Ronan Farrow

Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow (born December 19, 1987) is an American journalist.

The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, he is known for his investigative reporting on allegations of sexual abuse against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which was published in The New Yorker magazine.

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.

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, actress Mia Farrow, 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.

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.

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.

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."

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 concluded his term as Special Adviser in 2012, with his policies and programs continuing under his successor.

After leaving government, Farrow began a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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 to sexual assault on campus.

On May 11, 2016, The Hollywood Reporter published a guest column by Farrow in which he drew comparisons between the long-term absence of journalistic inquiry into the rape allegations leveled against Bill Cosby and the sexual abuse allegations levied against his father Woody Allen by Farrow's sister, Dylan Farrow (who was 7 years old at the time of the alleged abuse).

Farrow detailed first-hand accounts of journalists, biographers, and major publications purposefully omitting from their work decades of rape allegations targeting Cosby.

The magazine won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for this reporting, sharing the award with The New York Times.

Farrow has worked for UNICEF and as a government advisor.

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.