Farrow’s investigation into the allegations against the producer won him a Pulitzer prize. He talks about the personal costRead an extract from Ronan Farrow’s book here In the story behind the story of Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace, there is a large portion devoted to how the movie producer tried to silence reporting of the allegations against him. For Ronan Farrow, whose investigation for the New Yorker won him a Pulitzer prize in 2018, the effect was paranoia-inducing. He was convinced he was being followed; he thought his phone had been hacked. At one point, he opened a safety deposit box in a vault beneath a branch of Bank of America, and placed in it transcripts of interviews with dozens of sources and a flash drive containing incriminating audio. On top of the pile, he left a note with instructions on whom to contact “should anything happen to me”, and the entreaty: “Please make sure this information is released.”
As it turned out, the surveillance was real, and the threat of legal action constant. The pressure on everyone involved was so intense that, prior to publication of Farrow’s new book, Catch And Kill, he spent so long on the phone with a New Yorker factchecker called Sean, that Sean “got a stress nosebleed”.