All the worst people you know are back again.
All the worst people you know are back again.
‘B
ad things happen when you hear my name
Deny your attraction, but I’ve got no shame.”
These are the opening lyrics of a song titled “Jailbait,” recorded by journalist Olivia Nuzzi back when she was a teenager and an aspiring MySpace pop idol, trading under the name of “Livvy.” The track is devoted to the singer’s attraction to older men with money, and, without knowing anything else, I’m inclined to believe Nuzzi wrote the words herself.
Readers, before I begin, I want to stipulate that I loathe every single person involved in the story I am about to discuss, some of them quite passionately, and all of them for slightly different reasons. That means this is going to be fairly vicious. But I feel required to register, at least in some unformed way, my intense disgust at every aspect of the entire Olivia Nuzzi story. Every last miserable goddamned part of it.
If you don’t already know what I’m referring to, then (1) I envy you; (2) I shall now have to sully your purity with this link to Jim Geraghty’s excellent piece from Monday morning, which covered the state of play up until that day. (Subsequent developments have proven insane.) The brief version: Olivia Nuzzi is a journalist who suddenly appeared via spontaneous generation back in 2013, when she turned a brief college internship with then-mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner into a cover story for the New York Daily News.
I remember it well because Weiner’s campaign famously collapsed once he was caught sexting with an underage girl — again. That was the story, for newshounds. But who was this stone-faced intern elbowing her way into the picture, making it about her? Why was she decked out in glamorous garb and makeup despite being a Fordham University junior from the Jersey sticks? Are you trying to be a writer or an “it” girl? (In New York City, that sort of drill is familiar to all. Weiner apparently had a nickname for Nuzzi: “Monica,” as in Lewinsky. Whatever his other faults, the man was eerily perceptive.)
From that day on she was unavoidable for a certain kind of political news consumer — one of those “New York glamour” journalists who wrote instantly forgettable, flowery profiles that read like airport “chick lit,” with embarrassingly otiose romance-novel verbiage and a complete lack of insight. First she went to the Daily Beast, and then to New York magazine, and then (naturally) to media deals with MSNBC, HBO, and Bloomberg Television. I remember rolling my eyes when Nuzzi announced her 2022 engagement to former New Yorker and then-Politico reporter Ryan Lizza. I recall my exact thought being: “Huh, I figured she would have traded up by now.” I was not wrong!
Because then she got into a sexting relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one she began while she worked on a New York profile on his presidential candidacy in November 2023. The scandal itself only came to light in September 2024, and the details are excruciatingly sordid and depressing, so much so that — after a surprising amount of internal agonizing — I decided the world was better off without reading my take on the morality of Olivia Nuzzi. Nobody needed that blast of napalm, not in print, least of all you.
Times change. Now Nuzzi — after little over a formal year of public disgrace — has resurfaced with a new home, a new prestige job, and a new memoir to flog. She has “gone Cali,” taking her talents to Los Angeles and a new editorial job at Vanity Fair. And as part of her public resurfacing, she has written a memoir of her relationship with that passing love of her life, RFK Jr., one hilariously titled — as if begging comparison to Ezra Pound (similarly lunatic, but actually talented) — American Canto.
If the excerpts are anything to go by, it is unreadable. A brief selection:
A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough.
You cannot outrun your life on fire.
I will spare you more, though if you want to feel as if your eyes are melting out of your skull like a man who accidentally stared into the Ark of the Covenant, I invite you to gaze at some of the clumsiest, purplest prose this side of freshman year English Comp 101. (There is a segment about RFK’s brain worm that boggles the mind. Is it possible to physically cringe so hard that you actually pull a muscle in your cheeks? I think I did.)
And that might have been that — another hypersexual young social climber bombing out, moving across the country, and attempting to resurrect her career with a tell-all memoir — except for the fact that the Other Side also gets to make a move. And the Other Side in this case is none other than Ryan Lizza. Cashiered from two prestigious media positions — once for Me Too allegations (which he denied) and once for the fallout from this mess — Lizza started his own lonely Substack and is now using it to tell his side of the story. And what a side it is.
