YouSaid · the spoken record

Ronan Farrow

lines on the record: 83
first: 2018-06-07
most recent: 2018-06-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Maybe the world. To hear, I was fortunate to be a conduit for some very brave women in their stories, and I'm going to keep going. I got to get back to the office now to keep cranking out the next one.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As to why people I came out of this experience of investigative reporting at NBC with a lot of incredible producers and diggers for the truth on that investigative unit there, realizing the importance of having greater independence from a corporate structure that controls editorial content. And I believe I've found that in HBO. And we're starting the development process on that now. It's a ways out, but was shockingly after the low point of this process with the Weinstein story where I really did think I had lost my career, was then suddenly in a position where I could kind of have my pick of platforms. And after talking to the team at HBO, I really felt like this was the place I could go deepest and be the most uncensored. about the truth.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the only, you know, because I was getting asked in such a public way to comment on it at the time that I did review that evidence and look back at it. I had no choice but to try to be as rigorous as possible. And that's just, you know, maybe that's an emotional failing, but it's also just my tendency as a person. I'm an attorney. I'm an investigative reporter. I am going to look at things in a kind of as dispassionate a way as I can. That said, I've never claimed to be an impartial third-party observer. Everything that I've said about this I've said with the caveat of this is my family. I'm writing this partly as a, you know, when I wrote that one, I've only ever written on the subject once in this Hollywood reporter piece that I was kind of cornered into writing. I said up front, like I'm writing this as a brother as well.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you may be right that one of the reasons I was able to approach this as dispassionately as I have is because I compartmentalized it in some way.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm sure there's some of that going on. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have an emotional relationship with it other than feeling. Yeah, for him, I think that I have an emotional connection with my sister's story. But I really was able to, maybe you're right, it would require a better shrink than I to assess. More meat.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't have a strong emotional feeling about it. I think because I was young at the time, because I wasn't really exposed to the fact pattern one way or the other until I kind of approached it as an adult, and then did realize, by the way, that everything that I had seen as a child rang true with her account of events. Obviously, it's an incredibly painful story. But I think it's all of our responsibilities to be willing to see the facts as they are, no matter your connection to them. And no matter how much of a fan you are of someone or if someone is your father,”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an important point. But I'm asking you about how one feels. This is a rare, rare case, David, where the prosecutor himself came forward and said, we should have pressed charges. Yeah, yeah, I know.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that you look at what happened in that situation and there was an act of intimidation campaign directed at all of the law enforcement involved. And this crazy thing that would never happen today of a psychological report being issued by these Yale New Haven investigators who met with him and his lawyers repeatedly never met with the victim, not even once, and destroyed all their notes afterwards. I mean, it was the whole thing smells really bad, you know, just as an investigative reporter, when you look back on it. And I think I understand her being angry. The conversations afterwards were... Complicated because I think she was proud of what I had done, but still very much in her own painful fight.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's what I mean by angry. I think she saw the vindication of so many of these women's stories and then saw the very different reaction that she got, I think partly because of just the moment in time. You look at the reaction that Bill Cosby accusers got, and it was also equal parts, angry op-eds from mostly male fans saying these women are trying to tear down an icon. And then sort of the few people saying, hey, maybe there's something here. And I think we were still very much in that moment when she spoke out. Look, I've never said believe all survivors. I've said listen to all survivors and interrogate their claims thoroughly. And for anyone like my sister who has a very credible claim backed by a lot of evidence, I mean, we're talking about his hair fibers being there in the spot. She said they would be even after.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a fascinating observation. I mean, I think she was just as Gretchen Carlson talking about Fox was a part of this sort of lineage of this moment. I do think my sister doing a really brave thing and enduring an unimaginable smear campaign as a result. And my mother getting a lot of the brunt of it too, as we mentioned, that was an indispensable part of the history of this moment.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was angry, which is interesting, and I think understandable. She came forward, there was a great article by, I think Kate Arthur and Buzzfeed a few years ago tracing kind of the early unfolding of this movement before it was known as the Me Too movement. And these forces had all linked up to turn into this watershed moment. And she talked about Hannibal Burras cracking that joke about Cosby and the Cosby women beginning to come forward. And the turning point of my sister coming forward sort of in that same time frame and how that was a catalyst for people talking about this issue. And one of the Weinstein accusers, Rose McGowan, the actress, commented on my sister being too soon.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. I spent a year living in the worst memories of woman after brave woman, and that's a very difficult place to be, and it certainly fills me with the desire that they be heard and that we never go back to a culture of silence”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that anyone could have anticipated the bravery of so many survivors in industry after industry women and now men as well. I certainly knew that there was a deep vein of untold stories here and I knew that there were systems in place that had suppressed those stories for a long time. And I guess I was so in crisis trying to break the thing that I didn't think about the long-term cultural reproductive.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this case. So, what happened was we ran this story, and the very first allegation in that story was from a young woman named Lucia Evans, who did a very brave thing speaking about it, and it was tough for her, but she wanted to support these other women and was obviously very credible, or she wouldn't have been in that story. And the police had the same reaction. And the day after the story ran, the NYPD cold case squad approached her and said, you should tell this story on the stand as well. And that's a wrenching decision to make because for her, it means potentially years of getting smeared and torn apart on the stand and having her credibility attacked. And I think the fact that she has decided to go ahead with that is a real act of public service.