It felt like something out of Spy magazine in the 1980s, or Gawker in the first years of the new millennium — a media scandal drenched in sex, politics, secrets and self-dramatization.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, political writers who had a habit of making news both before and after they were engaged to each other, were in near unavoidable circulation this week, overwhelming social media and the universe of Amtrak’s Northeast corridor.
These two products of legacy media, who once covered people in power for major publications, now find themselves hustling for attention in an environment where nothing gets you noticed like salacious self-revelation. They have stories to tell, and they are at the center of them.
For the uninitiated: Ms. Nuzzi, 32, and Mr. Lizza, 51, were a modestly glamorous, well-connected Washington couple. They ended their engagement last year, after her personal involvement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became widely known.
Ms. Nuzzi profiled Mr. Kennedy for New York magazine during his presidential run in 2023 and lost her job the next year, after her bosses learned of the entanglement. In recent days, she has re-emerged to promote her memoir-ish work of social commentary, “American Canto.” First, there was a profile in The New York Times. Then, on Monday, came the publication of an excerpt on the website of Vanity Fair, which Ms. Nuzzi recently joined as West Coast editor.
In the excerpt, she describes her ardent feelings for a man she calls the Politician. He is strikingly similar to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., down to the dead worm in his brain. “I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny,” Ms. Nuzzi wrote. “I loved his brain.”
On Monday at 7:18 p.m., Mr. Lizza delivered his reply in a lengthy Substack post. Ms. Nuzzi’s relationship with Mr. Kennedy, he claimed, was not her first professional transgression. There had been another man, another story subject: Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina. Ms. Nuzzi had profiled him for New York magazine in 2019, when he was making his own bid for the presidency. Mr. Lizza wrote that, some months after the story appeared, Ms. Nuzzi and Mr. Sanford had a sexual relationship.
Ms. Nuzzi’s lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld, said in a statement: “In ‘American Canto,’ Ms. Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.” Mr. Wilkenfeld went on to say that his client would “not dignify efforts to impugn her character with any future response.”
Informed of the lawyer’s comments, Mr. Lizza did not budge. “It’s true,” he said. “Stay tuned.” He was expecting to post the second installment of his narrative on his Substack as early as this weekend, he said. The first one was offered at no cost; the next one may or may not appear behind a paywall.
What did Vanity Fair make of Mr. Lizza’s claim that Ms. Nuzzi had apparently been romantically involved with a second story subject? “We were taken by surprise and we are looking at all the facts,” a spokesman for the magazine said on Friday.
Critics on social media delivered harsh reviews of Ms. Nuzzi’s book excerpt and Mr. Lizza’s post. Mr. Lizza was mocked for his florid descriptions of the “invasive bamboo” growing in his backyard, which he compared to the secrets he shared with Ms. Nuzzi. The political commentator Ana Marie Cox wrote a withering Substack post offering detailed edits of “American Canto.”
Some of Ms Nuzzi’s online detractors dug up old Twitter posts that could be considered retroactively embarrassing. Ten years ago, for example, she signaled her approval of a New York magazine piece headlined “Why Can’t Hollywood Get Female Journalists Right?”, which condemned the many films and TV shows that promoted the insidious stereotype of women reporters seducing their subjects. Ms. Nuzzi, who was not yet employed by the magazine, posted a link to the essay on Twitter. “Why,” she wrote, “does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?”
In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Nuzzi said the negative reaction to her book excerpt didn’t bother her. “I am pretty detached from the outcome,” she said. “Any time the notion of the external world intruded on the process of writing the book, I’d bat it away, thinking that a very, very good outcome would be if the book was received with open minds in 20 or 30 years. Hilariously, I’m an optimist.”
If Ms. Nuzzi’s book excerpt suggested an attempt at a kind of New Journalism poetry, Mr. Lizza’s post, “Part I: How I Found Out,” was an exercise in suspense. Readers approached it with the assumption that he would describe how he had discovered Ms. Nuzzi’s involvement with Mr. Kennedy. He left the disclosure about Mr. Sanford until the end, as if composing a treatment for a Hulu series that concludes each episode with a cliffhanger.
Mr. Lizza’s post rocketed across social media partly because he brought another known figure into his melodrama: Keith Olbermann, a former face of MSNBC and ESPN. Mr. Lizza told his readers that he had once helped Ms. Nuzzi “escape” from Mr. Olbermann, with whom she’d had “an unusual relationship,” he wrote.
Mr. Olbermann, 66, knows all too well how the attention economy works, and on Monday night he didn’t hesitate to throw himself into the social media maelstrom.
On X, where he regularly criticizes the Trump administration, he posted a meme showing Keanu Reeves dodging bullets, with the caption “this is me.” Then he recorded an episode of his podcast, in which he discussed his time with Ms. Nuzzi and voiced his low opinion of her book excerpt.
Mr. Olbermann had lived with her for a while in a Trump building on the Upper East Side, “if you can believe the irony,” he told me. He said he had discovered her writing on Twitter, where she provided witty political analysis as a student, and he wondered if she might be a good fit for the TV show he had hosted in those days.
They met for dinner. She was 18. He was 52. Instead of working together, they began dating, he said. They got two Maltese puppies and James Thurber-inspired tattoos. “It was marriage-y,” Mr. Olbermann said. “It was very much an at-home-with-the-dogs sort of thing.”
“One of the things that drew us together is that neither of us really liked people,” he continued. The dogs missed her when she moved out. He said he had determined this because they looked sad when they saw her on CNN.
The day after our conversation, Mr. Olbermann called to clarify something that had not come up; he wanted it known that they did not begin a physical relationship until Ms. Nuzzi was 19.
Ms. Nuzzi apparently does not consider her relationship with Mr. Olbermann to have been “marriage-y.” “I have not ever before and will not now acknowledge any claims made by this person,” she wrote in a text.
The age difference between Ms. Nuzzi and Mr. Lizza was narrower — 19 years. He was known for measured political analysis, but he had suffered his own setbacks. The New Yorker, where he had served as Washington correspondent for a decade, fired him in 2017, after he was said to have engaged in what the magazine called “improper sexual conduct,” a charge he denied.
Mr. Lizza moved on to Politico. He and Ms. Nuzzi were engaged in 2022, two years after her alleged fling with Mr. Sanford. Their eventual separation was hardly amicable. In September 2024, she filed an application for an order of protection against him in the domestic violence division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Politico put Mr. Lizza on leave. He filed motions denying her claims and accused her of defamation. In December, she withdrew the petition, with her lawyer stating she would “garner the greatest protection by disengaging” from the process.
Mr. Lizza left Politico early this year. In his first post for his Substack venture, Telos.news, he slammed his former employer. Ms. Nuzzi moved to Los Angeles and got to work on her book, a grafting of her own crisis onto the current national maladies, one attempted in the spirit of Joan Didion, and so close to its apparent source of inspiration that the cruelties of the Santa Ana winds are invoked at least three times.
When “American Canto” is published on Dec. 2, it is likely to result in more argument, more content, possibly more revelations. And there will doubtless be more effort at brand expansion on the part of its central players, who must now shop themselves around seeking relevance in a reordered world.
On Thursday morning, several hours after Mr. Olbermann’s podcast dropped, he sent me a text: “The Olivia segment on today’s podcast was only about a half hour. It has 44K listeners so far.”
Ginia Bellafante writes features, profiles and social criticism for The Times.
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