‘He wanted me to have his baby’: Nuzzi’s book lays bare her relationship with RFK Jr

In the beginning, there was Olivia Nuzzi, superstar. Major talent. Prodigy. Hired at just 24 to be New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent, she produced piercing stories about the capital’s creatures, describing, for example, Joe Biden’s “words and syllables dissolving into an incoherent gurgle”.

For years, she was a glamorous fixture in Washington, first solo, then as half of a power couple with her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, Politico’s former chief Washington correspondent.

Lizza was 19 years her senior and had lost his previous gig at the New Yorker over allegations of “improper sexual conduct”, which he denied. So, sure, their love story had some weird contours, but Nuzzi and Lizza, with all their saucy Zs and cool pizzazz, were hyper-talented Washington players.

Then, kersplat! In September 2024, allegations surfaced that Nuzzi had a secret “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr, a presidential candidate and the subject of a major profile she had written. He was 39 years older than her and married.

“The relationship was never physical,” Nuzzi, now 32, said in a statement when the news hit, but New York Magazine severed ties with her.

Her vague phrasing only fed the wildfire. If it wasn’t physical, what was it? Sexting? Some new kind of AI phone nookie? Zoom-va-voom? Who the hell knew? RFK denied the whole thing, but the story had already become the flaming hot sauce drizzled on practically every gossipy conversation in the Washington-New York mediasphere.

It’s not as though sex with “Bobby”— as he, like his father, is widely known – was new or surprising. This, after all, was the man whose “lust demons” were given the full tabloid treatment more than a decade ago by the New York Post, which obtained and printed Kennedy’s 2001 diary describing his sexual adventures with more than three dozen women, including three different women on one prolific Tuesday.

But still, the intimate personal relationship between a journalist and the subject of her reporting set off ethics alarm bells, especially at a time when Donald Trump and his administration have made it their daily mission to degrade, insult and undermine journalists.

Many female journalists have been especially outraged. “We, despite what every Hollywood property from House of Cards to The West Wing would have you believe, do not date our sources,” wrote Monica Hesse in the Washington Post.

A law firm hired by New York Magazine to investigate found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in Nuzzi’s coverage of the 2024 campaign. “Nevertheless, the magazine and Nuzzi agreed that the best course forward is to part ways,” the magazine told its readers, adding: “We wish her the best.”

Scandal. Shame. Firing. That might have been that, and the world might have moved on. Then Nuzzi and Lizza lunged for each other’s throats.

Nuzzi went to court accusing Lizza of blackmailing and harassing her. She claimed her ex-fiancé “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation – a threat he has since carried out”.

Lizza pushed back hard and accused Nuzzi of “catastrophically reckless behavior”. He said Nuzzi admitted her affair with Kennedy and that she called him a “70-year-old sex addict”. Lizza said Nuzzi also told him the relationship was “toxic”, “stupid”, “psychotic” and “indefensible”.

Nuzzi eventually withdrew her court petition and fled the east coast, heading west to Los Angeles, where sex is not seen as quite as scandalous, and fewer dinner party conversations revolve around journalists and their ethics. She found a little place in Malibu, hiked a lot, settled into her California exile and quietly set to work on a book.

A year later, Nuzzi has now come galloping back into public view, with a splashy feature in the New York Times that announced the arrival of her new book, American Canto.

The article instantly defibrillated the mainly dormant scandal, with black-and-white Hollywood glam shots of Nuzzi – in the moonlight, walking barefoot on the beach. And it opened with a video clip of Nuzzi, in big Jackie O (Bobby’s aunt) sunglasses, driving a convertible with her blond hair flying wildly in the wind.

The Times story revealed that last summer Nuzzi had quietly landed a job as Vanity Fair’s west coast editor – a remarkable position for someone who had flouted a core journalism principle.

Her book is a mishmash, including some potent observations about Trump and his impact on America, but plenty of blowsy observations like: “Ulysses was the subject of one of my favorite Cream songs.” The Washington Post review said: “At its worst, Nuzzi’s prose is not just stilted or repetitive. It is ostentatiously mannered, itching at every turn to announce its showy lyricism.”

