grades in school and took courses with the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. At age 11, he began his studies at Bard College at Simon's Rock, later transferring to Bard College for a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. He graduated at age 15, the youngest to do so at that institution.
He entered Yale Law School, from which he received a Juris Doctor in 2009. He later passed the New York State Bar examination. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, Farrow earned a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from the University of Oxford, where he was a student of Magdalen College. His dissertation was titled "Shadow armies: political representation and strategic reality in America’s proxy wars" and was supervised by Desmond King.
Career
Public service
From 2001 to 2009, Farrow served as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth, advocating for children and women caught up in the ongoing crisis in Sudan's Darfur region and assisting in fundraising and addressing United Nations affiliated groups in the United States. During this time, he also made joint trips to the Darfur region of Sudan with his mother, who is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He subsequently advocated for the protection of Darfuri refugees. Following his time in Sudan, Farrow was affiliated with the Genocide Intervention Network.
During his studies at Yale Law School, Farrow interned at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and in the office of the chief counsel at the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, focusing on international human rights law.
In 2009, Farrow joined the Obama administration, as Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was part of a team recruited by diplomat Richard Holbrooke, for whom Farrow had previously worked as a speechwriter. For the next two years, Farrow was responsible for "overseeing the U.S. Government's relationships with civil society and nongovernmental actors" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In 2011, Farrow was appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as her Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues and Director of the State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues. The office was created as a result of a multi-year task-force appointed by Clinton to review the United States' economic and social policies on youth. Farrow co-chaired the working group with senior United States Agency for International Development staff member David Barth beginning in 2010. Farrow's appointment and the creation of the office were announced by Clinton as part of a refocusing on youth following the Arab Spring revolutions. Farrow was responsible for U.S. youth policy and programming with an aim toward "empower[ing] young people as economic and civic actors." Farrow concluded his term as Special Adviser in 2012, with his policies and programs continuing under his successor.
Journalism
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After leaving government, Farrow began a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He studied toward a DPhil, researching the exploitation of the poor in developing countries, and submitted his thesis in October 2018.
He has written essays, op-eds, and other pieces for The Guardian, Foreign Policy magazine, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and other periodicals. In October 2013, Penguin Press acquired Farrow's book, Pandora's Box: How American Military Aid Creates America's Enemies, scheduling it for 2015 publication.
From February 2014 through February 2015, Farrow hosted Ronan Farrow Daily, a television news program that aired on MSNBC.
Farrow hosted the investigative segment "Undercover with Ronan Farrow" on NBC's Today. Launched in June 2015, the series was billed as providing Farrow's look at the stories "you don't see in the headlines every day", often featuring crowd-sourced story selection and covering topics from the labor rights of nail salon workers to mental healthcare issues.
In 2018 Farrow was included in Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World" list.
On July 3, 2021, The New Yorker published an investigative article by Farrow and journalist Jia Tolentino detailing the Britney Spears conservatorship dispute. The article described the events related to the establishment of the conservatorship, alleged that Britney Spears was subject to a variety of abuses under her father Jamie Spears's control, and included testimonies from various named sources close to Britney.
Film and television work
Farrow became involved in popular entertainment as well. He voiced minor characters in the English-language versions of two Japanese animated films, From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) and The Wind Rises (2013). He also guest starred as himself on the Netflix comedy series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Farrow appeared on the daytime talk show The View as a guest co-host on December 3, 2019. Farrow starred as a Guest Judge on Ru Paul's Drag Race All Stars 7 All Winners in episode 10: "The Kennedy Davenport Center Honors Hall of Shade", airing on July 15, 2022. He sat alongside Ru Paul, Michelle Visage, and Ross Mathews. In 2024, he was a guest judge on the fourteenth episode of RuPaul's Drag Race season 16 (episode "Booked and Blessed"). He also has a small motion-capture role in the 2024 remake of the video game Riven.
