The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, he is known for his investigative reporting on sexual abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which was published in The New Yorker magazine.

[4] His given names honor National Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige[5] and maternal grandmother, Irish-American actress Maureen O'Sullivan.

[12] Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, Farrow earned a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from the University of Oxford, where he was a student of Magdalen College.

[13] His dissertation was titled "Shadow armies: political representation and strategic reality in America's proxy wars" and was supervised by Desmond King.

[25] For the next two years, Farrow was responsible for "overseeing the U.S. Government's relationships with civil society and nongovernmental actors" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

[19] The office was created as a result of a multi-year task-force appointed by Clinton to review the United States' economic and social policies on youth.

[27] Farrow co-chaired the working group with senior United States Agency for International Development staff member David Barth beginning in 2010.

[30] Farrow was responsible for U.S. youth policy and programming with an aim toward "empower[ing] young people as economic and civic actors.

[32] He has written essays, op-eds, and other pieces for The Guardian,[33] Foreign Policy magazine,[34] The Atlantic,[35] The Wall Street Journal,[36] the Los Angeles Times[37] and other periodicals.

In October 2013, Penguin Press acquired Farrow's book, Pandora's Box: How American Military Aid Creates America's Enemies, scheduling it for 2015 publication.

[44] Farrow detailed first-hand accounts of journalists, biographers, and major publications purposefully omitting from their work decades of rape allegations targeting Cosby.

Those e‑mails featured talking points ready-made to be converted into stories, complete with validators on offer—therapists, lawyers, friends, anyone willing to label a young woman confronting a powerful man as crazy, coached, vindictive.

[44]In closing his guest column, Farrow expressed his view of media culture as one that actively discourages victims of abuse from coming forward.

[49][50][51] The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for Farrow's reporting, sharing the award with Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey at The New York Times.

[58] On July 27, 2018, The New Yorker published an article by Farrow saying that six women had accused media executive and CBS CEO Leslie Moonves of harassment and intimidation, and that dozens more described abuse at his company.

[60] On September 14, 2018, Farrow and Jane Mayer published information pertaining to an allegation of sexual assault against lawyer, jurist, and then-United States Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

[63] On July 3, 2021, The New Yorker published an investigative article by Farrow and journalist Jia Tolentino detailing the Britney Spears conservatorship dispute.

[71] Farrow served as an executive producer on Endangered directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, focusing on threats against journalists which released in June 2022.

[79] In February 2014, Farrow received the third annual Cronkite Award for "Excellence in Exploration and Journalism" from Reach the World, in recognition of his work since 2001, including his being a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth in 2001.

[89] In May 2020, The New York Times reporter Ben Smith published an article titled "Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?"

[92] In a Slate piece, Ashley Feinberg described Smith's report as an "overcorrection for resistance journalism" and opined that his approach showed "broad-mindedness, sacrificing accuracy for some vague, centrist perception of fairness.

[97] The two became engaged in 2019 after Farrow wrote a proposal to Lovett in the draft for his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

"[100] In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, Mia Farrow said that Ronan could "possibly" be the biological child of singer Frank Sinatra, with whom she said she had "never really split up.