Ronan Farrow
Appearances
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Well, there were very brave women who were sources. There were great activists who preceded that. But I'm honored to have been a conduit for some of those stories.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
I mean, I'll do that too. Cat listicles are the future, guys. Right. But it is true. You know, look, there was intimidation. There was a system designed to shut down these stories. And that affected not just me, but a whole range of brave journalists going up against this thing. And sure, like the moment when you find yourself deciding, do I go home tonight because I'm getting staked out?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
And like, if I do go home, I go in with my keys and I'm like looking under the bed and pulling back the shower curtain. It's like, okay, either I'm crazy or actually the story is stranger than fiction. And as it turns out, what we were able to break is he was hiring former Mossad agents, combat-ready operatives that were, in fact, following people around using false identities.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Is that correct? In fact... the same Israeli spies from a firm called Black Cube. The same as the Harvey Weinsteins? That Harvey Weinstein hired. And in some cases, using the same false identities and front companies that I heard from when I was getting stalked by these guys.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Why? So that's the surprising part of this. These are policy wonks. You know, these are Obama advisors. And, you know, we don't have all the answers yet. But sources close to this and documents that we obtained at The New Yorker show very clearly there was a seemingly political in focus operation designed to smear them, seemingly all connected to their work on the 2015 Iran deal.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Yeah, these stories all connect. Look, these are individuals fighting desperately to save a deal because they believe if we unilaterally as a nation back out of the Iran deal, for all its imperfections, it's worked in its narrow goal of containing them for a time.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
And if we back out, their fear is it drives a wedge between us and our allies, and it potentially sends a message to North Korea and other rogue states that we don't want to be sending, that they shouldn't come to the table. And as you suggest, this is all connected. They are getting smeared and intimidated. It's in a context, as I outline in War on Peace, where their profession...
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
is endangered, where people who make our deals and negotiate and hopefully secure options for addressing conflicts around the world that don't involve going in guns blazing, they are under attack. They are getting fired en masse. People don't understand what they do anymore. And more and more, that work is being outsourced to the military, to our spies, to the intelligence community.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Well, what I chronicle in War on Peace is in place after place, when we sabotage opportunities for political settlements and peaceful ways out and we go in shooting first, it really comes back to haunt us, Trevor. Again and again, we see situations where we end up lying down with warlords and strongmen and unsavory characters.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
And then we have no leverage over them because we have fired all of the diplomats who could negotiate and play hardball in that way.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Yeah, so you're exactly right. This is happening to a new extreme right now. Donald Trump has unceremoniously fired, basically, ambassadors across the world, assistant secretaries that run some of the most sensitive regions in the world.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
So we have an understaffed, unmanned diplomatic operation. There is precedent for this before. We've seen other administrations, Democratic and Republican, sort of sideline diplomats and see how disastrous it is. But this is new in terms of what an extreme it is. And when you look at the consequences, We see situations where there are active opportunities to make peace, and we just give them up.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
We see situations where you could bring people to the table potentially and spare brave servicemen and women going into the line of fire, and we give those up. It's a real problem. And I'd also point out, for people who kind of don't want to think about those high-level talks, these are also the people that screen dangerous interlopers from coming into the United States. Right, right, right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | International Diplomacy
Stamp your passports that save you if you're kidnapped abroad. This is unglamorous work, but it's life-saving.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
Yeah, it's always a pleasure. It's always such a good conversation with you guys. I try to capture over the course of the four and a half hours of this series the answer to that question. I feel like this series doesn't neatly fall into one category. It's not one thing. And one of the layers of it is at a time when the press is under attack. There's dwindling trust in the press.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I wanted to show the mechanics of how a journalist goes about vetting, in this case, a really politically explosive allegation. And I headed off into this wealthy, gated community in the desert, Paradise Valley, Arizona, to try to assess the question you raised. Was the source at the center of this credible? And then you have these other layers that flow from this.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
You have, you mentioned volatility, a relationship that is the backbone of this series that is really wild. I mean, this is about a former pageant queen. Her name is CeCe Doan. And as I'm vetting her, I start to realize that she's been connected to this improbable series of unsolved crimes. you know, an arson allegation.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
Special sauce.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
There's a period of time where the FBI investigated her for allegedly sending death threats to her own family. There's a police investigation into whether she tried to hire a hitman to kill one of her husbands, and then another investigation into whether she tried to kill another husband with Viagra. Overdosing him deliberately was the claim.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
As I looked into that, to your point about volatility, the relationship with her became really complex because she wouldn't stop calling and she kept coming back for more interviews. So there was clearly an attraction there, but also she was furious And at one point, you know, she threatens to punch me actually now as of our latest conversations, multiple points.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
So you get to really see this this kind of rise and fall of a very intense, complicated relationship. And then finally, you know, I thought that this series was consequential because she represents someone who's at a lot of our dinner tables and a lot of our like Thanksgiving meals and a lot of our communities. She is very, very steeped in the kind of Fox News Breitbart spectrum of at times.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I'll just say it as a as a reporter where I'm very committed to the facts. It's disinformation at times. You know, I'm not saying everything on those platforms falls into that category, but some of the things that she embraces, like the idea that Donald Trump won the 2020 election You know, the idea that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
There are certain things that come up in our conversations where it's clear that she represents a really significant part of this country's population in terms of disinformation culture. And that's something I'm very interested in. So the show kind of becomes a blueprint for not only can I solve these crimes, And can I use this person as a source credibility wise?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
