The soap-opera sideshow currently roiling elite media involves journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, a formerly engaged Washington, D.C., power couple whose breakup has produced dueling, late-breaking memoirs.
Nuzzi, who was infamously axed by New York magazine after she allegedly conducted a digital affair with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., resurfaced after a year of self-imposed exile with a new gig as Vanity Fair‘s West Coast editor and a memoir of her liaison with Kennedy.
After a year of remaining mostly mum over the matter of his ex, Lizza responded to Nuzzi’s memoir with a series of bombshell blog posts, alleging that Nuzzi carried on illicit romances not with one failed presidential candidate, but with two: the second being the scandal-ridden Mark Sanford of South Carolina.
The love lives and misadventures of Lizza and Nuzzi really should not matter. Strip away their looks and talented turn of phrase, and the yearslong fallout over Lizza and Nuzzi’s breakup is more human than Hollywood. Infidelity is a sin so old it is literally biblical, but so are the hopes of learning from those mistakes and seeking redemption. The question of journalistic ethics is ongoing. Lizza levied new salacious charges against Nuzzi that have not yet been corroborated, though they are worrying if true. But the shock and awe from a media that is regarded by the public as being as trustworthy as used-car salesmen and payday loan sharks seems more than a bit performative.
The only villain that really matters to the broader public is the politician who has maintained a damning silence throughout Nuzzi’s personal and professional turmoil. Kennedy has issued a categorical denial of the affair, insisting that he met Nuzzi only once, for a 2023 profile. But if Nuzzi’s graphic and galling claims are false, why the hell would Kennedy not have already buried her with a defamation suit?
Through disturbingly rose-tinted glasses, Nuzzi says she fell genuinely in love with Kennedy in excerpts of her forthcoming memoir, but she concedes that she only did so after (she alleges) Kennedy said he loved her several times. Nuzzi boasts that Kennedy told her he wanted to impregnate her and swore he would take a bullet for her, but Kennedy (she alleges) asked Nuzzi to take a bullet for him. When the affair first surfaced, whatever her private mistakes, Nuzzi admitted the truth and relinquished her engagement and career. Kennedy called her a liar and parlayed a failed presidential bid into a Cabinet position.
Even those previously dismayed by Kennedy’s decades of dedication to lying about the efficacy of life-saving vaccines, his climate cultism, and already appalling romantic rap sheet will walk away from the his and her’s essays about the Nuzzi affair with new fodder for their nightmares.
Nuzzi alleges that Kennedy, who now controls one-quarter of all federal spending by the United States government, still abuses Schedule I drugs, such as psychedelics and DMT. Not only are these banned under U.S. law, but they are also drugs that, when used, theoretically render a government employee ineligible for the top secret security clearances that virtually all HHS secretaries normally obtain.
Nuzzi says she was so paranoid after the fallout of the affair that she slept next to a loaded gun. This could be written off as the unreliable musings of some writer scorned. But Lizza, in the middle of exacting essays’ worth of revenge on his ex, inadvertently corroborates and validates Nuzzi’s terror, writing that Nuzzi was scared that Kennedy would kill her if the liaison went public. Sure, Lizza paints an unflattering portrait of his ex, but “Bobby” comes off far worse, allegedly demanding “discipline and fearlessness” and “at times, total submission” from the online paramour, who is young enough to be his daughter.
Perhaps if Kennedy had a prior reputation as an altar boy, we could grant him the benefit of the doubt. But this is a man who, after allegedly cheating on his first wife, financially abused and cheated on his second wife (and mother of his children) until she committed suicide. After bullying his ex’s family in court to bury her in the Kennedy compound, Kennedy clandestinely disinterred her corpse and dumped it in an unmarked grave by the highway.
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If Lizza and Nuzzi had not chosen to publish competing memoirs, I would not feel comfortable writing about their breakup at all. They are not CEOs, members of Congress, actors, or even influencers. But Kennedy is different: he is 12th in line to the presidency and the nation’s top health official — someone who, according to both Lizza and Nuzzi, uses illegal drugs, engages in unhygienic behavior, and falsely claims that long-established vaccines such as measles and HPV are not only ineffective but dangerous. He is a 71-year-old man who allegedly sought to have a child with a woman other than his third and current wife, and who insists that mothers who take Tylenol cause autism rather than acknowledging the well-documented risk factor of advanced parental age.
And again, if Nuzzi or Lizza, for that matter, are lying, Kennedy can and should sue them into oblivion for defamation. Until he does, however, he remains the only villain of an otherwise sad personal saga that matters to the public.
