I Still Feel a Tiny Bit Sorry for Olivia Nuzzi

Politics

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December 2, 2025

She violated every journalism ethics code. But her childhood set her up to fall for a string of incompetent daddy-figures too lame to protect her.

Olivia Nuzzi at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, DC, in 2023, when she was Washington correspondent for New York magazine.

(Jose Luis Magana / AP Photos)

Olivia Nuzzi has always known how to spot a good story, especially when she can put herself in the middle of it. The now-infamous journalist, who lost a coveted post as Washington correspondent for New York magazine last year when details emerged that she’d had a sexting romance with now Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after profiling him, is back with a new book, American Canto, and a publicity tour about the whole sordid situation. Mainly about herself.

But she first came to national attention when she wrote a tell-all for the New York Daily News about Anthony Weiner’s doomed (by his own sexting, and more) 2013 mayoral campaign—from the point of view of the 20-year-old campaign intern she had been for roughly a month. (The main revelation? He called her, and several other interns, by the name “Monica.” No comment.)

The Nuzzi Seizure of Power

Chris Lehmann

I have a vague memory of defending Nuzzi on Twitter, and getting a digital thank-you from her, when Weiner’s communications director came after her in crude, sexist terms, calling her a “bitch,” “slutbag,” “twat,” and “cunt,” promising to ruin her in New York. I needn’t have worried about her; Nuzzi seemed to get the last word, for a while, turning her new fame into a job as New York’s first-ever Washington correspondent at the age of 22.

Having lost that prestigious perch last year over her secret sext affair with Kennedy, Nuzzi might have thought American Canto would give her another last word. Alas, it has not. Before the book was even published, her former fiance, Ryan Lizza—himself let go by the New Yorker over a what the magazine called “improper sexual conduct”—used his ex’s emergence from exile to throw his underwhelming Substack into overdrive, with a so-far three-part exposé of Nuzzi’s romantic and journalistic misdeeds, which, if true, go far beyond some gross sexting with a grosser-still politician (or “The Politician,” as she pretentiously calls him in her memoir).

I did not want to know any of this, but it is my job. You can decide whether to read on, or not.

But first let me Nuzzi myself, at least briefly. I know most of the sad bold-faced names in this story. I first crossed paths with Lizza when I wrote a few features for The New Republic in the last century, while he was just a child starting out there, and I saw him regularly over the next decades, remaining vaguely friendly as he soared high above me, socially and professionally. I became Twitter-friendly with Nuzzi after defending her from Weiner’s sexist comms director (who it turns out became one of Nuzzi’s close real-life friends, because of course; her book tells us she’s also friends with mean-girl doyennes Maureen Dowd and Sally Quinn), and she always greeted me semi-warmly at political events.

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While I was defending the (I thought) defenseless college student against the Weiner campaign, it turns out Nuzzi was dating and/or living with then–MSNBC titan Keith Olbermann (34 years her senior), whom I edited when he was (briefly) a Salon columnist. (Lizza dished about their relationship in Part One of his feverish posts.) Olbermann, far from his Countdown fame peak, took the opportunity to confirm and even elaborate on Lizza’s disclosures, making sure we all know that he gave Nuzzi tens of thousands of dollars of expensive designer clothes and jewelry, because what else was he supposed to do… “Get her Gift Certificates from Kmart?” No, I’m not making that up. He said that.

Oh, I also edited Kennedy on a piece (on the nonexistent link between autism and vaccines) that Salon wound up retracting. One of the worst experiences in my professional life. One of the worst people I’ve ever known.

I have often felt slightly icky about myself when I think about knowing any of those people, as I’ve watched them perform, often shamefully, on the political stage—even before I knew what they did in their personal lives, sometimes behind one another’s backs. I would have liked all of this to have stayed behind my back.

But hey, I’m paid to be tough about depravity. Especially when it’s found at the highest levels of journalism and politics.

Despite all this, I still feel a little bit sorry for Olivia.

Let me backtrack a little, un-Nuzzi myself, if you will. Let me start over with an old-fashioned inverted-pyramid-style story. If you’re not a news junkie, which we learn Nuzzi was not—according to a recent fawning profile in The New York Times, “Nuzzi cared less about breaking news than about exposing the foibles and vanity of Trump and the people within his orbit”—an inverted-pyramid story tells you what’s big and important, at the top, and then gets into smaller details—like, say, the “erotic” poetry RFK Jr.’s sent to Nuzzi, or his brainworm—much later. (I’m ignoring the allegedly erotic poetry.)

So if I were starting over, I’d say American Canto is a sad and bizarrely told story about a motherless girl who technically did have a mother well into adulthood, and a daddy’s girl whose sanitation worker father did his best but could not protect her from her abusive, alcoholic mother. Both died young. That’s the story. (Also, paternal Grandpa Tony left his wife for a 16-year-old, she says.) Nuzzi dates creepy older men because she still craves Daddy’s protection—but she also hates them because they can’t protect her, not even from herself.

