Ronan Farrow attempted to use his influence to kill a story on his adopted sister, a reporter claims.
Daphne Merkin had worked on an interview with Soon-Yi Previn that would have run as the cover feature of the September 17 issue of New York magazine in 2018. Previn, wife of director and actor Woodie Allen and the adopted daughter of Allen and his ex, actress Mia Farrow, was at the center of revived allegations that Allen had sexually assaulted his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992.
The story ultimately ran, but not as a cover feature. Merkin alleges that the magazine caved to pressure from the Farrows, spearheaded by Ronan Farrow.
“I wasn’t used to this level of fear … fear of Ronan, of being sued, of the power of Mia and Ronan, simply culturally, their power on Twitter,” Merkin told the New York Post in an extensive interview.
Only a year prior, the New Yorker had published Farrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece investigating allegations of sexual assault and rape by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Merkin alleges that Farrow’s influence and “cultural capital” helped him influence the publication of her story.
“Ronan is a powerful journalist now with lots of connections. It had absolutely influence on what we’re doing,” Merkin’s editor, Laurie Abraham, told Merkin in a Sept. 10 email explaining the phone call.
Merkin detailed to the Post a campaign of sustained pressure from the Farrows that included calls to the then-New York magazine editor-in-chief Adam Moss as well as emails from Mia, Ronan and Dylan Farrow’s representatives.
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The most distressing element of the story for Merkin was when she believed the Farrows obtained an advance draft of her 9,000-word story. The Farrows demanded that Merkin include a line in her story about how she was “friends” with Woody Allen for over 40 years – a line that critics homed in on to criticize Merkin as incapable of objective reporting.
“I had never had this much interference [and] oversight,” Merkin said. “I said more than once that maybe I should pull it. In my long journalistic experience, which has included writing critical profiles of Madonna and the Kabbalah Center, both media heavyweights, neither ELLE nor The NY Times ran the pieces by.”
Merkin’s allegations come at a time when Ronan Farrow is under intense scrutiny for his claims that NBC had similarly tried to kill his story on Weinstein. NPR reporter David Folkenflik interviewed Farrow for NPR’s “On Point” radio show, during which Farrow criticized NBC’s handling of the story.
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The allegations have a strange echo of Merkin’s own story, with Farrow speculating that Weinstein pressured NBC to drop the story and that Matt Lauer’s own reputation for pursuing women would have brought unwanted scrutiny.
Farrow’s work with Weinstein led him to further investigations into then-New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as well as Matt Lauer. Lauer has seized on a recent op-ed in the New York Times to attack Farrow, claiming in a Mediaite post that Farrow “routinely presented stories in a way that would suit his activist goals, as opposed to any kind of journalist standards.”
While Farrow has yet to comment, the Post spoke with a source close to him that insisted Farrow “only wanted to understand the story better, so he could advise his sister, who was worried about a piece that discussed her sexual assault.”
A New York magazine rep reportedly denied Merkin had been promised the cover, or that Team Farrow saw an advance copy.
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“The decision not to put it on the cover was an editorial decision by the magazine that had nothing to do with pressure from Ronan Farrow or the Farrow family,” the spokesman said.
