Journalist Ronan Farrow said the lack of support from powerful progressives such as Hillary Clinton during his reporting on sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein felt like a "gut punch."



"It is an example of how power protects power," Farrow said in an appearance on BuzzFeed News' AM to DM on Tuesday to discuss his new book Catch and Kill, in which he says NBC News tried to quash his reporting on Weinstein. Farrow's story went on to win a Pulitzer Prize after it was published in the New Yorker, and helped launch the #MeToo movement and a public reckoning about sexual misconduct by powerful men.

Farrow recalled that he was due to interview former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for his last book, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (published in 2018), when word got around political circles that he was working on a story about Harvey Weinstein.

"There was an apparent effort to cancel that interview after they raised concerns about the reporting on Weinstein," Farrow said.

Weinstein was a powerful ally of Clinton's and had helped bundle and raise millions of Hollywood dollars for her.

"It was a personal moment of gut punch to me," Farrow said. "People that I thought would support that kind of reporting were actually very leery of it."



A spokesperson for Clinton on Tuesday said there hadn't been anything scheduled at the time, "so it couldn’t have been canceled."

"We were on a book tour, we scheduled the interview when we had time at the completion of our own book tour," the spokesperson added.

Clinton eventually agreed to a phone interview and denied Weinstein had anything to do with the schedule changes, Farrow said.

