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

“Which was the one thing that the diplomats every last one of them said would be a disaster, because you surrender all of your power to bring anyone to the table if they know you can wait. The thing out. And he felt that was the death knell for negotiations.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what was your take on that? You were at the receiving end of his pleas. And I think there were a lot of legitimate reasons why Barack Obama didn't get along with Richard Holbrooke. But also I do think that the environment had changed and this idea of the celebrity diplomat was no longer welcome. And I know Ben Rhodes and a few other administration figures who spoke in this book did kind of give a Maya culpa and say, look, we were in the thrall of these kind of celebrity generals at that point and there wasn't as much room for. Well, I don't know if it was the...”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did. He earnestly believed in public service. He earnestly believed in the power of the United States to make peace and not just war, and the importance of deals of the kind that he cut which were imperfect, as the Dayton Peace Accord was, but which could avert warfare and bloodshed. And he found himself at odds with the Obama administration, and I know he had conversations with you in those final days.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Because he really was a larger than Legend. Which is the phrase everyone always uses returns to with him. He was famously a jerk. He burnt bridges everywhere, really sharp elbows, big ego, but was fiercely loyal to the people that he mentored, and that was true of everyone on that Afghanistan and Pakistan team. He was a great example of how you can be establishment, I think, and still, you know, because he was a foreign service officer going back to his 20s and still welcome new ideas that shake up the old order. He assembled a team of kind of nonconformist, often non-government types from different sectors and academics and business people, and he really wanted to break through the old school thinking that I think had locked our military conflicts into one path of escalation.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I ever thought that I wanted to practice black letter law, but I thought that it would be a useful education. I mean, I think it's very often the refuge of people who don't know exactly what they want to do. And Yale Law is the perfect place to not be a lawyer. So I had a wonderful time there. It was the most intellectually lively group of people I've ever been exposed to. It is like a Montessori school style environment where people kind of sit around and sing Kumbaya and study human rights and international law and legal theory and have no idea how to pass the bar when they finally get to it. It's one of the most extraordinary educational institutions we have. I was really lucky to be there.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's look back at my early law school pictures and I've got these hammer pants on over my broken busted up legs, which was an odd symmetry having grown up with siblings who struggled to walk, among other things.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I did come back and get it checked out, but through whatever combination of doctors not catching it and me being on the road,”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, yeah. I mean, this was a medical problem that went untreated for a long time, partly because I was traveling some of these. Yes, yes, staph aureus in the bone. It will get you every time. But that was something that would have been perhaps treated better. I mean, look, you can go back and game out whether complications could have been prevented or not, and you never know. But it was a period where I carried on with all of this other stuff in my life. And I was testifying before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, and I was traveling in these African countries.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very fortunate to see a lot of places where the problems that I came to care about and focus on in my work were playing out firsthand. The time I spent in Sudan, for instance, a lot of that Ended up resulting in op-ed columns that I was writing for the Wall Street Journal and other places about sexual violence as a tool of war. And many of the stories that I was telling in that context were direct mirror images of the stories that I ultimately told about Harvey Weinstein's accusers. And I guess all of this gave me a sense of obligation to do as much as I could because I saw how much these voices needed to be elevated and if I had any shred of ability to make a tiny difference, to put a spotlight on that stuff, it felt like one of the few ways that I could maybe be useful.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was impossible to ignore the world's problems because my brothers and sisters, the people I loved most, were refugees essentially. My mom adopted older and she adopted disabled, and she really specifically, I think because of some deeply ingrained Catholicism that she carried with her still, even after her years of being a hippie, she realized that these were men and women that the world had kind of left behind and would never get adopted otherwise. And you see the consequences of that. Like definitely, you know, my siblings have struggled with all sorts of things that have been really difficult for the family. And I guess what that ingrained in me was a real knowledge that the world is a difficult place and your passport into the world of the healthy and the living, it can be taken.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it was a struggle just for them to get through school. And I think our family is something I'm tremendously proud of. It's also like it was never going to look like the perfect nuclear family. Some people just through sheer dint of incredible parenting were able to pull out of those backgrounds of trauma and disability and some were not. And that's devastating. But it really made me acquainted early on with how fortunate I was to have the ability to maybe make a difference where so many of my splitters through the day.