The ex-fiancé of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s digital lover, Olivia Nuzzi, is now claiming she served as an undercover “political operative” for the Health and Human Services secretary throughout his failed presidential bid.
Nuzzi, 32, allegedly had a fling with Kennedy, 71, after interviewing him for New York magazine in 2023.
Ryan Lizza, a journalist formerly at Politico, wrote in a bombshell new Substack post on Wednesday that former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi learned Kennedy had dumped the body of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.
Instead of reporting that information, a story that later became a hallmark of his botched campaign, Nuzzi then outed the source of the tip to Kennedy in a breach of basic journalistic ethics. Lizza claims Nuzzi helped Kennedy do damage control on the allegations before they were made public.
“Together they plotted ways to kill it, or, at the very least, get ahead of it,” Lizza, 51, wrote in his Substack piece titled “Catch and Kill.” The bear-dumping incident prompted a police investigation into animal cruelty. The case went unsolved until Kennedy confessed in a bizarre video shared on social media in August 2024, just days before a New Yorker article exposing the incident was published.
“As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate,” he added.
Lizza further claimed that Nuzzi was “secretly working to help make Bobby the next president,” and even helped negotiate the terms of his eventual endorsement of Donald Trump. This arrangement positioned Kennedy for a potential role in Trump’s Cabinet.
“The spring and summer of 2024 were busy for Olivia. Bobby was telling her he loved her and wanted to impregnate her, but he was also deeply confusing—he flipped back and forth between passionate engagement and total ghosting—and she was struggling to understand him,” wrote Lizza, who was fired by The New Yorker in 2017 following a sexual-misconduct allegation he has denied.
Lizza made several other explosive claims about Nuzzi’s alleged behind-the-scenes assistance to Kennedy. In one example, Lizza claims Nuzzi traded intel about the president with Kennedy after he realized his campaign was “over” and began negotiating an endorsement deal with Trump.
In another, he wrote that she helped secure Kennedy’s Secret Service protection by “work[ing] the phones to suss out the inside story holding up the decision and fed the information to Bobby to help him navigate the process,” until the Biden administration ultimately approved his detail.
He further claimed that a young campaign aide gave Nuzzi a “chaotic” inside account of why Kennedy chose Nicole Shanahan as his running mate—only for Nuzzi to convince the staffer not to go public, then Nuzzi exposed the staffer to Kennedy.
“She had successfully caught and killed an embarrassing tell-all from a campaign whistleblower whose identity she revealed to the candidate,” Lizza wrote. “In the media business, there are few journalistic crimes as serious as betraying a confidential source. How could any source—or reader—trust such a reporter again?”
He concluded with yet another bombshell. He alleged Nuzzi armed commission artist Isabelle Brourman with a secret recording device to carry while Brourman worked on a portrait of Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to Lizza, in that recording, the president made a claim about the July 2024 assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Lizza wrote that, if true, “would shatter our understanding of recent history.”
This is the third installation of Lizza’s salacious saga. In “Part One,” he alleged Nuzzi had not only cheated on him with Kennedy but also with former Republican Rep. Mark Sanford.
In his second installment, Lizza also published the Health and Human Services secretary’s stomach-turning penchant for penning erotic poetry.
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” the scion of the Kennedy clan is alleged to have written.
Meanwhile, Nuzzi—whose new post as West Coast Editor at Vanity Fair could already be in jeopardy—released an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, American Canto. In the excerpt, Nuzzi describes wrestling with her attraction to Kennedy while worrying that a parasitic worm may have eaten parts of his brain.
Her affair with Kennedy is understood to have begun while she was covering his ill-fated 2023 presidential campaign. She later acknowledged an emotional relationship with him, but said it was non-physical and did not influence her reporting. Kennedy has denied the affair and remains married to Cheryl Hines, 60.
After the news first broke, New York magazine placed Nuzzi, who formerly worked at the Daily Beast, on leave before the two parted ways in October 2024. Lizza had already ended their engagement at that point. That same month, Nuzzi sought a protection order against Lizza, alleging harassment and threats, though she later asked the court to drop the request.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vanity Fair representatives for comment.
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