And who, exactly, wins in this bi-coastal clash of egos? In one corner we have Olivia Nuzzi, 32: a journalist with an identity built on the twin pillars of elite access and great hair; she seemed reputationally ruined after news broke of her affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr, 39 years her senior and a subject of her reporting, last year; forcibly exiled from the Waspy Arcadia of Georgetown to Malibu; now a staff editor at Vanity Fair. Facing her? Ryan Lizza, 51: Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé; sacked from the New Yorker in 2017 over sexual misconduct allegations; formerly of Politico and now self-published on Substack; he remains in Washington DC.
Here’s what happened (deep breath!): Nuzzi had an-over-the-phone affair with RFK Jr while reporting on him as a presidential candidate in 2023. She was fired from New York magazine in 2024 and fled the city. She wrote a book in secret – American Canto (self-mythology check) about the twisted soul of America and her own romantic tryst. She landed a profile in the New York Times last weekend, and the opening extract of her book was serialised in Vanity Affair today. This morning Lizza drops the first in what looks like to be a series of tell-all Substack posts about what really happened as the pair’s “decade-long” entanglement broke down.
It is titled: “Part 1: How I found out” (men are as deserving of the “messy bitch” moniker so often reserved for women). Throughout the whole piece – via a tortured and torturous metaphor about bamboo husbandry – we think Lizza is talking about discovering Nuzzi’s affair with RFK (“the ugly Olivia saga” he says), and we think he is questioning all the ways this could blow up the lives of this on-and-off-again pair. That is until the final reveal: this isn’t about RFK at all. Nuzzi, Lizza alleges, had a different affair with a different presidential candidate in a different election: the Republican Mark Sanford in 2020.
For a couple so consistently plagued with scandal and vanity, even these telenovela histrionics are extreme. I suppose in a country without kings, you need the coastal patrician class to provide the soap opera. But the spectacle looks remarkably like a circus, were it run by the clowns. Back to the question: who wins? Lizza has a nimbler route through the mire with none of the confines of Old Media (editors, fact-checking, print schedules). But in truth, this is a death knell for something else: in 2025, nothing is sexy any more. Not even illicit, unethical affairs with Kennedys.
Whatever mythos Nuzzi was constructing for herself – via profiles, and secretly written memoirs, brooding portraits of her on the beach in California, a white open-top Mustang driven around Malibu – has been found DOA. It is a shame: there is something likeable about the chaotic, self-destructive, honest-to-god romantic who continues to come good by virtue of talent (in Nuzzi’s case, it is not clear that prose-on-the-page is the talent). She is searching for a femme fatale, Joan Didion, Lana Del Rey crossover event: someone for whom fleeing to the West Coast was a fait accompli, rather than a blip in the plan. And it helps that she is beautiful: with porcelain skin, high cheek bones, bleached hair. The New York Times described her as a Hitchcock Blonde.
It was never going to work. Not when a vengeful ex-fiancé can spill details and secrets and thwart a carefully planned media strategy with a frictionless “publish” button. It’s not just his fault. It was never going to work when Nuzzi has decided that becoming the story is the best way to tell the story; that personal confession is the most direct route to universal truth. The persona she seeks relies on mystery. On secrets. On half truths. On obfuscation. Laying everything on the table? Having the world parse the quotidian details of your life over social media? A magazine profile? There’s a lot to say for holding something back. And there isn’t much holding back going on here.
And so what we have is two people in apparent pain, cannibalising each other’s corpses and reputations via some proxy battle between new and old media. Nuzzi says her book paints a picture of a nation and a personal life on fire. This all looks more like an autopsy to me. And none of it is very sexy at all.
[Further reading: I’ll say it: I’m a boyfriend, and proud]
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