Olivia Nuzzi appears to be trying to undermine ex Ryan Lizza’s account of their breakup and the blockbuster scandal surrounding it.
The journalists famously ended their engagement after Lizza discovered that then-New York Magazine correspondent Nuzzi allegedly had an affair with then-presidential candiate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Both of them have given their accounts of the saga, with Nuzzi writing the memoir “American Canto” and Lizza penning a series of articles on his Telos Substack.
Over the course of (so far) five posts, Lizza cast Nuzzi as a damaged, impulsive person who moved between a series of romantic relationships, including flings with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and famed journalist Keith Olberman. (Neither Nuzzi nor Sanford have commented on that claim).
He also claimed that after the affair ended, she was lovesick over Kennedy and “elated” when the scandal broke in September 2024 because “up until then, Bobby had been ghosting her, so Olivia, according to her friends, was ecstatic to be back in touch — even if it was just to protect him and humiliate her.”
And he published a “strategy memo” that Nuzzi wrote for Kennedy which, Lizza said, was proof that the journalist had become a “political operative.”
But in a newly published interview with Substack writer (and former Nuzzi nemesis) Jessica Reed Kraus, Nuzzi undermines Lizza’s writing, framing him as a desperate outsider looking in.
“It was all designed as this like dirty bomb, just this impossible trap designed to punish me,” she told Reed Kraus on her House Inhabit Substack in an interview taped earlier this month, “and designed as this effort to, it seemed to me, to control my life from the outside if I would not permit this person, who I met when I was 19 years old, to control it from the inside anymore.”
She described the posts as “like a suicide bombers manifesto,” and an attempt “to muddy the waters,” before saying, “It feels like a person who is at best sort of a peeping Tom, in the last year of the time that I knew him [who] thinks whatever he can see through a keyhole or hear pressed up against a door or whatever he might extract from the object of his obsession, … that those data points are enough for him to be the narrator of the events happening through the door, inside the house.”
The interview itself is in keeping with the high-drama milieu in which the Nuzzi story exists.
Kraus — who first became popular for her first-person writing about her family life before she turned her focus to national events and personalities, and is known as a vocal cheerleader for RFK Jr. — has a complex past with Nuzzi.
They became friends before Kraus set out on the 2024 campaign trail, but when the scandal broke, Kraus backed the politician.
Nuzzi and Reed Kraus repaired their relationship, leading oddball bloggers to speculate that the pair were working in league to influence the candidate.
We’re told that this is the first of two interviews between the former enemies.
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