No journalistic adage deserves to be chiseled into a tablet quite as much as “Don’t become the story.” And no journalist deserves to have that tablet taped to her forehead as much as Olivia Nuzzi.
Increasingly, Nuzzi serves as a walking reminder not to make messiness your own personal brand. She may technically be a political writer, but it’s fair to assume that she’s destined to go down in history as the woman who got sacked for sexting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In fairness to Nuzzi, she has never been particularly afraid to put herself in the center of the drama. This is a woman whose first foray into the media took the form of a series of disparaging blog posts about her time interning for Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral bid—in short, he got people’s names wrong and had a tendency to underpay—which would have been highly underwhelming if not for the response it drew from Weiner’s communications director, who variously called Nuzzi a “bitch,” “twat,” “cunt,” and “slutbag” during an interview. But Nuzzi shook this off with a series of journeywoman bylines for publications such as Politico, GQ, and New York magazine.
It all came crashing down last year with the R.F.K. Jr. scandal. Again, Nuzzi had made herself the story. Again, it backfired: New York responded by putting her on leave.
How has Nuzzi reacted? You’ll never guess. For the past week, she has made herself genuinely inescapable. This time her comeback bid has dropped all pretense of actual journalism in favor of hauling every photon of attention toward herself.
She has a new job, as West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, which seems like a sharp handbrake turn for a woman who has primarily worked in Washington. But perhaps that doesn’t matter, since her beat appears to be “What it’s like to be Olivia Nuzzi.” As of yet, her only byline in the magazine’s newly released Hollywood Issue—Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci’s first—is an excerpt from her book, American Canto. Without wanting to state the obvious, the book is about her.
Is it about her dalliance with R.F.K. Jr.? Who can say? She only refers to the figure as “The Politician,” so technically it could be anyone. True, she does whittle down his identity somewhat. She mentions that he is married. She mentions that he had been an addict. She mentions that she worries about the worm that might be eating his brain. Really, it’s anyone’s guess.
In the excerpt, Nuzzi writes that “The Politician” was “the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.” If you just felt a wash of exhaustion rush over your body, that’s probably you realizing there’s going to be an entire book of this.
Separately, Nuzzi was the subject of a recent New York Times profile in which she revealed that she read Dante and the Bible as inspiration for American Canto, a book she claims she wrote with her thumbs on her phone.
The reaction to American Canto’s publicity onslaught has, to be polite, been mixed. The New Statesman called it “telenovela histrionics.” Mediaite called it “Everything Wrong With Modern Media.” And then there’s Nuzzi’s former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, who has chosen to meet this messiness with a bucketload of his own.
Lizza—a former New Yorker writer fired in 2017 for “improper sexual conduct”—this week wrote a Substack post offering his side of the story, and it makes Nuzzi’s melodrama feel staid by comparison.
Entitled “Part 1: How I Found Out,” Lizza’s article wastes no time naming names. He claims that former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann had paid for Nuzzi’s college and apartment in New York’s West Village, given her thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, and that Nuzzi “felt stalked” by him after they broke up. (To which Olbermann responded on X: “What was I supposed to do? Get her Gift Certificates from Kmart?”) But that’s simply a warm-up for the moment when he announces how he stumbled across her big political sex scandal.
In the post, Lizza says that he found an unsent love letter from Nuzzi to a presidential candidate, one that made it clear the two had been physical. R.F.K. Jr.? Nope. He’s talking about Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor from South Carolina and presidential hopeful, with whom Nuzzi also allegedly had an affair, in 2020. At least you can’t deny that she has a type.
Seeing as this is 2025, the Internet has reacted to this second scandal by muddying the waters further, i.e., digging through social media. And, sure enough, embarrassing tweets have surfaced. In one, Nuzzi writes, “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?” Another is a schoolgirlish sketch of Sanford’s face.
Most mortifying of all, though, is an MP3 of what appears to be a single that Nuzzi released in 2010 under the name “Livvy” (coincidentally, R.F.K. Jr.’s alleged nickname for her). This alone would be bad enough, but what pushes it over the edge is the fact that it goes: “Bad things happen when you hear my name / Deny your attraction but I’ve got no shame.” And also that it came out when she was 16. And also that it is literally called “Jailbait.”
It’s hard to know where any of this mess will lead. Likely not to any serious journalism, because Olivia Nuzzi has made herself the story to such a degree that her byline will now eclipse any subject that she attempts to cover. Luckily for her, though, reality TV is still a thing. The Real Housewife of Brainworm Central, anyone?
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