You can read the piece if you want. The writing is obnoxious — there is a bamboo metaphor so strained that I honestly began to question whether Nuzzi learned her own atrocious prose style from Lizza — but I’ll give the man credit for packaging the tale of his own cuckoldry into a tight conceptual framework with a decent payoff. You see, Lizza understands that we’re all prepared for his story of how he lost his fiancée to RFK Jr., and his story is titled “Part 1: How I Found Out.” So he builds dramatic tension by relating how he first discovered her infidelity: a partially written love note he discovered among her belongings.
But what we find out at the end of the piece is that this first part of his story is set in 2020, before their engagement was publicly announced, and the politician that Olivia Nuzzi was sleeping with and writing glurgy love poetry to at the time was none other than former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
Yes, that Mark Sanford. The man who destroyed his political career in 2011 by abandoning not only his post but his wife and family to go “hiking the Appalachian Trail” with his Argentinian mistress, Maria Belen Chapur. Clearly that relationship didn’t work out either, because nine years later Nuzzi found time to seduce him. (These are Lizza’s characterizations, but they follow a pattern similar to that of the RFK affair.)
And that’s not all we find out! Remember when I said that Nuzzi’s career seemed to emerge mysteriously out of nowhere back in 2013? How does somebody swing a Daily News cover story with no prior credentials, after all? It turns out that she probably had a little bit of help from a “friend”: According to Lizza, during this entire period, Nuzzi was the kept woman of none other than Keith Olbermann.
Yes, that Keith Olbermann. (I told you this story would get insane.) Per Lizza’s timeline, she reached out to Olbermann after her high school “Jailbait” career as a pop idol failed to take flight — Lizza claims that she solicited him out of the blue, via private message — and entered into a transactional sexual relationship with him. Olbermann — and I stress that these are Lizza’s claims — apparently paid her way through college at Fordham and decked her out in the jewels and finery she suddenly began sporting around New York during her Anthony Weiner internship days.
And then, once that was done and paid for, Nuzzi decided it was frankly ghastly to be secretly sleeping and living with a wrinkled old rage-prune like Keith Olbermann. (This is the most understandable part of the story.) She therefore turned to high-flying New Yorker editor Ryan Lizza to bail her out. After all, Keith’s career was done — and Ryan’s was taking off. The same sexual pact clearly applied in this case, only apparently Lizza never grasped that he was dealing with Nuzzi on a transactional level.
Lizza’s narrative has not turned to “Part 2” yet, though I can only imagine what horrors we might discover. (Nuzzi clearly is drawn to insecure older men — “sugar daddies” — who have money and power yet lack sexual opportunity, and from the evidence it’s usually those she writes political profiles about.)
What conclusion to draw from all of this, at least preliminarily? What does it say when Anthony Weiner, of all people, comes across as the sanest participant? Nothing, nothing at all.
I hate everyone involved in this story. I hate Mark Sanford and RFK Jr. for being the incorrigibly sleazy political poon hounds they are. I hate Keith Olbermann for that, but also just on general principles alone. I hate Ryan Lizza for being such a mewling cuckold. (Don’t sympathize with his narrative blindly: Lizza left the wreckage of his own marriage and family to shack up with Nuzzi, seemingly never once realizing that he was being used as a means to an end, a comfortably safe stepping stone for a woman who was born to socially climb in the horizontal position.)
Most of all I hate Olivia Nuzzi, for permanently confirming everybody’s worst stereotypes about women in journalism. “Why do people always think female reporters sleep with their sources?” wrote Nuzzi back in 2015, in a tweet that I swear to God I am not making up. They think it because of you. On a professional level, I confess I’m offended about how smoothly Nuzzi has ascended in a dying and desperately competitive field, despite astounding acts of professional misbehavior.
But also I hate how Nuzzi has demonstrated that success in this business is untethered to writing skill or observational talent. I happen to have a lot of female friends in the world of commentary and journalism, so I’ll ask you to understand that I am channeling their frustrations here as well, by request. I know more than a few — specifically in New York and Washington — who have told me unpleasant stories of feeling pressured into sexual relationships if they wanted to advance their careers. Now here comes Nuzzi to prove that any profession can pay off, so long as you are secretly drawing inspiration from the world’s oldest one.