In January 2018, Farrow signed a three-year deal at HBO to produce and develop documentaries. Farrow served as an executive producer on Endangered directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, focusing on threats against journalists which released in June 2022. In 2024, Farrow starred and produced Surveilled focusing on cyberintelligence firm NSO Group.
Recognition
In 2008, Farrow was awarded Refugees International's McCall-Pierpaoli Humanitarian Award for "extraordinary service to refugees and displaced people". In 2009, Farrow was named New York magazine's "New Activist" of the year and included on its list of individuals "on the verge of changing their worlds". In 2011, Harper's Bazaar listed him as an "up-and-coming politician". In 2012, he was ranked number one in "Law and Policy" on Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" Most Influential People. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Dominican University of California in 2012. In its 2013 retrospective of men born in its 80 years of publication, Esquire magazine named him the man of the year of his birth.
In February 2014, Farrow received the third annual Cronkite Award for "Excellence in Exploration and Journalism" from Reach the World, in recognition of his work since 2001, including his being a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth in 2001. Some media outlets noted that the award came three days after Ronan Farrow Daily began airing and suggested that the award was therefore not justified. Farrow is the recipient of the Stonewall Community Foundation's 2016 Vision Award for his reporting on transgender issues. He was also recognized by the Point Foundation in 2018. In July 2018, Farrow won the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association's Journalist of the Year award. In 2019, he was listed among the 40 Under 40 List put out by Connecticut Magazine. He was also named the Out100 Journalist of the Year.
In May 2020, The New York Times reporter Ben Smith published an article titled "Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?" and asserted that some of Farrow's journalism did not hold up to scrutiny. Farrow stated in a response that he stood by his reporting. In a Slate piece, Ashley Feinberg described Smith's report as an "overcorrection for resistance journalism" and opined that his approach showed "broad-mindedness, sacrificing accuracy for some vague, centrist perception of fairness."
The audiobook for Farrow's book Catch and Kill, read by Farrow himself, was nominated for Best Spoken Word Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards.
Personal life
As of August 2019, Farrow resided on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He publicly identified as part of the LGBT community in 2018.
Farrow began dating podcast host and former presidential speech writer Jon Lovett in 2011. The two became engaged in 2019 after Farrow wrote a proposal to Lovett in the draft for his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. The couple bought a $1.87 million home in Los Angeles in August 2019. In March 2023, Lovett stated on his podcast that the couple had separated.
Relationship to Woody Allen and paternity
Farrow is estranged from his father, Woody Allen. After Allen married Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn, Farrow commented, "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression."
In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, Mia Farrow said that Ronan could "possibly" be the biological child of singer Frank Sinatra, with whom she said she had "never really split up." Ronan Farrow tweeted, "Listen, we're all *possibly* Frank Sinatra's son." In a 2015 CBS Sunday Morning interview, Sinatra's daughter Nancy dismissed the suggestion that her father was Farrow's biological father, calling it "nonsense". Sinatra's biographer James Kaplan also disputes Sinatra's potential paternity of Farrow in his book Sinatra: The Chairman (2015). He said that Sinatra was splitting his time between Hawaii and Palm Springs with his wife Barbara Marx Sinatra and was in ill health during the time when Farrow would have been conceived.
Farrow has refused to discuss DNA analysis. He has said that, despite their estrangement, "Woody Allen, legally, ethically, personally was absolutely a father in our family." In a 2018 New York magazine article, Allen said that Farrow may not be his biological son: "In my opinion, he's my child ... I think he is, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. I paid for child support for him for his whole childhood, and I don't think that's very fair if he's not mine."
Written works
Books
- Farrow, Ronan (2018). War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. New York: WW Norton & Co. ISBN: 9780393652109
- Farrow, Ronan (2019). Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. New York: Little, Brown and Company ISBN: 9780316486637
See also
In Spanish: Ronan Farrow para niños
- Black Cube
- LGBT culture in New York City
- List of LGBT people from New York City
- New Yorkers in journalism
- List of Rhodes Scholars