But also, how do we deal with this phenomenon in our culture of people who live in denial, maybe as in this case about themselves and and also about the world around them?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I think that any treatment of this subject, no matter how delicate and sensitive and meticulous in the fact checking, was going to trigger a firestorm and, in her eyes, a confirmation of the untrustworthy leftist qualities of the media. I will say that over the course of this series,
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
One of the leitmotifs that emerges is blackouts that she claims to have blacked out her memories of many of these alleged crimes. You know, her response in a lot of cases isn't a firm denial. It's a well, I don't remember.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
And and she attributes that to a combination of struggles with alcoholism, which, you know, I think is is a part of the series that a lot of people and a lot of families will relate to. There's a very forthright discussion of the substance abuse part of this.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
and also i think to just not wanting to confront some of this stuff i think it's a mix of both and so the the silver lining here in answer to your question is there are parts of this show where she actually starts to confront some of these things she's done in her past and to acknowledge well maybe maybe it's possible i did do this maybe it's possible i did say this
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
and like members of her family for instance have reached out to me it's a very complicated portrait of a family as well and she's you know been accused of being abusive by her kids and so on people have reached out and said this is a really cathartic series for for them to watch within that family and and i've i've been also heartened to hear from people not connected to this family who have just listened to it out in the world and said this reminds me of my mother this reminds me of someone i know and it's it's helped me process
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I don't even know anymore. The guitars are not wallpaper. The keyboard is not wallpaper. The books are wallpaper. And you'd be shocked how much conversation I wind up in about the wallpaper. Like, people see the wallpaper. They love the wallpaper. They feel betrayed by the wallpaper when they learn that the wallpaper is a stylized rendering of a library.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I promise you, in person, it's not pretending to be real books. Like, it's painterly. The texture of it is not, you know, photographic. It's supposed to be impressionistic. I didn't want real books in here. I wanted a painting. But yeah, I apologize. Those books are fake news.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
You know, I think I did at one point like lean in really close and try to ascertain whether there's a title you can see. I don't think they're designed to have like full titles on them.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
That's going to require a separate booking, guys. You know, what we should do really is you should just report that there's some deeply cancellation worthy book on this fake shelf. You know, there's a fake Mein Kampf on this fake shelf.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I knew you were. I just figured I'd do it for you.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
In 2021, I got an encrypted email from a person claiming to be a federal prosecutor and saying that they were chasing the case of a, they thought maybe historically prolific predator and being obstructed by the local police. This person thought that the cops might be protecting the alleged perpetrator. And it was such an incredible claim.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
And as I dug in from there, the specifics were so wild that I wound up spending four years just looking at every facet of this case and immersing myself in hundreds of pages of legal documents and interviewing dozens of people on the ground in Appalachia where this takes place. wound up being about this prosecutor, Kat Dahl.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
She she really was a federal prosecutor and she had been assigned to Johnson City, East Tennessee. And she started to track strange events around the local businessman, a guy named Sean Williams. There was a woman who fell out of his fifth story window. There was another woman who left his apartment, you know, super out of it, seemingly drugged and was panicked and went off the road.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
She realized there had been years of police reports from women claiming that he had drugged and raped them.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
um and various pieces of evidence recovered around him started to lead her to believe that he might also be preying upon children and as she worked on this case actually a bunch of people uh allegedly were assaulted while she failed to to get the case across so it became this kind of passionate obsession for her and the the local cops seemed really uninterested in pursuing it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I'm tired of them.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
And you can read in this piece in this week's New Yorker all of the details of the ways in which they behaved strangely and through some combination of neglect, lack of interest, you know, just incompetence. And this is one of the things that emerges as the piece goes on, potentially corruption. They let him get away over and over again.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
I'm talking about what she finally struggles and struggles and struggles to get an indictment against him. And then he goes on the run successfully for more than two years in total. He at one point gets caught by officers on a college campus by complete coincidence. and is taken into custody and then escapes from a moving police van. I mean, it's stuff you don't expect in the present day.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
And over my years of reporting on this, the alleged perp, this guy, Sean Williams, when he finally was in custody, started to tell me, well, I I threw an associate of mine was paying off the cops. They deny this. But I, you know, I present all of the evidence and people can come to their conclusions.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
Yeah, there's now motion in some of the cases around this. There's a bunch of both civil and criminal proceedings that have flowed from this. And in at least one of the civil cases, there's been new filings based on some of this reporting. So maybe we haven't heard the last of this and maybe there'll be more answers. I do think that one of the reasons that made me want to put this out now
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
is that it's a story about state and federal oversight systems failing. And as I was reporting on it and saying like, hey, why didn't the FBI look at this more? Why didn't the Department of Justice writ large look at this more? Why doesn't this community have answers to these answerable questions about whether the cops were being paid off?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
what i started getting back in response to those questions was people saying hey buddy the offices that you're asking for more and better accountability from are getting destroyed right now so the trump administration is dismantling a lot of these corruption oversight apparatuses a lot of the uh systems for whistleblowers like the one in this story to come forward.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
They fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which is the office responsible for enforcing the Whistleblower Protection Act. They've done various other things to try to erode the space for whistleblowers to come forward.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
They have downsized the public integrity section at the Department of Justice, which is the office that should be looking at corruption claims with respect to police around the country, to just a skeleton crew. So I think it's important as people read this to also have them know this is why we need federal systems of oversight to protect people around the country.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
And what I'm being told by people around this case and other experts is with the absence or diminishment of those systems, we're a lot more likely to see more cases like this go unchecked.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: Enough With These Good Murderers (feat. Ronan Farrow)
Always a pleasure.