Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s digital lover Olivia Nuzzi couldn’t handle the heat.
Nuzzi, the journalist whose alleged affair with the married Health and Human Services secretary sparked a media firestorm, broke down as she was confronted on The Bulwark Podcast on Wednesday about why she withheld crucial information about Kennedy during his Cabinet confirmation battle.
“You had information that you could have shared,” host Tim Miller said to Nuzzi, who profiled Kennedy for New York Magazine during his failed presidential campaign.
Miller pointed out that there were other nominees whose confirmations fell apart in the face of damning information.
“RFK wasn’t even a Republican. It’s possible that these senators could have not confirmed him, and you didn’t share anything about him. Why?”
The 32-year-old former political journalist, who chronicled the relationship with Kennedy, 71, in her new book American Canto, appeared taken aback by the question.
“You’re making this—I don’t know how to responsibly handle this on camera with you here,“ she said.
“I’m writing, in that scene that you’re talking about, about how I felt privately,” Nuzzi continued. “About my private reaction. How I felt privately.”
Miller fired back: “But you had acted to help him. You admit in the book that you had acted to help him over the course of the campaign. And so, like, once you realized that he was screwing you over, you didn’t take any counteraction. You just let him walk over you.”
“You’re reading about it now,” Nuzzi responded sternly, referring to the revelations about Kennedy she included in her memoir.
Nuzzi admitted in the book that he “did not handle stress well,” that he loses his temper easily, and that he was “not good in a crisis.”
Miller said, in his opinion, that since Kennedy was confirmed, he’s been “doing a lot of bad stuff,” and asked Nuzzi if she agreed. She did, calling it “the correct assessment.”
“But… I don’t really know what to do with the question that you’re asking me because it’s making a lot of assumptions,” Nuzzi said.
Miller returned to how Nuzzi shared in her book that she did indeed help Kennedy during his campaign, noting that she had, in that respect, “ceased to have become a journalistic actor.”
“Well, I lost my job,” Nuzzi said. “I was fired, and I was in hiding, and I was afraid. I was terrified.”
When Miller asked what terrified Nuzzi, she began to break down.
“I write in the book that I was terrified of the man I did not marry,” she tearfully said, apparently referring to her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, whom she was dating at the time of the affair.
“I was very worried about people knowing where I was, and—I’m sorry, can we pause this?” she said before turning her camera off.
Nuzzi, 32, lost her job at New York Magazine after she admitted to a “digital” affair with Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, while profiling him about his split from the Democratic Party and subsequent independent bid for the presidency. The fallout from the scandal also led to her split from Lizza.
Nuzzi claims in the book that Kennedy told her he loved her, had a pregnancy fetish and admitted to using drugs like ketamine and DMT, despite claiming to be “sober” following recovery from heroin addiction.
Lizza, who had also been fired from his job at The New Yorker in 2017 due to allegations of sexual misconduct, has released several Substack posts sharing his side of the story—including an alleged revelation that Nuzzi had also cheated on him with a different famous politician: former GOP congressman Mark Sanford.
Kennedy, who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, has denied any relationship with Nuzzi beyond meeting with her for the “hit piece” she wrote about him for New York Magazine.
Since his confirmation to the Trump administration as HHS secretary, Kennedy has used his position to further his anti-vaccine agenda, support billions of dollars in cuts to federal health programs and promote claims that pregnant women ingesting acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol, increases the risk of autism in their children.
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