Self-destructive behavior can be fun to read about when the principals are good-looking, famous or powerful. In the downfall and attempted resurrection of the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, we have a trifecta of prurience:
A beautiful young political reporter who is engaged to a much older professionally successful colleague falls in love with her subject, a much older, married presidential candidate from a storied American family.
With her fiance in the dark, a year of passionate phone sex and bad poetry reportedly ensues. But the beautiful young reporter is also something of a blabbermouth and word gets out. A famous tech journalist, once Nuzzi’s mentor, reveals her transgressions to her fiance and her employer. Nuzzi’s engagement ends, the lover dumps her, she is fired from her job and — she flees to the West Coast because, you know, this is the place Easterners come to so they can take stock and seek redemption. You can’t get any farther from New York than Point Mugu. “Here,” as Joan Didion once famously wrote, “is where we run out of continent.”
Nuzzi’s new book, “American Canto,” is a disjointed mashup, part obscurantist memoir and part reflection on the weirdness of the era of Donald Trump, whom she has covered for years and who always seems happy to see her no matter what she writes about him. “Very young and very beautiful,” Trump says the first time they meet.
Nuzzi has the unfortunate habit of trying to channel Didion, California’s high priestess of angst. Huge mistake. Anyone who attempts to imitate the singular Didion just comes off cringey: “This I will tell you,” Nuzzi writes. “Events lost context. Words lost meaning.”
“I mean to tell you of the canyon where voices carried.”
“I mean to tell you that, before I was consumed by it, I could not have told you what it was.”
Another problem: Nuzzi is coy to the point of absurdity. She does not name now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with whom she allegedly had the affair that derailed her career. Instead, she calls him The Politician. (Kennedy has denied the claims.)
“He called me his baby bird, baby doll, baby love,” Nuzzi writes. The Politician trained her like one of the baby ravens in his Brentwood backyard, to come when offered a treat. “He told me that he wanted me to have his baby.” He would take a bullet for her.
She writes that The Politician, a former heroin addict, told her he secretly smokes the potent hallucinogenic drug DMT. This is an account that might have been of interest to the public when Kennedy was being confirmed by the Senate.
Nor does Nuzzi name her former fiance, Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker during the MeToo era, later resurfaced at Politico and now writes on Substack. Instead, she calls him “the man I did not marry.”
I did enjoy Nuzzi’s transcription of a conversation with President Trump. She asks him why he so often mentions “Silence of the Lambs” character Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail. Trump offers an extended rumination on how countries are releasing the criminally insane — people like Lecter! — who then seek asylum in the U.S.
“Oh wait,” Trump says. “Is that not clear?”
If you want to get a more literal, though one-sided, sense of what happened between Nuzzi and Lizza, and of the ways in which Nuzzi trampled on journalistic ethics, you can read Lizza’s poisonous, paywalled four-part Substack essay about her. The first installment has racked up more than 750,000 views. If his accusations are true — and her behavior gives us little reason to think otherwise — the real scandal here is her blatant disregard for the tenets most journalists hold dear: You do not become emotionally or sexually involved with your subjects or sources. Period.
Lizza accuses Nuzzi of cheating on him long before she met RFK Jr. with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford — he of “hiking the Appalachian Trail” fame — when Sanford was seeking the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. (Neither Sanford nor Nuzzi has commented on the allegations.)
Nuzzi, for her part, accuses Lizza of sleeping with a woman who worked for the Democratic presidential campaign while they were engaged. “She was pretty enough that I was not offended,” Nuzzi writes, “and not so pretty that I was offended.” It’s a wonder these two horny journos ever got any work done. (Lizza has denied the accusation.)
While Nuzzi writes in faux-Didion style that “I did not think it my place to offer prescriptive advice” to The Politician when he was dropping out of the 2024 race, Lizza claims Nuzzi worked as RFK Jr.’s “private political operative,” advising him on how to deal with the media, what to wear at a news conference and what to say. And, as proof, he published the strategy memo he says Nuzzi wrote for Kennedy.
And what did Nuzzi get in return?
Kennedy reportedly dumped her in a hot second after news of their affair leaked, and went on to a high-profile job in the second Trump administration while she self-exiled to Malibu to write a book that’s now being trashed by critics.
Vanity Fair recently announced it had hired Nuzzi to be its West Coast editor. That she would land such a plum job after destroying her credibility is perhaps more a testament to the cynicism of the magazine world than to her shamelessness. However, on Friday, the magazine announced they’d parted ways in light of the latest allegations about her breach of ethics.
Anyway, I predict Nuzzi will land on her feet.
After all, as Maureen Dowd told her, “At least you’re still young and beautiful!’”
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