On January 9th, during jury selection for the sex-assault trial of Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow tweeted that a “source” with knowledge of the proceedings had told him that “close to 50 potential jurors have been sent home” because they’d read his book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. In fact, the number of jurors sent home for that reason was two, as a New York Times reporter had already noted.

Twitter typically isn’t journalism, and Farrow wasn’t tweeting in his capacity as a reporter. But the fact that he believed the vastly inflated figure to be accurate, saw fit to boast to his followers about it, and even stood by the number when later challenged on it, is indicative of his robust sense of self-regard and the ease with which he is seduced by dramatic but dubious narratives. As New York Times media columnist Ben Smith wrote in a May 17th feature entitled “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?,” the disgruntled-NBC-staffer-turned-New Yorker reporter has, for his young age, a surprisingly extensive record of botched stories:

• In 2018, Farrow prominently reported a source’s sensational claim that records pertaining to Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s lawyer, had vanished from a government database under suspicious circumstances. But as Smith notes, it turns out the circumstances weren’t suspicious, and the documents hadn’t even vanished. Farrow’s source was later discovered to have been a mentally fragile IRS employee and TV addict who’d illegally leaked Cohen’s records to a lawyer representing porn actress Stormy Daniels. (In response to Smith’s article, a New Yorker editor emphasized that Farrow had relied on information that was available at the time, and asserted that Smith hadn’t included the “detailed responses” that had been provided by the New Yorker in regard to his inquiries.)
• In a long article for the New Yorker in October 2017, Farrow reported allegations by a college student, Lucia Evans, who claimed that Harvey Weinstein had forced her to perform oral sex on him in his office. However, Farrow did not disclose that a friend who was with Evans when she’d first encountered Weinstein at a club had refused to corroborate Evans’ allegation of assault, volunteering only that “something inappropriate happened.” The same friend later told police that Evans’ encounter with Weinstein was actually consensual, a report that a detective then tried to obscure. (When this was discovered, the assault charge related to Evans was dismissed.)
• Catch and Kill related a stunning tale, in which then-news anchor Matt Lauer was said to have assaulted a junior employee named Brooke Nevils, with whom he had previously had an affair, in an NBC dressing room. Nevils then fled in tears, Farrow wrote, “to the new guy she’d started seeing, a producer who was working in the control room that morning, and told him what had happened.” But, as Smith reports, neither Farrow nor his fact-checker bothered to speak with this “new guy.” And when Smith did contact him, he said he has no memory of the scene Farrow described. It is exceedingly unlikely that this witness completely forgot that his tearful girlfriend had told him that she had just been sexually assaulted by one of America’s most famous newscasters.
• Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years in jail for his sex crimes. Since he’d been able to prey on women with impunity for years, the inclusion of the word “conspiracy” in the subtitle of Farrow’s bestseller is arguably apt—at least on the level of loose metaphor. But Farrow isn’t dealing in metaphors: He actually suggests that forces within NBC and even Hillary Clinton’s political team sought to prevent the disclosure of Weinstein’s behavior—a scandalous claim that undoubtedly helped sell the book. But Farrow’s evidence turned out to be thin to non-existent. And even the evidence that did exist seems to have been garbled by the author. In regard to NBC, Farrow’s proof of conspiracy amounted to such vagaries as suspicious glances exchanged during editorial meetings; and second-hand accounts delivered by an ex-NBC staffer named William Arkin, who failed to substantially back up the most dramatic aspects of Farrow’s narrative when Smith spoke to him. Where Clinton is concerned, Farrow focused closely on a phone call from a Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill, which Farrow suggested might be part of an “ominous” pro-Weinstein, anti-Farrow agenda. But as Smith notes, the far more likely motivation for the call, as indicated by preserved third-party text messages, was closer to the opposite: Clinton was (justly) hesitant to get involved in a documentary project with Weinstein, and was seeking Farrow’s input.

As Smith is careful to note, Farrow doesn’t appear to be an outright fabulist. The Pulitzer Prize winner simply comes off as a young and callow reporter seduced by monochromatic moral narratives, and impatient with the journalistic spadework and rigorous vetting needed to support breathless claims about the misuses of power that he sees everywhere. He is, after all, only 32 years old—much younger than most high-profile investigative journalists—and these flaws in his reporting style may well diminish with greater age, experience, and maturity.