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Look, I can tell stories and it always felt to me that that was a power that carried some responsibility with it, not to lapse into Spider-Man dialogue. But I was raised with a lot of people who couldn't write or tell stories in that way. A lot of my siblings struggle with severe backgrounds of trauma and both physical and mental disability.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was great for me. So I made the decision between a small liberal arts college bard and larger schools and had wonderful opportunities to go to kind of more marquee name schools. And I think Correctly, I decided, and I was 11 at the time, so my mom was a part of this decision that a small school would be a lifeline where I was never going to fall through the cracks and I could have friendships with these older kids, but they would be sort of protective and like big brothers and sisters. And it really did pan out that way. It was very kind of nurturing. I was on campus but living in a professor's house for the last two years of it. I actually, God bless her, my mom drove me to class a lot for the first two years. And I kind of used that maxim all the way through. I went to a very small law school. The scholarship I did in England was also tiny.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 11 year olds or 11 year olds. You'll have to be the judge as to whether I, you know, I'll let you know at the end of the hour. Yeah, exactly. You tell me. Yeah, no, I think whatever social dysfunction I have is probably lingering from my dupin. What was it like to be an”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, only because it was involuntary. That was when I was younger. These letters and the stocking of my sister continued for years. But at the same time, sometimes he would send me kind of parallel letters saying, you know, I'm here if you want to come over to my side, essentially. It's this very destructive tactic in a family to have that hanging over everyone, you know, that I will support.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that happened, and I've said that publicly in the statement now, so that's not news, but it was very clearly, you know, he would sort of stalk my sister. She was terrified of him, and she'd be not registered under any specific name at school, trying to get away from him, and he'd send shoeboxes full of pictures of him with her. And she'd just call sobbing saying, he found me, he found me, a deeply creepy behavior, and he'd sent her letters saying, you know, I'm waiting with open arms. And she'd be terrified.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but the saving grace of my having been younger is It is something that I was able to approach independently as an adult, and I desperately wish that I could have taken the offer when Woody Allen said, okay, I'll only pay for your college education if you lie about your mom. There have been all these beats where I had the choice, and it's a tough thing.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't think of a more destructive thing. Right. I mean, you have a family, obviously. No, it's not something a father would do making sexual advances on the daughters. I guess I tried to write it off as okay, there's that problem, and then separately there's my sister's allegation that he also went after her at a younger age and was able for a while to compartmentalize and ignore this other allegation. But it really is part and parcel with the same pattern of fixation on underage girls. And obviously the Washington Post did this expose recently where they went through all of his private documents, which I think are at Princeton. And it's just, it's all over them. I mean, they're terrifyingly creepy things to read.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it always very clearly seemed off to me. And I guess I took solace as so many of his fans who are very, look, people don't like having their idols torn down and they get just viciously angry about this. People are enraged at my sister. And I think by proxy, there's a certain kind of guy who is worshipful of the targets of these investigations and is enraged at women coming forward in general. I see a lot of that directed at me by proxy. For me, I had the same reaction a lot of them had initially, which was, okay, so he married my sister, and that's not cool. And certainly there's all this evidence that there's a pattern of fixation on underage girls. And it's a tremendously destructive thing to do in a family for a father to be.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's this very set of systems. And I guess that wasn't as much on my mind during the Weinstein matter, except in that I knew that I had a woman close to me who had been through this kind of smear campaign and targeting and still is today. She's an incredibly brave and strong, as is my mother. And they will weaponize everything and anything against them, you know, pay people off to lie, it's unbelievable. And so dealing with women who everyone else said were paranoid. It seemed insane when they were saying we're being followed, we're being lied about. And I sat in rooms full of executives who said, you know, okay, girls like that say these things all the time, referring to these grown women with allegations against Harvey Weinstein. I knew that actually there is a cloak and dagger universe of the tactics deployed by a certain kind of powerful guy. I guess I knew”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had private investigators digging through the trashes of the cops on the case. There was a New York social worker who determined abuse had taken place and then got an order from the mayor's office in New York to halt the proceedings and change his findings. This happens over and over again when powerful men get accused of this sort of thing.