On Friday, the world woke up to a new face splashed across the home page of the Daily Mail: Olivia Nuzzi, blonde, attractive, and no shrinking violet, posing at an event in her stretchy leopard-print top.
At just 31 years old, she’s had a short but hard-charging career as a scoop-oriented, politically connected reporter that’s already media-world mini-legend. But her sources are about to dry up: she was placed on leave by New York magazine, where she has been Washington correspondent since 2017, over a personal relationship that she developed with a reporting subject. The media newsletter Status quickly revealed it was the Trump supporter and headline magnet 70-year-old Robert F. Kennedy Jr..
It was sexting, it seems, not sex, but still, a straight-out-of-Shonda-Rhimes story line. They met just once, when she visited his Brentwood, California, estate on assignment for New York. Published in November 2023, the feature was far from a love letter, although it may have been a meet-cute. He greeted her, she writes, with an “unfriendly expression” and drove her to a trailhead in the Santa Monica Mountains in a van that “smells so bad I thought I might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun.” While hiking, she hammered him with questions about anti-vaxxers and Trumpworld while he cleared the path from “the astounding amount of waste produced by his dogs.”
That was apparently their last IRL meeting. A Kennedy spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” And yet New York announced that Nuzzi “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.”
On Thursday night, in a statement to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Nuzzi said, “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”
The feature was far from a love letter, although it may have been a meet-cute.
Love is strange, and attraction, even stranger—especially in Washington, where power, and in this case proximity to power, is the preferred aphrodisiac.
The Kennedy-Nuzzi debacle is especially tawdry because Kennedy is renowned for his “lust demons” and frantic womanizing, despite his being married to actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi had been engaged to journalist Ryan Lizza, who himself was exiled from The New Yorker in 2017 when it was revealed he was having an “inappropriate” relationship.
Web sites and Reddit forums were quick to dredge up the most salacious, and least salient, elements of her biography: her college internship with Anthony Weiner’s own sext-sunk mayoral campaign (he referred to her as “Monica”), previous feuds (including an especially fraught falling-out with Keith Olbermann), and the time a candidate’s communications director called her a “slutbag.” That one made the national news.
It’s an unfortunate development in what has been, otherwise, an extraordinary rise. Nuzzi grew up in New Jersey, where her father worked for the sanitation department. She attended Fordham before dropping out to join the Daily Beast, where her coverage of the 2016 presidential election made her one of the highest-profile journalists of her generation.
At New York, she authored incisive profiles of big names and covered presidential campaigns with style, verve, and nuance. It wasn’t all that long ago that she was breaching Mar-a-Lago to examine Donald Trump’s ear (among other things), but now it’s safe to say she’s off the list.
There’s been heated media speculation about who could have leaked the correspondence with Kennedy, and how it may have destroyed a Washington power couple. Following Lizza’s firing from The New Yorker, he had managed to jump-start his career, landing at Politico as its chief Washington correspondent and co-author of its Playbook column. However Lizza confirmed on Friday that his engagement with Nuzzi was over.
Despite all this, it’s not impossible to imagine a Hollywood ending. Think of how this could play on Netflix. Too bad the title of Bombshell has already been taken.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