The sections on Kennedy, referred to in the book only as “the Politician”, are revealing yet vague. In Nuzzi’s telling, she had it bad for Bobby. She admired him, believed in him, thought he was good for the country, loved him “so much”.

Kennedy is now Trump’s health secretary and rewriting generations of public health policy to align with his fringe anti-vax views. Most of the medical establishment and many members of his own prominent family have called him an embarrassment and worse.

But he rang Nuzzi’s bells. “Lone wolves, each of us. We were alike in strange ways. We shared common language, common skepticisms, common ideas about what was beautiful, common beliefs about what was valuable. Like me, he loved rock and blues, surrealism and naturalism. Like me, he moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contractions that worked somehow in concert. He was the only other person I had ever met who could be moved to tears by the sight of something so trivial as a rose.”

She writes that Kennedy returned her passion. “‘I need everything from you, Livvy,’ he said. He always said that. Mostly it seemed sweet, earnest. ‘Everything is yours,’ I said. I always said that. He told me that we wanted me to have his baby. This seemed earnest, too. We stared at each other and picked out our favorite features. My mouth, my cheekbones. His eyes, the little dimple in his chin.”

He called her “my beautiful girl”, she wrote, and at one point he was so overcome while professing his love he cried. But he remained in control enough to discreetly turn over a framed photo of himself and his wife, Cheryl Hines, an actor, when Nuzzi noticed it in his Los Angeles home.

Spicing the gumbo even more, Hines, wrote her own book (of course she did) that was published three weeks before Nuzzi’s. She doesn’t mention Nuzzi by name (of course she doesn’t) but says she and her husband spent several “soul-searching” days wrestling with the scandal and “tightened our ties that bind”.

But wait, remember Ryan Lizza, the forsaken fiancé? You didn’t think he was going to just sit back and take all this, did you? Three days after Nuzzi’s glittery New York Times article, Lizza, who left Politico earlier this year, started posting on Substack like a UFC brawler jumping into the ring.

In the first of several serialised posts, he dropped a bomb: he claimed Nuzzi had an affair with Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina governor running in the 2020 presidential election, another profile subject.

Sanford, 33 years her senior, had become famous in 2009 when he disappeared for several days, supposedly to hike the Appalachian Trail, when he was actually visiting a girlfriend in Argentina. Sanford has not publicly addressed Lizza’s account. But Nuzzi, through her lawyer, said Kennedy was the only time in her career that she had an “improper relationship with someone she was covering”.

Lizza also wrote of Nuzzi’s “unusual relationship” with political commentator Keith Olbermann, who confirmed to the New York Times that he met Nuzzi when she was not quite 20 and he was 52, and they lived together for a while in New York.

In several subsequent posts (viewable for $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year), Lizza said Nuzzi was also trying to help Kennedy become president and “had crossed the line from journalist to political operative”.

Lizza provided the receipts, posting a 1,000-word memo he said Nuzzi had written for Kennedy in June 2024 offering political advice, ending with: “You are the best candidate, and the people who already know that came to that belief because they respect you and your ideas. Focus on your ideas. Just as you know what’s best for the country, you know best what you should do on your campaign, and whatever you decide, you’ll be great. I love you.” She ended the message with kiss and heart emojis.

Nuzzi has called Lizza’s posts “obsessive and violating fan fiction-slash-revenge porn”. But she apparently hasn’t lost her sense of humour, posting a Substack column of “signs your book rollout has gone awry”. Among them: “Monica Lewinsky reaches out to check on your mental health.”

As the soap opera rolls on, and avid readers find themselves Googling the meaning of “felching”, Melody Schreiber from the New Republic weighed in with mic-dropping clarity.

“It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr espouses kill people.”

Vanity Fair has now announced that it is parting ways with Nuzzi at the end of the year, a few days before she turns 33.

Photographs by Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for CBS News, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images