In a maneuver perhaps designed to thwart “the Washington read” — flipping straight to the index to find the pages featuring certain boldface personalities — few figures are referred to by name in Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir.
But many readers will still comb through “American Canto” looking exclusively for new details about the scandal that at least briefly derailed Nuzzi’s journalism career. Last year, while she was Washington correspondent for New York magazine, news broke that she had engaged in a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his failed 2024 presidential campaign. (At the time, Kennedy’s representatives said that Kennedy and Nuzzi had met on only one occasion, while she was writing a profile of him that New York published in November 2023.) She parted ways with the magazine and with her fiancé, political reporter Ryan Lizza, with whom she had been contracted to co-author a book about the 2020 election.
The lead-up to the Tuesday release of “American Canto” by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, has been dizzying and acrimonious: In addition to keeping up with the disclosures from an excerpt published by Vanity Fair and in a profile of Nuzzi in the New York Times, readers have been greeted with a series on Lizza’s Substack in which he accuses Nuzzi of, among other things, having an affair with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020.
Here are some takeaways from the memoir:
RFK Jr. told her, ‘You’ll need to be brave.’
Throughout “American Canto,” Nuzzi refers to Kennedy as “the Politician.” The specifics of their relationship — how and when it began, for example — generally remain hazy, though she describes the poetry they exchanged and how they bonded over his attempts to befriend a pair of ravens. She says that he often showed her photographs of himself as a young man and that he said he wanted her to have his baby.
“From the start, it had been about trust,” Nuzzi writes, recalling the moment when her journalistic skepticism was, “suddenly and resolutely, suspended.” Kennedy told her, “You’ll need to be brave,” later adding, “I would die before I hurt you.”
Nuzzi says that Kennedy was a “subject” of hers — referring to her November 2023 profile — but, “He had not been my source. He was not, for the most part, plugged into the kind of information that I required access to for my work.” (She adds that they argued over the story, which he “hated,” but that “then, well, we had stopped arguing.”)
The memoir opens with a phone call between Kennedy and Nuzzi, in which he professes not to understand why their relationship might have professional repercussions for her: “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she recalls him saying. “If we got married, it still wouldn’t be wrong. My aunt married my uncle after she interviewed him.”
She offered Kennedy some advice for his presidential campaign.
Nuzzi describes a few occasions when she offered Kennedy advice during his presidential run. She stresses that she did not tell him which decisions to make, only “how to think through” them.
In one phone conversation, she says, she told Kennedy that she had heard that years ago he had put the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park. When he confirmed the anecdote, saying, “Baby, you have to understand, I used to do something funny every week,” she laughed and responded: “I guess, if I were you, I would get ahead of the story.” Nuzzi was surprised, she writes, when this getting ahead took the form of Kennedy posting a social media video in August 2024 featuring Roseanne Barr.
One of the book’s more extended passages about the relationship is set later that summer, after Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said in an Aug. 20 interview that they were considering ending the campaign. Nuzzi says Kennedy asked her what he should do. “I did not think it my place to offer prescriptive advice as it related to most things,” Nuzzi writes, but she “approached his dilemma Socratically,” asking Kennedy to compare how he would feel standing onstage and endorsing Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Nuzzi also outlined possible scenarios in which Kennedy endorsed Trump and attempted to negotiate a position of influence in the administration.
After they discussed his dilemma, she writes, Kennedy started to cry, telling her, “I wish I could just be with you.”
When he endorsed Trump and shared the stage at a rally Aug. 23, Nuzzi told Kennedy she was proud of him, “because I believed he believed the decision was the best means to be of service to others, and I was proud of him for doing what he believed was right even though it had been hard.”
She initially lied to her bosses at New York about RFK Jr. relationship.
Generally, Nuzzi writes, “it had not required much effort to avoid [Kennedy’s] presence interfering with my work.” She grew more apprehensive as, over the summer of 2024, there was a risk that their visits to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and to a Trump rally in Arizona might overlap; she told Kennedy they should avoid this, for fear that Trump would discover their relationship.
In September 2024, Nuzzi writes, New York magazine editor David Haskell — referred to as “the man for whom I worked” — asked in a meeting about the rumored relationship between her and Kennedy. Haskell had been told about it by journalist Kara Swisher, whom Nuzzi considered a mentor. Nuzzi says she initially lied to Haskell, denying the alleged relationship. At some point after she came clean, she says, Haskell told her that she could save her job if she wrote a tell-all. “I did not consider this,” she writes in “American Canto.” (Vox Media, which owns New York magazine, declined to comment.)
When the story about Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship went public, she writes, Kennedy called her early in the morning, saying, “I need you to take a bullet for me.” Eventually, they agreed to privately describe the relationship as “a flirtation. Nothing more.”
Ultimately, she describes feeling betrayed and violated by Kennedy, “the man I trusted most,” as the scandal consumed her career. “When he saw me there, a mob on the horizon moving closer, he reached out to me, not to lift me to my feet but to pin me down, to drive the teeth of the trap deeper into my flesh, to hike my skirt higher, to wave the mob over to look, to invite the country to lay its hands on me,” she writes.
Kennedy ultimately apologized, Nuzzi writes, albeit indirectly, having an intermediary nicknamed “the Bodyguard” phone her to express regret. (“The Bodyguard” appears to refer to security consultant Gavin de Becker.)
She accuses Lizza of being engaged in ‘a mad plot to harm me.’
Throughout “American Canto,” Lizza is referred to as “the man I did not marry.” Nuzzi says that “for about a year before I took it off,” she thought of her engagement ring as the “Diamond Albatross,” because she no longer wanted to marry Lizza. She claims that he “was sleeping with a woman who had worked for the Democratic presidential campaign,” a revelation that felt like a relief to Nuzzi: “my behavior was not quite so egregious in light of this information.” (Page Six reported that Lizza got in touch with Avid Reader to say that the claim of his affair with a Democratic operative is a “false and defamatory allegation” that is “made up.”)
Nuzzi characterizes Lizza as controlling, alleging that he was engaged in “a mad plot to harm me” and “a siege of hyper-domestic terror.” She says that before her meeting with Haskell, she had told New York magazine that she believed Lizza “had intruded on my digital privacy and that the security breach had bled harassment into my work.” As her relationship with Kennedy was made public, she writes that she felt “lanced by the teeth of a trap set by a man who could not let me go.”
Nuzzi alleges that Lizza threatened Kennedy, saying that he would distribute “a trove of intimate materials” to the media. In these exchanges, Nuzzi says, Kennedy called her a stalker, later telling her that he did so only to “exculpate myself.”
She says that she filed a report with the FBI about “the alleged stolen materials.” In October 2024, she filed in D.C. superior court for a civil protection order against Lizza, accusing him of harassment, blackmail and making violent threats; he denied the allegations. She eventually dropped the request.
Later, she says that a friend told her Lizza had said, “If she wants to come back, I would still take her back.”
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