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. I'm saying that if you want someone who says, I will do anything for you, you hire this woman, Leslie Dart. And it's really shocking. I've been forwarded the emails when she's planting these stories trying to basically destroy women. And there is that category of PR person you can hire. Obviously, in the same category, there's the people that Weinstein worked with. Similarly, you can manipulate the criminal justice system. Woody Allen did, I didn't really realize this until after the Weinstein reporting, how close the parallels were.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, there was no direct factual link, but what it did expose me to was the viciousness with which powerful men can retaliate against women with allegations against them. I mean, my sister has been the subject of years and years of smear campaigns. My mom was very often the target of those. It's much easier to by proxy, attack a mother. It's the oldest and least credible kind of trope that you run into in these kinds of responses to child molestation allegations. And what I saw is the ability of a certain echelon of wealthy and powerful person to manipulate press coverage. He has one of the most powerful PR people in the country, less Lee Dart, who's famously, if you want an amoral PR person who will represent a child molester and smear women and attack them, you go to Leslie Dart. And she's got, you know, Will Smith and Meryl Streep. So she can really,”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To avoid it for years and years, and then it was in finally sitting and reviewing the evidence and talking to her that I realized, holy moly, this is real and that I did have an ethical obligation to When called upon to speak on it, say, yeah, it appears there's the evidence is there.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was never abusive towards me because of that, and I think because my mom was so meticulously careful about never badmouthing him or kind of exposing us to any of this stuff, I really had to form my judgments about it as an adult. And then once I interviewed my sister about it basically because she, I think, felt that I had let her down, that I had avoided this issue for so long, and had been able to dispose of it with a joke. As so many people do when this issue affects their families, I'm sure this will resonate with a lot of survivors of sexual violence and their siblings. I just wanted it to go away and knew intuitively that obviously she was telling the truth because I know her to be a truthful person. And look, there's just no body of literature that suggests this idea that there are mentoring candidate 30-year-old women who have implanted memories. It's just not a thing. She's always been consistent in her story.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think that's right. I mean, he was never bad-mouthed in our home. I was actually, I was sort of the sacrificial lamb where courts always kept him away from my sister because there was just such overwhelming evidence. You look at this New York custody decision. The judge in that just wrote this scathing decision saying, you know, he needs to be protected, she needs to be protected. There's something like a phrase I think grotesque behavior with respect to children. There were always these things.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, this grooming behavior was all the way through, and basically, as long as he had access to her. And I would have to go back and look at the last comment. I guess my point.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which is important legally and ethically because you're dealing with a guy who has basically said it's acceptable to marry your son's sister because they're adopted. And by the same token, part of his response to my sister's allegations against him, which are very, very credible, I reluctantly came to that realization, but it's really inescapable when you review the evidence. It's been entwined with this suggestion that basically if there aren't biological ties, it's not a family, which was not at all the framework I grew up in. I grew up with a lot of adopted siblings. I think adopted kids ever ever would object to that. Yeah, y”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Scallion life. Womanizer, and I think ran away from a home, which was Australia. He was raised back when Australia was still a penal colony, and he sailed the South Pacific and wrote, I think, the first French English-Tahitian dictionary, and also a well-regarded scholarly biography of Damian of Malachi, who cared for the lepers there. So he was a very eclectic guy.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an Academy Award winning writer director. He wrote Around the World in 80 Days. And they fell in love on the set of one of these Tarzan movies that he was directing.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, growing up, you know, I can't recall what age I would have been, maybe 12 or something when she passed. But she was great. She was a Rakontus, knew her way around a great story, drank heavily for many years. The classic magical Irish grandmother. And she was someone that I wished I had gotten to know better as an adult. There were these incredible people in the background, including my grandfather, her husband, John Farrow. Yes.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, very few people ask about the grandparents, but my grandmother was Maureen O'Sullivan, who was Jane in the Tarzan movies, one of the first big Irish-American movie stars and part of the stable of MGM stars back when they were contract players. So this business of freelance actors hauling in these big paychecks and doing whatever projects they pleased was, of course, not the business model back then. She did something like 20 movies a year, had no choice in the matter. Yeah. And she's therefore on Turner Classic Movies just all the time because they were so prolific.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, one of my editors is the great David Rode, who was famously kidnapped in both Bosnia and then in Pakistan. It was one of my reporting heroes for years and years.”
2018-06-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 249 — Ronan Farrow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source