​Why I Don’t Hate Ryan O’Neal

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I don’t hate Ryan O’Neal. I don’t need other people to like him, and I’m not even sure I would say that I do. What matters to me is that I cannot honestly research Farrah while pretending that the man she loved for years was nothing more than a villain imposed on her life. Ryan was part of Farrah’s story for roughly three decades. That does not require me to defend everything he ever said or did, nor does it require anyone else to approve of their relationship. It does require me, however, to look at the relationship as it actually existed, rather than starting with the conclusion that Ryan was the villain and interpreting everything else around that conclusion.

I became aware of the hatred for Ryan very early, within the first few months of running my original Farrah Facebook page. The comments were usually variations of the same argument. Ryan ruined her life. She should have stayed with Lee Majors. Ryan was responsible for everything that went wrong afterward. At first, what bothered me was not even the criticism of Ryan. People are entitled to dislike him, or even hate him. What bothered me was what those arguments seemed to say about Farrah. Somewhere along the way, criticism of Ryan often became criticism of her judgment. People who believed they were defending Farrah were sometimes talking about her as though she had no meaningful choices of her own.

That has always struck me as a strange way to defend someone. Farrah was an adult woman. She could make good decisions, bad decisions, complicated decisions, and decisions that somebody watching from the outside would never make for themselves. None of that changes the fact that they were hers. Saying Farrah had agency does not mean every decision she made had to be wise. It does not mean every part of her relationship with Ryan was healthy or easy. It simply means that I am not comfortable rewriting her life as though everyone else gets to decide which choices she should have made once we know how the story ended.

The “she should have stayed with Lee” argument is especially problematic to me because it uses one relationship to judge another. Lee becomes the imagined alternative, the man who represents the life Farrah supposedly should have chosen, while Ryan becomes evidence that she took the wrong path. But that alternate life does not exist. Nobody knows what Farrah’s life would have looked like had she remained married to Lee Majors. We know the marriage she actually had, the reasons she publicly discussed for its problems, and the life she chose afterward. Turning Lee into the answer to everything that later went wrong creates a romanticized counterfactual and then uses that imagined life to judge the real one.

I also think hatred is a terrible research method. Once you decide someone is a villain, it becomes easy to interpret every ambiguous statement in the worst possible way, give more weight to information that confirms what you already believe, and dismiss anything that complicates the picture. I have watched interviews with Ryan that others seemed to approach with their conclusions already formed. I did not always see or hear the same things they did. That does not mean my interpretation is automatically correct and theirs is wrong. It means that feelings toward a person can affect how we interpret them, and anyone doing serious research has to be conscious of that. If I began by hating the man who occupied such a large part of Farrah’s adult life, that hatred would not remain neatly confined to Ryan. It would become a filter through which I viewed Farrah’s decisions, her statements about him, the people around them, and nearly thirty years of her life. 

I read Ryan’s memoir and liked it. That does not mean I agree with everything in it or assume every memory is beyond dispute. His account can fill gaps, provide context, and be compared with other versions of her life. I have also read Tatum O’Neal’s A Paper Life, which contains material that is extraordinarily difficult to read, including accusations of serious abuse. Even after reading it, I did not come away hating Ryan. I came away thinking, again, that complicated families are complicated precisely because simple judgments rarely explain everything. The fact that people continue relationships with one another after terrible conflicts is itself part of the complexity. I do not have to resolve those contradictions before I can learn from them.

More importantly, I cannot simply discard Ryan as a source because somebody dislikes him. A firsthand source can be biased and still be valuable. The responsible approach is to compare it with other evidence, not throw it away because the person telling the story has already been judged unworthy of consideration. The same standard applies to everyone. Farrah’s own words matter. Ryan’s words matter. The accounts of people close to them matter. No one gets automatic control over the story, but no one should be dismissed simply because they complicate a preferred narrative.

And the record I have reviewed does complicate the idea that Farrah should be remembered primarily as someone trapped by Ryan. On The Arsenio Hall Show, when Farrah and Ryan were asked why they were doing Good Sports together, Farrah answered that they “just love to be together pretty much,” and shortly afterward called him funny. In a 1984 appearance with Ryan on The Tonight Show, she readily agreed when Johnny Carson described him as charming and talented. Another archival interview included in This Is Farrah Fawcett has Farrah describing her initial attraction to Ryan as “magical” and later saying that love for someone was more important to her than a piece of paper. The same material does not pretend the relationship was simple; it describes it as complicated, passionate, volatile, and deeply connected.

That combination reflects what I have found over and over again. Love and volatility are not mutually exclusive. A relationship can contain conflict and still contain real affection. In Farrah Fawcett Forever, Farrah explains the relationship in unusually direct terms: they made each other laugh, loved each other, respected each other, were committed, and had what she called a “deep love” and a “deep support system.” The same passage sits beside an anecdote about the two of them screaming at each other during a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. That is almost the relationship in miniature. It was neither love nor volatility. It could be both.

In my research so far, I have not found Farrah expressing any hatred toward Ryan. I have found frustration, difficulty, humor, affection, attraction, commitment, and love. At times, she even pushed back when others spoke negatively about him. During her 1997 interview with Howard Stern, for example, when Stern began mocking Ryan, Farrah responded simply, “Ryan is very sweet.” That does not prove everything behind closed doors was good, nor would I make that claim. It does mean I should be careful not to project onto Farrah emotions that I have not seen her express.

This is where I think hatred can begin to overwhelm Farrah’s story. I do not think people necessarily minimize everything she accomplished after Lee. The problem is subtler than that. Ryan can become the lens through which people interpret the rest of her life. Her decisions become Ryan decisions. Her difficulties become Ryan difficulties. Her disappointments become evidence against Ryan. Eventually, a man some fans hate begins to define the woman they claim to be remembering. That seems backward to me. Farrah was a whole person. Defining her life through one relationship, or through your hatred of the person she chose to have that relationship with, is a poor way of remembering her.

I understand that some people believe hating Ryan protects Farrah. To be on Farrah’s side, they seem to believe, requires being against Ryan. I see almost the opposite. If protecting Farrah requires me to pretend she did not understand her own life, that other people know whom she should have loved better than she did, or that thirty years of choices can be dismissed because outsiders believe she chose the wrong man, then I am not sure what is being protected. Farrah’s agency matters to me more than creating a clean story around her.

None of this is an argument that anyone should like Ryan O’Neal. My purpose is not to rehabilitate him, excuse him, or convince Farrah’s fans that they have misunderstood everything. It is simply to explain why hatred is not a useful foundation for the work I am trying to do. I want that work to be based on facts, Farrah’s own words, the accounts of people who actually knew her, and a willingness to accept complexity where the record requires it. I want to see her strengths and weaknesses, good decisions and bad ones, contradictions and complexities. I want the truth as close as the surviving record allows.
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Ryan belongs in that record because Farrah put him there, not because I did.