Hillary Clinton’s ties to Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul facing a number of sexual misconduct claims, are once again garnering attention. Journalist Ronan Farrow, who worked with Clinton “for years,” says that the former secretary of State distanced herself after learning that he was looking into the sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein.
“It’s remarkable how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centers of power or the sources of funding around them,” he told the Financial Times in an interview published on Friday.
All about the money
As we know, Weinstein was certainly a “center of power” for Clinton, donating tens of thousands of dollars to groups supporting Clinton during her 2016 run for the presidency. Clinton was also working with Weinstein on a documentary at the time that the scandal broke.
Farrow was Clinton’s special adviser on global youth issues back in 2011 when she was then-President Barack Obama’s secretary of State. The two had worked together for “for years,” according to Farrow, until Clinton learned that he was working on the Weinstein story — and their longtime relationship started to cool.
“Ultimately, there are a lot of people out there who operate in that way,” Farrow added. “They’re beholden to powerful interests and if you go up against those interests, you become radioactive very quickly.”
Circling the wagons
In an October interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Farrow said that he had scheduled an interview with Clinton about a separate project, but her aides contacted him in an attempt to back out after learning that he was investigating Weinstein’s behavior.
“She attempted to withdraw from an interview that she had committed to for a foreign policy book that I was working on, for which I interviewed every other living secretary of state,” Farrow said. “And, before doing so, her staff raised concerns about the fact that I was working on this story about one of her most significant donors — a big bundler of Hollywood money.”
In another October interview, Farrow said the negative reaction to his reporting from Clinton and other progressives felt like a “gut punch.”
“It was a personal moment of gut punch to me,” Farrow said on BuzzFeed News’ AM to DM podcast. “People that I thought would support that kind of reporting were actually very leery of it.”
And again in an interview with Rolling Stone, Farrow said that at the time he viewed Clinton’s cancellation of the interview as “another example of these circles of mutual protection of the most powerful people and the turns screwing, as word of my pursuit of the story leaked to political circles.”
On the wrong side of #MeToo
Farrow’s story was eventually published by The New Yorker in 2017, triggering the #MeToo movement. At the time, Clinton was criticized for staying silent for five days after the bombshell story broke. She eventually released a statement, saying that she was “shocked and appalled by the revelations” about Weinstein.
If Farrow’s account is right, then it certainly adds more weight to the arguments of those who believe that Clinton must have known of Weinstein’s behavior and did nothing to expose it.
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