Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s digital lover has been accused by her ex-fiancé of having yet another affair with a politician twice her age.
Olivia Nuzzi, the 32-year-old reporter who allegedly had a fling with Kennedy, 71, after interviewing him for New York magazine in 2023, revealed new details this week about the scandal in excerpts from her upcoming tell-all book.
On Monday, Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, fellow journalist Ryan Lizza, 51, claimed in a Substack post that Kennedy was not her first fling born of journalistic pursuits while they were in a relationship.
Titled “Part 1: How I Found Out,” Lizza’s post recounts how he stumbled upon a love letter from Nuzzi to “a famous politician, 32 years older than Olivia, and well-known for a sex scandal” who was also “a presidential candidate, a source and the subject of Olivia’s recent profile for New York.”
The punchline comes at the end: He wasn’t describing Kennedy, but former Republican congressman and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
Lizza dates his discovery of Nuzzi’s alleged affair with Sanford, 65—who served in Congress until 2019 and ran for president until suspending his campaign in November that year—to March 2020.
Lizza writes, “She later explained to me that she became ‘infatuated’ with him after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Nuzzi and Sanford for comment.
I spent some time in South Carolina with Mark Sanford for @NYMag (📸 by Lauren Matarazzo): https://t.co/NiHKlpLBhW pic.twitter.com/Ajf3BFlQSv
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 15, 2019
In 2009, a teary-eyed Sanford admitted to having an extramarital affair in Argentina after dropping out of sight for nearly a week. His wife, Jenny Sanford, filed for divorce later that year.
Lizza, who worked for Politico until launching his Substack earlier this year, said that while he and Nuzzi had long cycled through breakups and reconciliation, they were in “a period of tranquil domesticity” when he found out about her alleged affair with Sanford.
Lizza and Nuzzi stayed together despite the alleged affair and became engaged in 2022.
But the couple finally called it quits after Nuzzi’s alleged affair with Kennedy was revealed in late summer 2024.
The Health and Human Services secretary—who has been married to actress Cheryl Hines, 60, since 2014—has denied ever being romantically involved with Nuzzi. He and Hines have remained together.
Nuzzi was fired from New York magazine in October 2024 but has since been hired as an editor at Vanity Fair.
Lizza makes clear in his post that he is displeased about Nuzzi’s forthcoming tell-all, saying she had told him earlier this year that she would “never talk about any of this again.”
“…it wasn’t true, and, unfortunately, silence no longer seems advisable or even possible,” he writes.
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