It can be fun to read about self-destructive behavior when the protagonists are handsome, famous, or powerful. In the fall and attempted resurrection of journalist Olivia Nuzzi, we have a triplet of lasciviousness:
A beautiful young political reporter who is engaged to a much older, professionally successful colleague falls in love with her subject, a much older, married presidential candidate from a storied American family.
With her fiancé in the dark, a year of passionate phone sex and bad poetry supposedly follows. But the beautiful young reporter is also something of a charlatan and word spreads. A famous tech journalist, who once mentored Nuzzi, reveals her transgressions to her fiancé and her employer. Nuzzi's engagement ends, her lover leaves her, she's fired from her job, and she flees to the West Coast because, you know, this is where Easterners go to take stock and seek redemption. You can't get further from New York than Point Mugu. “This,” as Joan Didion once wrote, “is where we run out of continent.”
Nuzzi’s new book, “American Canto,” is a disjointed mix, part obscurantist memoir and part reflection on the weirdness of the era of Donald Trump, whom she has covered for years and who always seems happy to see her no matter what she writes about him. “Very young and very beautiful,” Trump says the first time they meet.
Nuzzi has an unfortunate habit of trying to channel Didion, the high priestess of California angst. Big mistake. Anyone who tries to imitate Didion in the singular simply becomes embarrassed: “I will tell you this.” Nuzzi writes. “Events lost context. Words lost meaning.”
“I want to talk to you about the canyon where the voices came.”
“I want to tell you, before it consumed me, I couldn't have told you what it was.”
Another problem: Nuzzi is absurdly shy. It does not name the now Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with whom she allegedly had the affair that derailed her career. Instead, she calls him The Politician. (Kennedy has denied the claims.)
“He called me his little bird, his doll, his love,” Nuzzi writes. The politician trained her like one of the baby crows in his Brentwood backyard, to come when offered a prize. “He told me he wanted me to have his baby.” He would take a bullet for her.
She writes that The Politician, a former heroin addict, told her that he secretly smokes the powerful hallucinogenic drug DMT. This is an account that might have been of interest to the public when Kennedy was being confirmed by the Senate.
Nuzzi also does not name her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker during the MeToo era, then resurfaced at Politico and now writes at Substack. Instead, she calls him “the man I didn't marry.”
I enjoyed Nuzzi's transcript of a conversation with President Trump. She asks him why he mentions “Silence of the Lambs” character Hannibal Lecter so frequently during the election campaign. Trump offers a lengthy reflection on how countries are releasing criminally insane people like Lecter! – who then seek asylum in the US.
“Oh, wait,” Trump says. “Isn't that clear?”
If you want a more literal, if one-sided, idea of what happened between Nuzzi and Lizza, and the ways in which Nuzzi trampled journalistic ethics, you can read Lizza's poisonous four-part Substack essay about her. The first installment has accumulated more than 750,000 visits. If his accusations are true (and his behavior gives us little reason to think otherwise), the real scandal here is his blatant disregard for the principles most journalists hold dear: you don't get emotionally or sexually involved with your subjects or sources. Period.
Lizza accuses Nuzzi of cheating on him long before she met RFK Jr. with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (he of “walking the Appalachian Trail” fame), when Sanford was seeking the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. (Neither Sanford nor Nuzzi have commented on the allegations.)
Nuzzi, for his part, accuses Lizza of sleeping with a woman who worked for the Democratic presidential campaign while they were engaged. “She was pretty enough that I wouldn't be offended,” Nuzzi writes, “and not so pretty that I would be offended.” It's a miracle these two horny journalists ever worked. (Lizza has denied the allegation.)
While Nuzzi writes in faux-Didion style that “I didn't think it was my place to offer prescriptive advice” to The Politician when she was dropping out of the 2024 race, Lizza claims that Nuzzi worked as RFK Jr.'s “private political operative,” advising him on how to deal with the media, what to wear at a press conference and what to say. And, as proof, he published the strategy memo that he says Nuzzi wrote for Kennedy.
And what did Nuzzi receive in return?
Kennedy reportedly dumped her in a hot second after news of their affair leaked, moving on to a high-profile job in the second Trump administration while she went into self-imposed exile to Malibu to write a book that's now coming under fire.
Vanity Fair recently announced that it had hired Nuzzi as its West Coast editor. That he got such a good job after destroying its credibility is perhaps more a testament to the cynicism of the magazine world than its shamelessness. However, on Friday, the magazine announced that they had parted ways in light of the latest allegations about their ethics violation.
Regardless, I predict Nuzzi will land on his feet.
After all, as Maureen Dowd told her, “At least you're still young and beautiful!”
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