Olivia Nuzzi's Crash-and-Burn Comeback

Does everyone have to lose their minds in this era of blinding excess and heartless self-dealing, including the people who cover it? I was always a fan of political journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s vivid, irreverent coverage in New York magazine and enjoyed her unabashed bravura. In the last decade, there’s been so much tiresome moral tyranny on office Slacks from pursed-lipped publishing nuns passing judgment on anyone who dared to question newsroom pieties or exhibited the slightest hint of flipness or iconoclasm. The gorgeous, pillow-mouthed Nuzzi seemed refreshingly transgressive in her attitude. I never quite understood her engagement to the bespectacled Beltway byline Ryan Lizza, 19 years her senior, but whatever. Maybe it was a Marilyn Monroe/Arthur Miller thing. (Lizza had had his own brush with cancellation after he was dumped from The New Yorker for an unspecified MeToo charge.)

Writer and scandalista Olivia Nuzzi (Credit: Vanity Fair/X)

But then came Nuzzi’s self-immolating sexting scandal with former presidential candidate RFK Jr., whom she had profiled on the 2023 campaign trail. Her flagrant professional line-crossing was not a good look, a good idea, or a good career move. I’ve always had a weakness for people who make epic mistakes, having made a few myself, but this one had real-world implications for trust in the press, which, at 28%, is already lower than that in Congress. “Quiet, Piggy,” directed to a female journalist on Air Force One, defines Trump’s attitude to women who are real news reporters and the media are in an existential fight for their independence.

Nuzzi’s only hope for redemption was to come roaring back with a witty mea culpa memoir that would also defenestrate her “insatiable in all ways” former crush (she even loved his brain worm, for God’s sake), who now, in the hugely influential role of secretary of health and human services, is wielding reckless power over the life and death of 342 million Americans. But no. Nuzzi has, alas, blown it with the absurdly pretentious American Canto. The memoir’s opaque, staccato paragraphs, the recurring gusts of Didion-derivative Santa Ana winds, the clunking literary aperçus from the likes of Carl Jung thrown around — WTF, Olivia? American Canto is Ezra Pound in hair extensions. Except, instead of Pound’s crystalline imagery, the prose feels muffled in the smog of the LA fires (a laboriously overworked metaphor for her own reputational incineration) and the bloated sense that an ambitious 32-year-old magazine snark-artist who lusted for the conferred charisma of a Kennedy fling is a doomed femme fatale of the silver screen. “He desired. He desired desiring,” she warbles. “He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”

“Insatiable” Bobby Blue Eyes: RFK Jr.

He Who Seeks Revenge Digs Two Graves

Unsurprisingly, after the sexting imbroglio, Lizza broke off his engagement to Nuzzi, which was followed by a round of Wars of the Roses scorched-earth legal action. And now, in response to extracts of her book, his clapback has been a lapidary revenge strategy that is nothing short of masterly. In a series of short Substack essays, Lizza ends part one with the big reveal, a claim that Nuzzi had a sexual dalliance before with a power player she was profiling: former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, whom Lizza says she pursued obsessively and spent the night with, when he thought she was caring for her sick mother. Holy moly. Is Nuzzi the psycho fiancée Cherry Laine in Amazon’s compulsive new thriller The Girlfriend (which I thoroughly recommend, btw)?

Folie à deux: Olivia Nuzzi and ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza

Did Lizza lie in wait to launch this new Substack just at the moment when Nuzzi’s prose poem manqué was in the middle of an adulatory New York Times rollout and a Vanity Fair excerpt, and then drop his subscription sign-up bomb? Lizza quotes from one of RFK’s more appalling, dick-rearing jottings to Nuzzi, “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you.” (Happy Thanksgiving, Cheryl Hines.) Lizza says he was taping all their recriminatory conversations. Who does that, except someone plotting a print version of revenge porn? Ironically, his much more gripping version of their shattered engagement guarantees that he’s made American Canto a surefire bestseller—and that Netflix will have to buy both their life rights for a six-part series. Each will insist on being executive producer, which means they will eventually be working together again in steaming cinematic hate.

The Real Heartbreak

Tatiana Schlossberg (credit: Thea Traff for The New Yorker)

But these tawdry antics are not tonight’s streaming offering. They take place against the backdrop of the real, rising menace of RFK Jr., whose ruthless ignorance dazzled Nuzzi, but should not blind the rest of us. As American Canto is poised for its carpet bomb release, The New Yorker has published the tragic account by RFK’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy’s 35-year-old daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, mother of two children under age four, who reveals that she is dying of acute myeloid leukemia. She writes, “As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the NIH, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.” Heartbreakingly, she worries about funding cuts for trials that are her “only shot at remission.”

This is what it looks like up close when Trump says, Let Bobby “go wild” on health. Nuzzi could still redeem herself by writing about that outrage.