‘Imagine This Were Your Sister,’ Ronan Farrow Tells Woody Allen’s Publisher

In fact, Ben Sevier, the senior vice president and publisher of Grand Central, had acquired the book quietly last March. At the time, Little, Brown, another division of Hachette, was in the midst of editing Mr. Farrow’s “Catch and Kill,” which was published in October and spent 11 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.

In that book, Mr. Farrow wrote candidly about his relationship with his sister, at one point describing how he asked for her advice about how to talk to someone who is “accusing a very powerful person of a very serious crime” before he interviewed one of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers. He also blamed NBC News executives for impeding his reporting on Mr. Weinstein before he eventually published it in The New Yorker.

In his email to Mr. Pietsch, he expressed concern that Dylan Farrow had not received a “fact-checking call,” and described his sister’s allegations as being “backed up by mountains of contemporaneous reports and evidence.”

Mr. Pietsch declined to comment on the issue of fact-checking, which is generally not a standard practice in book publishing, though books on sensitive subjects are often reviewed by lawyers to avoid libel.

On Monday, in a statement posted on Twitter, Dylan Farrow called Hachette’s announcement “deeply upsetting to me and an utter betrayal of my brother.”

Ms. Farrow, whose own first novel, “Hush,” will be published in the fall by Wednesday Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, also criticized the publisher for not contacting her for fact-checking, which she called “an egregious abdication of Hachette’s most basic responsibility.”

“This provides yet another example of the profound privilege that power, money and notoriety affords,” she said. “Hachette’s utter complicity in this should be called out for what it is and they should have to answer for it.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/books/woody-allen-ronan-farrow.html