Journalist Olivia Nuzzi details alleged affair with RFK Jr in explosive memoir
Olivia Nuzzi’s alleged affair with RFK Jr shocked Washington — now her memoir and ex-fiancé have dragged the scandal back into the spotlight as Vanity Fair reveals it won’t renew her contract.
It’s the explosive political scandal that has cemented the old adage that a journalist should never become the story.
Former high-flying Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr dominated headlines and political group chats in the US for months before reaching fever pitch this week with the release of her memoir American Canto.
The tell all book has been widely panned as a ‘tell nothing’, largely eclipsed by revelations made by her former fiance and fellow journalist Ryan Lizza who has drip fed salacious details of the betrayal in his own blog.
Nuzzi, Lizza and Kennedy have offered up wildly different recollections of the scandal.
Nuzzi, 32, claims the romantic relationship with Kennedy, who is married to actor Cheryl Hines, began after she wrote a profile on him for New York magazine in 2023.
At the time, the Kennedy scion was the underdog in the three-way presidential race with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Nuzzi was engaged to 51-year-old political reporter Lizza.
RFK Jr, now the secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has denied the affair, claiming the two only ever met once for an interview.
The talented reporter Nuzzi had previously enjoyed a meteoric rise and at age 24, she was named New York magazine’s Washington correspondent where she reported on the first Trump administration.
She was let go by New York magazine late last year, about a month after her affair with Kennedy was reported to her editors.
Nuzzi left Washington for Los Angeles where she has spent the past year writing the scandalous novel, drip feeding details in recent weeks.
In her book released this week, Nuzzi claimed in the wake of their affair being made public, Kennedy told her she “needed to take a bullet for him” as he navigated his tenuous relationship with Mr Trump and a position in his administration.
“If it’s just sex, I can survive it,” he allegedly told her.
Nuzzi was appointed as Vanity Fair’s west coast editor earlier this year but after a tumultuous week in the headlines, the magazine announced on Saturday they had “mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year”.
Nuzzi has seemingly taken the negative press in her stride this week, sharing a humorous Instagram post about the “signs your book rollout has gone awry”, including anecdotes of being checked on multiple times by Monica Lewinsky, survey data of 87 per cent of respondents believing she is a CIA operative, and “an architect of the Iraq War says he’s ‘been through several things like this’ but ‘nothing quite as bad as this’.”
Among the scandalous revelations in Nuzzi’s book include claims that the married Kennedy wanted to impregnate her and had insisted he was so enamoured that he would “take a bullet” for her.
Nuzzi said the 71-year-old told her she made him feel as free as being thrown from a runaway horse as a child and sobbed as he said: “I wish I could just be with you”.
She alleged the publicly sober Kennedy revealed he privately took hallucinogenic drugs when his Curb Your Enthusiasm star wife Hines was away.
Throughout the book, Nuzzi has revealed intimate details about her relationship with Kennedy, 39 years her senior, revealing his favourite body part of hers was her mouth while hers was his nose.
She gushed over his blue eyes and his nickname for her – Livvy.
She referenced Kennedy’s 2012 claim that a worm had eaten part of his brain and died in his head.
“I hated the idea of an intruder therein,” she wrote.
“Although he said a doctor had told him it was not a worm, it was too late to stop what had already become ‘screwy legend’.”
She also shared excerpts of explicit messages, including one from Kennedy to her in which he allegedly wrote about “his plans” for her womb and another in which he said: “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”
The book has been widely panned by reviewers with the Atlantic describing it as a “tell nothing memoir” and the Washington Post saying “vast swathes of it are impressively and aggressively awful”.
Lizza for his part has not stayed silent about his ex-fiancé’s affair and has been chronicling his recollections of the story on Substack.
One day before American Canto was released, he alleged that Nuzzi and Kennedy had planned to consummate the relationship at a 2024 Trump rally. Nuzzi has insisted they were never physically involved.
Lizza said it was the event held in August where Kennedy publicly abandoned his own Presidential ambitions and pledged his support for Mr Trump.
“The timing was perfect,” Lizza wrote in the blistering post.
“Bobby would no longer be a presidential candidate himself, so the media glare would dim, and, more importantly, Olivia later told me, he would no longer have the Secret Service protection that complicated an encounter (and presumably Cheryl wouldn’t be around, either).”
He said the rendezvous was thwarted when he was assigned to cover the same rally, and discovered the affair.
In another post, he accused her of having another affair with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, describing how he found a hand written note to him on hotel stationery in which Nuzzi allegedly said: “If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house, I would still thirst for you”.
Kennedy is still married to American actor Cheryl Hines who released her own book last month in which she addressed the affair.
Hines said she was in Italy when the news broke and the couple discussed the allegations.
“We went through all of the details about the latest story – what was true and what wasn’t,” she wrote.
“Through those soul-searching days, we tightened our ties that bind.”
Hines this week appeared alongside First Lady Melania Trump and Second Lady Usha Vance during a Red Cross charity event.
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Originally published as Journalist Olivia Nuzzi details alleged affair with RFK Jr in explosive memoir
