Olivia Nuzzi Is The Latest Weird Story Involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Olivia Nuzzi Is The Latest Weird Story Involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He's almost more exhausting than Trump.
Olivia Nuzzi is an embarrassment to journalism.
New York magazine announced last Thursday that it had placed Nuzzi on leave after she disclosed a “personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.” Those are a lot of words to say that New York’s Washington DC correspondent was way too friendly with former presidential candidate and whale head collector Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also, Nuzzi didn’t exactly disclose the relationship in the “confession is good for the soul” manner so much as she repeatedly denied the affair to New York’s editor-in-chief David Haskell until the truth was finally wormed out of her. She’s now on desk leave, having turned in her badge and gun or at least her clipboard and glasses, while an outside party investigates the sordid matter.
Naughty by Nuzzi
Nuzzi told the New York Times last week that “some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal” earlier this year. “During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source.”
This is a lie, which meets the ethical standards of Fox News if Nuzzi winds up needing a new job. Sure, she technically didn’t write a story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after her November 2023 profile, but she’s a political reporter and Kennedy Jr. was running for president, at least as seriously as anyone who admits to leaving bear carcasses as gag gifts in Central Park.
In a March New York Times political roundtable, she claimed the presidential election was “not a two-man race. It’s a three-man race. A majority of Americans say they are unhappy with another ‘lesser of two evils’ contest, and they’re in luck, as they have a range of third-party candidates to choose from. One of those candidates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is polling competitively, especially among young people, and he’s steadily gaining ballot access across the country. Last Tuesday, the campaign announced it had collected enough signatures to qualify in Arizona and Georgia, crucial swing states.”
You’ll notice that Nuzzi sounds more like Kennedy Jr.’s campaign spokesperson than an actual political journalist with a basic understanding of how the winner-take-all Electoral College system works. Kennedy Jr. could never seriously win the presidency, but he could help siphon enough disaffected voters to return Trump to the White House.
In a note to its readers, New York said that if the magazine had known about Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy Jr., it wouldn’t have let her cover the presidential campaign, which is a major part of her job. Perhaps they would’ve reassigned her to the relatively apolitical cooking section, but Nuzzi might’ve started pushing recipes for bear tartare or honey garlic glazed bear.
New York claims that an internal review of Nuzzi’s work found no inaccuracies or evidence of bias, so they must have looked as hard as I do whenever I can’t find the remote and just start helplessly shouting my wife’s name.
After cheering on Kennedy Jr.’s Jill Stein cosplay campaign, Nuzzi wrote a scathing fourth of July feature about President Joe Biden titled, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.” The photo illustration depicts Biden propped up Weekend at Bernie’s style with someone’s hand covering his microphone while the other hand rests on his shoulder. The hands are brown, suggesting that it’s Vice President Kamala Harris. This parrots the right-wing propaganda that Biden is senile and Harris was helping cover it up.
The article itself read like the climax to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”
Nuzzi:
Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.
Poe:
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once — within the space of a single minute, or even less — shrunk — crumbled — absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.
Contrast this to her September cover story titled, "The Afterlife of Donald Trump." The photo illustration from Isabelle Brourman offers an almost saintly depiction of Trump.
You might want to keep an air sickness bag handy before reading the opening to Nuzzi’s piece:
Pink. An ovular rose. Big and smooth. A complex commonplace instrument. And, as far as these things go, a rather nice one. Isolated from the head and all that roils therein, and to which it is, famously and miraculously, still attached, you have to admit, if you can: It is beautiful. In Palm Beach, sunlight streamed through the window to find its blood vessels, setting the whole device aglow. Auris Divina, Divine Ear, protector of The Donald, immaculate cartilage shield, almighty piece of flesh.
Donald Trump raised his right hand and grabbed hold of it. He bent it backward and forward. I asked if I could take a closer look. These days, the former president and current triple threat — convicted felon, Republican presidential nominee, and recent survivor of an assassination attempt — comes from a place of “yes.”
Nuzzi insists her “relationship [with Kennedy Jr.] was never physical,” although I think we’d all prefer that she’d shaken his hand or even accepted a bear hug over what apparently transpired.
The “emotional, digital relationship” allegedly began a month after her Kennedy Jr. profile for New York, which ran within a week of influencer Jessica Read Kraus’s more flattering portrait. Kraus and Nuzzi later met “in person for the first time a few weeks later at a yoga event hosted by Marianne Williamson in LA.”
