Ronan Farrow Biography

Ronan Farrow (born Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow; December 19, 1987) is an American human-rights activist, journalist, lawyer and government official. He served in the Obama Administration, first "overseeing the U.S. Government's relationships with civil society" in Afghanistan and Pakistan and subsequently as the first director of the State Department Office of Global Youth Issues under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Farrow's writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and other publications, focused primarily on human rights issues in the Horn of Africa.

Early life

Farrow was born in New York City, to actress Mia Farrow and movie director Woody Allen. He was named after baseball player Satchel Paige and his maternal grandmother, actress Maureen O'Sullivan. He was given the surname "Farrow" to avoid a family with "one child named Allen amidst two Farrows and six Previns." Mia Farrow, asked in 2013 about longstanding speculation Ronan Farrow is the son of Mia Farrow's ex-husband Frank Sinatra, responded, "Possibly." No DNA testing has been conducted to determine Farrow's paternity.

Farrow first came to prominence when he became the youngest student ever to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock at age 11 and the youngest graduate ever from Bard College at age 15. Bard College at Simon's Rock accepts students in their junior or senior year of high school, while Bard College, where Farrow transferred and ultimately graduated, typically enrolls standard high school graduates.

in 2009, he graduated from Yale Law School, and he later became a member of the New York Bar. He subsequently studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 2012.

Career

From 2001 to 2009, he was a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth, working on conflict-related issues in Nigeria, Angola, and Sudan and assisting in fundraising and addressing United Nations affiliated groups in the United States. During this time, he also made joint trips to the Darfur region of Sudan with his mother, Mia Farrow, including media availabilities at UNICEF-run camps. He subsequently appeared on MSNBC, ABC, and CNN advocating for the protection of Darfuri refugees. Following on his experiences in Sudan, Farrow was affiliated with the Genocide Intervention Network, a group founded by Swarthmore College students to advocate for armed involvement in the Darfur Conflict.

During his time at Yale Law School, Farrow worked at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and in the office of the chief counsel at the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, focusing on international human rights law.

In 2009, Farrow joined the Obama administration with his appointment as Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was part of a team of officials recruited by veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, for whom Farrow had previously worked as a speechwriter. For the ensuing two years, Farrow was responsible for "overseeing the U.S. Government's relationships with civil society and nongovernmental actors" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In 2011, Farrow was appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues and Director of the State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues. The office's creation was the outcome of a multi-year task-force appointed by Clinton to review the United States' economic and social policies on youth, for which Farrow chaired the lead working group beginning in 2010. Farrow's appointment and the creation of the office were announced by Clinton as part of a refocusing on youth following the Arab Spring revolutions. Farrow was responsible for U.S. youth policy and programming with an aim toward "empower[ing] young people as economic and civic actors." Farrow concluded his term as Special Adviser in 2012, with his policies and programs continuing under his successor.

After departing government, Farrow began a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.

In October 2013, Farrow was in talks to host a program on MSNBC. MSNBC has since confirmed that Farrow will be hosting a weekday, one-hour show beginning in early 2014.

Political positions

Government Secrecy

Writing for The Guardian during its coverage of the NSA Leaks, Farrow criticized the United States government's secrecy policies, arguing that the classification of too many documents had led to "mistrust" and "fertile ground" for leaks.

Internet Freedom

Writing for Foreign Policy magazine in 2013, Farrow and former White House official Shamila N. Chaudhary published research on Western technology companies working with governments in Muslim-majority countries, concluding that "almost 80 percent of the 31 Muslim-majority countries tracked by the Internet freedom organization OpenNet Initiative use some form of systematic Internet filtering" and calling for companies like McAfee to reconsider their relationships with alleged human rights abusers.

Benghazi Attack

In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic on the Congressional investigation of the 2012 Benghazi attack, claiming that "in all but exclusively focusing on what Administration officials said after Stevens's death, Congress isn't just wasting America's time "? it's squandering a chance to save lives in the future." Farrow, who wrote that he worked with the victims of the attack, defended some former colleagues, such as Hillary Clinton associate Cheryl Mills, while criticizing others for allowing security to deterioriate at the Libya facility.

United Nations

Farrow has sharply and repeatedly criticized the UN's political bodies, including the predecessor to its Human Rights Council - the Commission on Human Rights - which he slammed in the Wall Street Journal as "a cancer on the United Nations" for what he described as a "single-minded focus" on Israel. In the aftermath of the 2008 failure of the United States to win reelection to the Human Rights Council, Farrow called for the body to be abolished.

Africa

Farrow was a vocal advocate for military intervention in Darfur. He wrote a string of columns on the subject between 2004"07, interviewing U.N. Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno as early as 2006 on the need for troop contributions. He has written repeatedly on China's investments in the Horn of Africa, including a series of exposés on their alleged arming and funding of the Sudanese government's brutal offensive in Darfur. His writing on the subject, beginning with an August 2006 piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "China's Crude Conscience", linked Beijing to the Darfur genocide and have been cited with helping to spark advocacy on the subject.

In 2008, he wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times criticizing counter-insurgency operations in the Ogaden desert by Kenya's neighbor, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian consul in Los Angeles, Taye Atske Selassie, wrote a letter to the Times saying Farrow had "quoted a single person in Kenya claiming Ethiopian security forces were responsible for human rights abuses, but the 'separatist rebels' had merely carried out a few attacks," and that Farrow had "failed to study the geopolitical intricacies of the Horn of Africa."

Recognition

He has been named New York magazine's "New Activist" of the year and included on its list of individuals "on the verge of changing their worlds" for 2009; listed as Harper's Bazaar's "up-and-coming politician" of 2011; and ranked number one in Law and Policy on Forbes Magazine's "30 Under 30" Most Influential People list for 2012. In its 2013 retrospective of men born in its 80 years of publication, Esquire magazine named him the man of the year of his birth.

Farrow was awarded Refugees International's McCall-Pierpaoli Humanitarian Award in 2008, for "extraordinary service to refugees and displaced people."

He was awarded an honorary Doctorate by Dominican University of California in 2012.