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I get asked that a lot, David, and the honest answer is I don't know that I've felt anything. Partly that was just a practical matter because I was immediately pulled into turning out the piece on the behind-the-scenes story of how the investigators pursued these charges and going back to this very brave moment.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, he said, You know, I'm wailing about, oh my God, I'm going to get scooped, and no one will ever know I worked on this. I'm losing everything, and it was too big a gamble. And he's like, okay, we're going to deal with all of that, but also you're going to tip this taxi driver really well”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the important story you think it is. That particularly was a concern to me because I had spent so long in rooms with executives telling me it's not a story, it's not a story, it's never going to be a story. And it really did require a leap of faith and it didn't feel strategic and I wasn't sure it was the right thing. And I'm just so grateful that I guess I listened to the gut feeling that I couldn't let down those women.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I had lost my career in television. I refused to stop reporting the story. And my next deal had gone away. I had moved out of my apartment because I was getting staked out and threatened. I thought I was going to get scooped. I had lost my book deal. This book that you have here and we're talking about now is a small miracle because it was rescued from the brink by Norton, a wonderful publisher. But at the time, I really thought I may have swung too wide and would just lose everything I had worked for. And the point of that speech was to say it's all very well and good in retrospect to say, look at this great thing and how great it turned out. But at the time, you don't know if you're doing any of it for the right reasons or is it your ego and your desire to see yourself as kind of the hero in your own story and you don't know whether it will be received as”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, which is not flip of me to say that I want to save that for the right time and place. When you have something that is an important piece of the puzzle of how these stories stay quiet for as long as they sometimes do, you got to do justice to that. Let me just ask you this question.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have said from a very early point when it became public that they suppressed the story that I wanted to be careful about talking about the reasons for that because when you have an explosive story behind the story, I think it does risk overshadowing the allegations. And this was always about being a conduit for the stories of these women, which are still playing out in real time. Harvey Weinstein was just indicted yesterday. I'm still very much trying to keep the women front and center. When I won that, it's also going to be.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was really proud of the work we were doing. I had a great producer, this guy, Rich McHugh, who stood by the Weinstein story at tremendous personal risk. And we went out and did a lot of, I think, really good work that got a lot of recognition. And in the course of that, I was working on a story I had fought for on the dark side of Hollywood. It was going to be multiple installments. And a lot of the stories that I had pitched did not end up retaining the green light. I wanted to do something on race in Hollywood and pedophilia in Hollywood and look at the Corey Feldman allegations. And a lot of that was deemed too dark for Morning TV, but I did retain the green light on asexual harassment in Hollywood story. And the Weinstein leads came to me through that work.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was doing my today show, so I was on the Today Show, as you mentioned, after this, for a couple years. Doing the same kind of truth to power investigative stories that I'm doing now. So I would go out for months on end investigate deaths and illnesses at a government nuclear site and come up with the stack of documents that showed they were covering it up and challenge Department of Energy officials about it and sneak into the site and get escorted out.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not, right? Everyone's cutting the cord. And I think the thing that continues to break through once you can get the headline on your iPod and your laptop and the LCD in your shoe as the years go on. The long form storytelling that really illuminates something in a deeper way still survives. And if you look at the success of Narrative podcasts, things like serial, if you look at the still stable market of the documentary space where good work still breaks through, those are formats that still thrive even with the cable cutting.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, it was very, the whole network was down 100 and something percent during the nadir of our own rating stuff. It was. An illustration, I think, of the fact that for my generation, the headlines have become more fungible. And I think a lot of TV executives have learned the wrong lesson from the transformations and how people consume media. I would have a lot of conversations with people who would say, okay, the kids love tweets. So let's just cram in shorter headlines to compete with the tweets. And I think that's the wrong lesson.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investigator right to do investigative work. And I guess the failure of that show, but also of cable news and particularly midday cable news in general, I mean, that is a business model that's in crisis still. You can get bumps during political seasons, but it's not a sustainable fix. That's a contracting market.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The I wouldn't have given up that experience for anything. It taught me what I value in the news and what I don't. So when I came into that job, the proposition was use it in the way I ultimately did kind of insist on using it, which was to do long tape pieces about things like over prescription at VA hospitals. I would do these investigative stories. And go out into the field and really kind of break news around a situation as it was happening. I would go out and gather in the midst of a conflict or... And then NBC obviously”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, at every step with everything I've done, I've faced a torrent of skepticism and hostility, and there are worse crosses to bear than that. But it's just... It's an off-screen line”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it was well regarded amongst kind of my peers there and the correspondents who were on the show and the people writing about this stuff in the media. But look, it's a really tough slot. I mean, that was their lowest rated slot when I went into it. We kind of brought it up a little bit here and there. But I mean, you're 20 times.