After a while, Kraus observed that Nuzzi “appeared like a dazed schoolgirl discussing RFK, having lost the ability to view him objectively — a red flag I noted. She had become a full-fledged Kennedy fangirl.”
According to Kraus, Nuzzi “made a flirtatious remark [to Kennedy Jr.] during a phone conversation,” and he blocked her number. Weeks later, she emailed him, requesting that he unblock her because she “had urgent information about a hit piece being prepared against him.” It seems like she could’ve contacted any number of people on his communications staff. Demonstrating his usual solid, whale-harvesting judgment, he unblocked her to find out what she wanted. Later that night, she sent him a “provocative” picture so he blocked her again.
Kraus writes:
For most of the next 8 months, Kennedy kept her blocked, except for a few occasions when Nuzzi contacted him from different emails and phone numbers, insisting he unblock her for urgent discussions about an imminent hit piece. Once unblocked, she bombarded him with increasingly pornographic photos and videos that he found difficult to resist. After brief exchanges, he would block her again.
I personally wouldn’t find it hard to resist unsolicited porn. I also don’t stop my car to pick up bear carcasses.
Circling the white wagons
Political journalists in particular take their jobs very seriously, as extensively detailed in their lengthy op-eds on the subject. So, you’d assume they’d banish Olivia Nuzzi to the journalistic Phantom Zone for her creepy behavior. Instead, they have rallied to her defense.
Ben Smith at Semafor dismissed any outrage over Nuzzi’s egregious ethics breach as just American prudishness.
You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
Smith went on to argue that people are only upset because they resented Nuzzi’s harsh Biden coverage. Call me a prude if you like, but I do take issue with Nuzzi torching Biden while she was personally involved with his political opponent. Biden is almost 82 and any journalist suggesting he might struggle to do the job until he’s 86 isn’t necessarily compromised. However, Nuzzi’s Biden feature was written in the first person and contained firsthand accounts describing Biden’s decrepitude. Sean Hannity doesn’t hide his partisan agenda. He regularly pronounces Biden recently deceased, but that would never generate a crisis of confidence among Democrats. After the debate, Biden was fighting for his political life primarily within his own party. The Nuzzi article was far more devastating than the latest Fox News or Newsmax screed.
Chris Cillizza posted this treacle on social media: “If we were all judged on our worst moments or our biggest mistakes, how many of us would come out looking anything other than awful? Don’t write people off. The arc of a life is long.”
I know rules are a little different for people who resemble Olivia Nuzzi (attractive young white women are legally entitled to one free murder), but most of us are judged for our “worst moments or our biggest mistakes,” especially if they involve our chosen profession. I vividly recall the New York Times collectively (and justly) denouncing Jayson Blair for his plagiarism and the creative writing he passed off as reporting. His “worst moments” were relatively low stakes, though, compared to trashing the president of the United States while sending Basic Instinct-inspired pictures to his political opponent.
‘I don’t know her.’
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a known philanderer — possibly the only trait he actually inherited from his more distinguished uncle. He allegedly kept a diary documenting his extensive affairs (37 in 2001 alone) and possibly drove his ex-wife to suicide. The 70-year-old deserves all appropriate scorn for fooling around Gen Z-style with a woman half his age. Nuzzi’s 31, so she’s also almost half the age of his current wife, Cheryl Hines.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone who, you know, read the last paragraph that Kennedy has thrown Nuzzi under a funeral procession of buses. One of his representatives said, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
Now Kennedy Jr. reportedly plans to sue Nuzzi for aggravated sexting and has hired security expert Gavin de Becker to investigate all those photos and videos Nuzzi sent him that he apparently kept, purely for evidence of course. This never would’ve gone public anyway if Kennedy Jr. hadn’t bragged to his friends about the photos. The gossip reached Nuzzi’s boss, David Haskell, who confronted her in what I imagine was an awkward HR discussion.
Nonetheless, de Becker contends this affair “had nothing to do with romance” and Kennedy Jr. “was being chased by porn.” That’s probably the tag line for the inevitable Lifetime movie adaptation of this mess.
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I’ll say it again: I dare Nuzzi’s defenders to tell me this would still be unimportant if it were Joe Biden or Kamala Harris instead of RFK Jr.
They’ve shown—again—who they are. It’s very important to the Ben Smiths of the world that politics be fun.
As a former reporter at a Bigtime Magazine, it's so very tempting... to be so close... to fame and the spotlight. Good piece. And today for the win: "Demonstrating his usual solid, whale-harvesting judgment..."