Ronan Farrow has reemerged with a new documentary adapted from his New Yorker investigative story on the police’s mishandling of serial sexual predator Sean Williams. Production on the documentary is already underway.
The untitled Farrow doc on Williams is being directed and produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and produced by Farrow, the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. Unjin Lee also produces the presently untitled documentary film.
Ronan Farrow has previously converted his reporting into Surveilled (2024) and Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes (2021) for HBO. Farrow was nominated for a spoken-word Grammy for the actual podcast tapes that would be adapted for the screen for Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes.
Bailey and Barbato made Small Town News and Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking, an adaptation of Fisher’s one-woman Broadway show, for HBO.
The new documentary film “chronicles a maze of revelations” about Johnson City, Tenn., resident Williams, “tracing both his decades-long evasion of justice and an ensuing scandal over claims of corruption and systemic law enforcement failures,” the HBO-provided synopsis reads. It goes on to tout “exclusive access to the subjects at the heart of the story, including Kat Dahl, a determined federal prosecutor who was dismissed after investigating the case.”
It was Dahl who reached out to Farrow, sparking the New Yorker article from earlier this year. The documentary film, from Farrow’s Ronan Production Group, HBO Documentary Films and World of Wonder, is basically the continuation of their joint investigation.
“The details of this story at times defy belief. I’m so grateful to the sources in Johnson City who have helped to bring it to light,” Farrow said in a statement accompanying HBO’s announcement. “In the wake of radical reductions to the federal government’s oversight mechanisms for corruption, this community’s questions about police accountability are more urgent than ever.”
Farrow won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his reporting on the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations.
