2024-09-21 18:35:03
New York magazine’s star political reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, is at the center of a bombshell report that emerged Thursday revealing that she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the failed presidential candidate who’s nearly four decades her senior.
News of the affair spread like wildfire, with the scandal being all the more intriguing because Nuzzi, 31, was engaged while Kennedy, 70, has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014. She also profiled Kennedy for a splashy story in the magazine in November 2023.
Nuzzi isn’t out of a job over the scandal—New York opted to put its star Washington correspondent on leave instead—but her engagement to Politico’s Ryan Lizza is no more.
“Because of my connection to this story through my ex-fiancée, my editors and I have agreed that I won’t be involved in any coverage of Kennedy in Playbook or elsewhere,” Lizza said in his lone statement on the matter.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza pose together at an after party following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2023. They’ve since broken up.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Nuzzi and Lizza, 50, split “recently” after getting engaged in September 2022, sources told the New York Post.
It’s unclear how long the couple had been together, but photos of Lizza on Nuzzi’s Instagram go as far back as Jan. 2018. That was just after he was fired at the New Yorker for allegations of “improper sexual conduct.”
Meanwhile, Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy reportedly began sometime earlier this year, though the journalist has insisted that the relationship was only “digital in nature.”
Kennedy has distanced himself from the scandal without denying that he and Nuzzi were “sexting,” as a source described the relationship to the New York Post.
“Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece,” a Kennedy spokesperson told CNN.
This scandal isn’t the only time Nuzzi, a New York native and Fordham University graduate, has made headlines. She first gained national attention in 2013 when she wrote about her treatment by Anthony Weiner while she worked on his New York City mayoral campaign.
She wrote a blog post for NSFWcorp about the experience, claiming that Weiner referred to her and other interns as “Monica” in a reference to Monica Lewinsky. Days after the blog was published, she was paid by the New York Daily News to write a follow-up piece that ran on its front page.
Olivia Nuzzi wrote a cover story for the New York Daily News in 2013. She was 20 at the time.
New York Daily News
Weiner and his team were enraged by the stories. Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the campaign, referred to Nuzzi as a “b—h,” “s–tbag,” “t–t,” and a “c–t” in an interview with Talking Points Memo.
Morgan later apologized, claiming she thought the interview was off-the-record, but the comments only brought more eyes to the scandal—further thrusting Nuzzi into the spotlight. She was hired by the Daily Beast in 2014 while she was still attending Fordham.
Nuzzi covered the political rise of Donald Trump and was listed as one of Forbes’ 25 “most influential” people in news media in 2016. Two years later, the magazine listed Nuzzi on its annual “30 Under 30” list.
Olivia Nuzzi has regularly appeared as a speaker at forums. This snap was taken at a South Beach hotel in Feb. 2022.
Alexander Tamargo/Reuters
Nuzzi, then still in her mid-twenties, left the Beast in 2017 to take a job with New York that’d have her based in Washington. Scandal followed her to the beltway and, in 2018, she admitted entering the home office of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s ex-campaign manager, to take a photo without permission. Lewandowski alleged that she also stole a photo album.
“You know, I just walked into the house, because nobody was answering at the door,” she said of the incident, adding that she left at the advice of her boyfriend, who told her it was illegal.
“I was like, ‘f–k,’” she told The Hill.
She made her way into the headlines again while covering a story earlier this year when she was thrown out of Manhattan court for taking photos from the overflow room of Trump’s hush money trial.
The incidents were merely brief speed bumps in Nuzzi’s career, however. She was invited into the Oval Office later in 2018 for a sit down interview with Trump and has landed big interview after big interview ever since.
She again scored an exclusive sit-down with Trump this summer, just weeks after he narrowly survived the first attempt on his life. That article was New York’s cover story on Sept. 9 and focused on Trump’s ear, which seemed to heal incredibly quickly after being shot.
Nuzzi seemingly scored another coup when she was tapped to by Bloomberg’s TV unit to host an interview show, Working Capital, earlier this year. But the planned media blitz for its rollout was canned amid an online left-wing campaign against her exposé on President Biden’s mental decline.
Nuzzi, who’s typically an avid poster to X, has gone quiet on the platform since Sept. 13. On the other side of the scandal, Kennedy—a noted womanizer and serial cheater—was hit with an unrelated story on Friday.
The Post reported a decade ago that it obtained a 2001 diary that Kennedy used to document the dozens of women he took to bed that year and on what dates, complete with their first names and occupations. He was in his seventh year of marriage to Mary Richardson Kennedy at the time.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, then an environmental attorney, waving the flag of Vieques Island in 2001.
Reuters
The tabloid wrote that Kennedy appeared to be taken aback by the alleged discovery.
“A Post reporter who questioned Kennedy on Friday about the diary was first met with six seconds of stunned silence,” the paper wrote.
Kennedy eventually responded: “I don’t think there is any way you could have a diary or journal of mine from 2001. I don’t have any comment on it. I have no diary from 2001.”