Oh, also: This is really a book about Donald Trump, whom she regularly profiled for New York over the last decade, although the Trump elements are a jumbled mess, sometimes literally a notebook dump of old interviews she never published verbatim. But Trump is the ultimate Daddy figure, and while I have no evidence, belief, suspicion (or even curiosity about) whether anything “romantic” went on between them, ick, we get many more details about their many creepy-if-chaste interactions than we do about her sexting (and campaign consulting, which is damning) with Kennedy. Sometimes American Canto, an almost self-satirizing title, seems to be saying, “Trump made me do it,” all the tawdry behavior, all the sexual posing (the book makes it seem she identifies with Jon Benet Ramsey and Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate, and we know how they ended up). Nuzzi clearly knows that being a hot, young blonde got and kept Trump’s attention, even when some of what she wrote about him wasn’t flattering. Although nothing was as vicious as what she wrote about President Joe Biden just as his campaign, which she described as a Weekend at Bernie’s endeavor, crashed and burned.

She still obviously has a soft spot for the adjudicated rapist, the convicted criminal fraudster, the seditionist who pardoned violent seditionists when, unbelievably, he returned to the White House this year. In her last (known) interview with him, published at inexplicable length in the book, she flatters Trump as an “artist” and notes that he “brought show business to business.” They have a great rapport with one another. Reading the book, while she seems to be saying “Trump made me do this,” you might also find yourself thinking, “But Olivia, you gave us Trump.” Not alone, of course. A lot of American voters love that Big Creepy Daddy; a lot of other journalists rolled over for him, not out of love, unless you count love of access, and the money and fame that come with it.

OK, what else do you need to know about this sad book? While Lizza is getting “credit” for revealing some of Nuzzi’s worst misdeeds on behalf of Kennedy, like tipping him off to some of the bad stories (oh, that poor bear cub) surfacing about him, she actually sort of tells a lot of it herself, in her vague, seemingly slightly stoned style. No, she does not cop to having an affair with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, as Lizza alleged, the famous Lothario of the Appalachian Trail, while she was covering his presidential campaign in 2019 (admit it, you blinked and missed it, I know I did). That’s Lizza’s big reveal in Part I of his someday legendary (he hopes) “How I Found Out.” Although she confesses to doing a lot of support work for Kennedy in her book, Lizza reveals much more, and I fear that her rehabilitation tour, centered on not just the book but also a new job as West Coast editor for Vanity Fair, may run aground on some of the details.

I write that “I fear” as though I care about her. I don’t, really, but then again, I do. Although I still think she should lose this latest job.

As we’re still taking in the horror revealed in so many of the Jeffrey Epstein e-mails (we still don’t have the Justice Department “files”), as we’re still understanding the despicable Lolita culture of our elites, it’s hard to see this young woman—she’s still only 32—preyed upon by older men when she was 19 or 20. Olbermann admits that he isn’t sure how young she was when they started dating. (Folks, she put out her own “rap” video, called “Jailbait,” on MySpace when she was 15. Under the name “Livvy,” which everyone from her dad to Bobby Jr. called her.) She began seeing Lizza, 19 years her senior when they started out, at 22; RFK Jr. was a full 34 years older. But it seems she was over 30 when that began, so even though he was married and is also apparently a sociopath, maybe that wasn’t as abusive? I don’t know.

You certainly can’t forgive Nuzzi all her bad judgment. She roots for Kennedy to get confirmed as HHS secretary—she has a bizarre, waking-dream account of watching his confirmation hearing from afar, as she prays for him. Kennedy is, in Olbermann’s old parlance, one of the “worst persons in the world.” He is mean, vindictive, and mentally ill, and will cause the sickness and death of many Americans, if he hasn’t already. Nuzzi is old and smart enough to know that. Or should be. She worries about his reported brainworm, and takes solace in his promise he never had a brainworm. “Baby, don’t worry, it’s not a worm,” he reassured her.

OK, great, but remember, his lawyers concocted his brainworm story to cheat his wife (who later committed suicide) out of earnings she believed she was owed in their divorce. The brainworm supposedly cut into his earning potential as a talented lawyer. No, really, and that story is as ludicrous as anything in Nuzzi’s book. She is so relieved to learn that he didn’t have a brainworm, ignoring why he made it up in the first place. (Also, WTF was it, if not a brainworm?)

But then again, why would she care that he tried to cheat his late ex-wife? She passes along terrible allegations (that I’ve never seen confirmed) about her. Much like her picture of her parents, she claims Bobby tried to shield his kids from their abusive mother, but failed. Nuzzi is too old to be absolved from these moral, political, and journalistic sins.

And Lizza does reveal some alleged journalistic sins she does not. He closed his breathless Substack Part III with a hint that she learned something (the details are too dull and intricate) about the alleged assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in August 2024, “something explosive that, if she were correct, would shatter our understanding of recent history.” Nuzzi’s last published story for New York featured her visit to Trump to inspect his allegedly wounded ear (and more, of course). In Part IV, he doesn’t quite deliver on his promise: there was allegedly a recording of Trump made by a Nuzzi colleague that featured the president raising doubts about the official story of the attempt. But when Lizza listens to the tape, he says, it’s of such poor quality he can’t be sure what if anything it reveals–and Nuzzi ultimately erases it.

If she had something that “explosive,” and didn’t reveal it, that’s horrific. But like so many of Lizza’s revelations: If true, one could argue that he had a journalistic obligation to come forward himself. So I really don’t know what to believe. And at some point, I have to stop trying to figure it out.

These deeply disturbed people are our journalistic elites, my friends. And you wonder why our democracy is hanging by a thread?

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Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.