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, I mean, it was an overratings failure. It was critically beloved by the end, the coverage we did during Charlie Hebdo and the long investigative stories that I was running.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it felt very natural to continue that. Through the Wall Street Journal op-eds I was doing, I would go on CNN and stuff, and then that led to this NBC deal.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was both something that I had been doing, as you pointed out. And even the commentary I was doing was sort of heavily reported, and probably that comes from a deeper place of having grown up in a storytelling setting. I had a flair for drama and an understanding that if you can move people with the right facts, you can maybe... Increase awareness about things that are otherwise in the shadows”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's politics is the name of the department. And it's actually a narrower band of what's in the book, the section on why'd you just submit this.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, the general's filling the White House right now, that, I think, overall is a malign influence, despite the fact that Mattis is a rare adult in the current scrum. The systemic impact of the Pentagon having more and more autonomy to decide things like troop levels without any kind of White House oversight in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, that overall is something that we should be concerned about.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was. Look, I think it's very clear that in a lot of these conversations about diplomacy, he comes off as one of the few grown ups in the room. So while this book is very much about the perils of the militarization of foreign policy, on a personality level, right, the irony is you kind of want Mattis in the room for a lot of this.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, once you're running an institution, you tend to want to marshal as many resources as you can for it. And I think you lose sight of some of those broader critiques that he was such a”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. That's right. And it's very cunning. I mean, they're beating us at a game that we were winning for a long time. And I think we all have to scrutinize whether that's the future we want for the world.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be, I think, an oversimplification to say that they're showing moral leadership, but they're coming around to pragmatic.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the world, we are already seeing a generation growing up with very overt signs of Chinese leadership and not American leadership. And that comes in multiple forms. It's the development projects that China is doubling down on, and the United States is withdrawing from. There are dams and roads and bridges all over the world that are known to be Chinese projects. And America is less and less in that game. But it's not just USAID and its retreat. It's also our Leadership in conversations around the world. China is now sending envoys to try to resolve situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Sudan and difficult places where there's less of a pragmatic interest for them to do so than even as they're gaining less.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ironically, right? So, this is an administration that seems to have a fairly unprecedented disregard for expertise, for history, and for diplomacy.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is hard to miss. It's inflicted on all of us every day. You know, him tweeting in the midst of Rex Tillerson's halting efforts to actually conduct diplomacy, which was a thing that he occasionally tried in between setting fire to the State Department.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, I think it's very evident. You don't have to look farther than his Twitter account where he even hardly hardly hardly h”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it turns out. And I had people like Brian Hook, who's quoted in there saying to me, this is our top priority. But at the same time, this administration was letting go of the resources we needed most in that area.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was part of a wave of firings when the Trump administration came in, which was really quite unprecedented. Tom Countryman was not a partisan political appointee. He was a career foreign service officer who served under administrations of both parties and was at the time of his firing our top technical official on arms control. And at a time at which officials”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they want you to say to legitimize them as a nuclear power. And what I know from talking to people around those conversations right now is that there is simply a void where that expertise once lay in our government.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but we've seen the ups and downs in the lead up to that potential meeting. And what I lay out in the book is the way in which the long fraught history of diplomacy with North Korea teaches us you need experts there to tell you this is what they're going to lie about. These are the pitfalls.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're dealing with a hobbled diplomatic apparatus right now, and I think that still is actively harming our foothold in conflicts around the world where we need to exert influence. You look at our approach to North Korea of late, and it's pretty close to the worst case scenario. We have sent a devastating signal to the regime in Pyongyang through our withdrawal from the Iran deal. Any rogue regime that we're trying to bring to the table to cut some kind of a deal with that will entail compromise and look imperfect, but also maybe save us all from annihilation now has significant reason to question whether the United States will hold to its commitments.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I got the clear sense, at least through the viewing this through the lens of the Afghanistan review in the first term, that it was a result of her focus on political expedience and also probably her longtime sincere set of convictions as a foreign policy hawk. I mean, she at every point was lockstep with Gates and the very cautious.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one of the contrasts that I found striking was I was only at state under Hillary Clinton, but certainly Hillary Clinton's approach to that job was very different from John Kerry's. And John Kerry did seem to pursue a more kind of autonomous Set of diplomatic missions than Clinton, who was”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess what I, and the book is not a Holbrook hagi geography. I mean, as you see, it's. Very critical of Holbrook and very forthright about his ego and his problems with navigating the politics of that administration, which were Often of his own making. But I do think history has vindicated many of the arguments that he was making. You had a to do over, would you have gotten him that audience with the president?”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did. He was his own worst enemy. But I do think that his freeze out is illustrative of. Way in which our foreign policy has transformed and not always for the better. I mean, I do sense that there was a course correction in the Second Obama administration.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source