Ronan Farrow and World of Wonder re-team for celebrity PI doc

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RuPaul’s Drag race producer World of Wonder (WOW) is teaming up with investigative journalist Ronan Farrow for a doc about the late celebrity PI Jack Palladino.

Titled The Palladino Files, the unscripted series is directed and produced by WOW’s Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and follows Farrow’s investigation into PI Jack Palladino, whose clients included Harvey Weinstein, and who was killed in 2021.

The project was unveiled at Sheffield DocFest where Barbato and Bailey hosted a conversation with Farrow, who joined live by video.

The Palladino Files follows the same format as Farrow’s 6 x 30-minute series Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, which focused on his investigations into the myriad allegations of sexual abuse levelled against Weinstein. The doc, also directed and produced by Barbato and Bailey, sold to HBO.

No broadcaster or platform is as-yet revealed for The Palladino Files.

Farrow described Catch and Kill’s format as “having one foot in the talk show interview world and one foot as a fully produced documentary”.

He said: “The half-hour length moved the story along really fast. I was interested in using that format again for another story that would be heavy on intimate interviews with everyone potentially involved in Jack’s killing and everyone involved in Jack’s biggest historic cases.”

The latest doc emerged, Farrow explained, when he discovered that Palladino had been hired by Weinstein to find out information after the allegations emerged – something he detailed in his 2019 book Catch and Kill.

“One of the firms that Weinstein hired was called Palladino and Sutherland, a glamorous husband and wife couple who became PIs to the stars,” he said. “I became fascinated by Palladino and wanted to tell a story about rich people hiring PIs with almost unlimited technical resources to spy on others.”

Barbato said Palladino was involved in high-profile cases including the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, The Black Panthers – “which represented the greatest internal threat to the nation at the time” – and the Jonestown massacre. Other clients included former President Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, car maker John DeLorean and R Kelly.

Although Palladino refused to talk with Farrow, he posthumously granted permission for Farrow to access his documents.

Farrow explained: “During the pandemic I got this call from Paladino’s lawyer, saying that he had been murdered and that one of the last wishes was that his files be opened up to me, even though I was an enemy in life. Perhaps he grudgingly respected the gumshoe work that I had done.

“His widow was initially very suspicious of me but she thought I might be able to help, using the files he had left behind, with the question of why he had been killed.”

Farrow also talked about the toil that the Weinstein investigations had on his mother, Mia Farrow.

“That was rough for her. There were periods where I was getting followed around, and I couldn’t go home. She had trouble with that whole period of time.”

Farrow calls out US media for ‘normalising fascism’

The Pulitzer Prize-winner also castigated media in the US for “normalising fascism.”

“In the rise of Trump 1.0 in 2016, journalists, including myself, were obsessed with the performance of fairness,” he said. “Increasingly, we normalised the fascist things that were eroding democratic rights because there was a need in newsrooms to balance left with right.

“The false equivalence created a space in which authoritarianism has flourished.”

He continued: “Any cursory study of the history of fascist authoritarianism reveals how pivotal disinformation is as a tool of oppression and repression.

“We are seeing that play out now in several places around the world, but it is in a very acute nadir in the United States.

“If you deny a democratic population access to facts it’s much easier to manipulate events and manipulate people. That’s why, like clockwork, one of the first steps that strong men take is to try to demonise the press and to cut off the access of the press.”

He said he envied public broadcasters like Canada’s CBC and the BBC in the UK, “where governments subsidise serious news while maintaining their editorial independence”.

“Public funding for truly adversarial independent watchdog news is something the United States has very little appetite for,” he added. “The gutting of PBS and NPR has been devastating.”

He urged journalists and documentary makers to tell stories across platforms, as he has done with Catch and Kill, as a way of extending reach.

“Where media consumption is so fractured we need to be able to tell stories across audio, video, and print. Diversification across media is a partial solution to a big problem which is that the business model is dropping out of investigative journalism.”