What began as a salacious sexting affair between former New York magazine correspondent Olivia Nuzzi and Human Health Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — then a candidate in the 2024 presidential election — has spiraled out into an industry-rattling scandal that continues to expand its blast radius.
From her supposed seclusion in Malibu a year after news of her relationship with Kennedy broke, Nuzzi is trying to cast the fallout of her tryst with Kennedy as a cosmic reaction to the emotional turmoil within American politics, and herself.
A fizzy New York Times profile featuring softly lit photos of Nuzzi in grassy California dunes and driving a convertible directly compared her to something out of the Lana Del Rey cinematic universe of Born To Die ingenues crooning to their middle-aged lovers. Meanwhile, an excerpt from her upcoming memoir about the dalliance, which Nuzzi says was never consummated physically, lit up group chats throughout the media world. In the chapter, Nuzzi frames her affair with Kennedy and its fallout against the outbreak of the Palisades wildfire.
“You cannot outrun your life on fire,” she writes.
“Duh,” say we, the onlookers to her arson.
Vanity Fair, where Nuzzi now works as a West Coast editor, published the excerpt hours before Nuzzi’s ex-fiance Ryan Lizza, former chief Washington correspondent for Politico, alleged that Kennedy wasn’t even the first presidential candidate Nuzzi had an affair with. In a newsletter post, Lizza wrote about finding out Nuzzi was sleeping with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who ran for the GOP nomination in 2020 and was profiled by Nuzzi for New York.
Here’s what you need to know about the scandal that won’t go away:
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Who is Olivia Nuzzi?
Olivia Nuzzi, 32, is the West Coast editor for Vanity Fair, and was previously the Washington, D.C., correspondent for New York magazine, a role she held between 2017 and 2024. Nuzzi first exploded into the Washington media scene after detailing her experience interning for Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign — which was rocked by its own digital sex scandal — for the New York Daily News. As a campaign reporter for The Daily Beast between 2014-2017, Nuzzi covered the rise of Trump during the 2016 election cycle.
Nuzzi developed a reputation for deep insider access to some of the most prominent figures in American politics — including Trump. She profiled Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been married to his third wife Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines since 2014, for New York in November 2023. The piece, titled “The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign” was cutting. Nuzzi described Kennedy as a “Frankencandidate” riddled with paranoia. Shortly before the news of relationship with Kennedy broke, Nuzzi profiled Trump in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against him in Pennsylvania, meeting him at his Mar-a-Lago resort and taking a close look at the former president’s ear.
Nuzzi was slated to co-author a book about the 2020 election with her then-partner, veteran political reporter Ryan Lizza, but the project was put on hold in 2021. Nuzzi announced her engagement to Lizza in 2022, but the engagement was called off amid the fallout from the news of her relationship with Kennedy.
What happened between Nuzzi and RFK Jr.?
In September 2024, former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy dropped a bombshell report in his newsletter, Status: New York magazine had placed political reporter Nuzzi on leave after her editors became aware of an inappropriate romantic relationship between her and Kennedy.
The revelation triggered an ethics crisis that rippled throughout Washington and the media world. Nuzzi was one of New York’s most prominent writers and the face of its political coverage. In October 2024, New York announced that Nuzzi and the magazine had mutually agreed to part ways.
At the time, Nuzzi claimed that “some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal.”
“During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” she added. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict.”
According to Kennedy’s staff, their meeting at his Brentwood home was allegedly the only time the pair ever interacted in person.
Puck News later reported that Nuzzi had sent nude photos — described as “demure” by a source — to Kennedy. The Daily Beast reported that the digital affair had come to the attention of Nuzzi’s editors after Kennedy had bragged about receiving explicit photos from her. A source also told The Daily Beast that the pair had met in person on more than one occasion. According to a November New York Times profile of Nuzzi, it was actually New York editor and prominent tech journalist Kara Swisher who reported the affair to the magazine.
What is Nuzzi up to now?
Failing upward, apparently.
In October, just over a year after the scandal broke, Vanity Fair global editorial director Mark Guiducci announced that Nuzzi had been hired as the magazine’s West Coast editor. Her book American Canto — written to fulfill the joint book deal she previously had with Lizza — will be published by Simon & Schuster on December 2.
The New York Times published a glossy profile of Nuzzi in November, which was followed by Vanity Fair publishing an excerpt in which Nuzzi romanticizes her move to the West Coast, comparing the turmoil in his life to the turmoil caused by the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles in early 2025. Nuzzi’s writing was widely mocked online. Guiducci called it “as much a work of poetry as it is boldly contemporary nonfiction.”
What about Ryan Lizza?
Ryan Lizza, 51, is a veteran political journalist and Nuzzi’s former fiance. After the affair was revealed, Lizza voluntarily recused himself from coverage of RFK Jr.’s campaign, and confirmed that his romantic relationship with Nuzzi had ended. Lizza left his job at Politico in 2025 to launch his own substack.
The breakup was messy, to say the least. In October of 2024, CNN reported that in a court filing seeking a protective order, Nuzzi alleged that Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation — a threat he has since carried out.” Nuzzi was granted a temporary no-contact order against Lizza on Oct. 1, and another court hearing will be held on Oct. 15. Lizza denied the allegations, calling them “false,” and an attempt by Nuzzi to divert attention away from the scandal. She later withdrew the request.
Lizza responded to Nuzzi’s book excerpt with a blog post on his Telos Substack, titled “Part 1: How I Found Out.” The post compared the troubles in the relationship between Nuzzi and Lizza to the creeping, invasive bamboo that constantly threatened to overrun the garden they shared in their Georgetown home. The couple is united by overwrought nature metaphors.
The great twist comes in the last sentence, when Lizza reveals that he is not describing the revelation that Nuzzi was having an affair with Kennedy, but the discovery of an affair — previously unknown to the public — that took place four years earlier, in 2020. “We have a big problem,” Lizza recalls saying to the couple’s joint literary agent “Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford.”
Nuzzi profiled Sanford, the former South Carolina governor who ran a failed campaign to win the 2020 Republican nomination, for New York magazine in 2019.
Is it OK to be in a romantic relationship with a source if you’re a reporter?
No.
Fucking around with a source compromises the integrity of the reporter and their report, full stop. It also severely damages the credibility of any outlet that allows it to take place, which is why New York placed Nuzzi on leave and hired a third party to investigate.
From Rolling Stone US
