Respectability is overrated these days, or so one infers from reading the dueling romantic narratives of two formerly top-tier journalists, whose saga of heartbreak and betrayal has captured the media’s attention and probably that of a few movie directors.
It’s all wildly delicious. I mean, it’s terrible, just terrible.
The past week’s breathless chatter is about the once-engaged couple, Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, who can’t stop sharing their downfalls and denouements. If you’re just tuning in, Nuzzi was 21 in 2014 when she began writing for the Daily Beast about President Donald Trump. She landed a plum job at age 24 as Washington correspondent for New York magazine.
Somewhere along the line, she and another star political writer, Ryan Lizza, who was fired by the New Yorker on allegations of sexual misconduct (which he denied) during the #MeToo hysteria, fell in love, became engaged and secured a contract to co-write a book about the 2020 election. Then news broke that Nuzzi had been “sexting” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while covering him during his run for president. This is the ultimate no-no in the universe of journalism ethics.
The engagement went bust along with the book, and Nuzzi lost her magazine gig. Whereupon she went into exile, moved to Los Angeles and wrote a soon to be released book, “American Canto,” reportedly typed on her cellphone while hiking. Sure.
Nuzzi, now 32, has reinvented herself in Hollywood fashion, which suits her new job as Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor. The New York Times recently published a splashy story about her book, accompanied by photos of a vampy black-clad, platinum-blond Nuzzi, who now lives in Malibu and gets around in a white Mustang convertible. I’m reminded of a popular girl sleuth book series from childhood that starred Connie Blair, who was always tossing on a summer frock and jumping into her sporty roadster while also employing her feminine wiles to get to the bottom of things.
You have to give a girl her due. From a young age, Nuzzi seems to have known and gotten what she wants, not just jobs but also men. Kennedy, about whom she wrote in 2023, was apparently too delicious to pass up. Calling him “the politician” throughout her book, she said she loved his eyes, “blue as the flame” and his insatiable appetites in all things. She has maintained they weren’t sleeping together but writes in the book about seeing him floss his teeth. When do people usually floss, a reporter might wonder.
Reacting to Nuzzi’s stage-managed resurrection, Lizza just added extra spice to this saucy story. On Monday, he revealed in his Substack newsletter that his former bride-to-be also had an affair with 2020 presidential candidate Mark Sanford, while crafting a profile of the former South Carolina governor already infamous for his own extramarital proclivities. In 2009, Sanford disappeared from home and office for several days, allegedly to hike the Appalachian Trail, when he was really visiting his lover in Argentina, who happened to be a journalist. His foray into small-brain activities was hardly a first for politics, but Sanford’s very public betrayal of his family and his state, as he tearfully put it in a news conference apologia, foreshadowed the ease with which he apparently entered into a lusty alliance with Nuzzi while she was dating Lizza.
The image of Lizza burrowed in his Substack bunker banging out his lamentations while his sexy ex hawks a book from the pages of the Times feels tragic and sad. This new iteration of Nuzzi, though entertaining, is a backstab not just to her former fiancé, but to all journalists who, toiling for insubstantial compensation, wouldn’t consider getting romantically involved with a source or subject. The last thing female journalists need is a high-profile climber glamorizing the Hollywood-created impression that female reporters trade sex for scoops. Some do, I’ve noticed, but they are the rare exceptions.
Nuzzi’s canto, which comes out Dec. 2, is said to be primarily about her RFK affair, Trumpworld and the twisted effects she thinks the latter had on her and the country. Much as I dislike contributing to the further diminution of the Fourth Estate, I’ll read the book, as well as “Unscripted,” a new memoir by Cheryl Hines, RFK’s wife. Hines reportedly is fuming about Nuzzi’s claim in the Times story that Kennedy wanted her to have his baby and that he’d take a bullet for her.
Mainly, I’m piqued by curiosity. What makes someone like Nuzzi tick? Why doesn’t she care about the things other ethically minded journalists obsess about — transparency, credibility, integrity and the trust they build with readers? Whatever the answers, Nuzzi and others like her are bad for journalism and, therefore, bad for the country. Even if she’s self-aware enough to reveal truths about the world she helped shape, this is surely one instance where it isn’t quite fair to blame Donald Trump.
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