Ronan Farrow Talks
video ©Dorri Olds
Ronan Farrow, the reporter who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in the New Yorker this year, gave a riveting talk at the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park South on December 20th. It was hosted by the Society of the Silurians.
It was fun to find out that Ronan and I share the same birthday :)
I had a nice exchange with Ronan (who happens to be Mia Farrow and Woody Allen's son) during which I was able to thank him for the Weinstein story because it helped change the entire focus of my book. I had originally set out to write a memoir about my own story of rape, which I had written about for The New York Times in January 2012.
The truth is, by 2017 I'd grown weary of writing about my own story. After my essay was published in The Times, it went viral. Dr. Drew contacted me to be a guest on his show. Then my essay became required reading for a victimology class at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I became a speaker for RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and I was commissioned to write many more essays about my gang rape.
It happened in 1973, when I was a 13-year-old living in Port Washington, Long Island. Classmates and I who attended Weber Junior High, had congregated at Nassau Knolls Cemetery one night to hang out, smoke pot and cigarettes, and drink. My naiveté made me a sitting duck.
Right before Ronan's Weinstein story broke, I had reached a point where I'd been contemplating setting my memoir aside to instead write an anthology about women who'd been raped. After the #MeToo hashtag shot across social media this year, my idea became solidified. I changed course to write a hybrid (memoir and self-help) book for rape survivors.
Every woman I interviewed has lived with shame for years. We have all blamed ourselves and most of us were too scared to tell anyone.
My book shares our harrowing experiences and how we got better and experts weigh in on how to navigate through the past trauma. If you'd like to learn more about the book, please visit https://gofundme.com/DorriOlds