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It’s been a wild few weeks for Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor. If you aren’t plugged in to the incestuous world of glossy coastal media but nevertheless recognize the name Olivia Nuzzi, that’s likely because of her election-era tryst with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Nuzzi had profiled for New York magazine during the early days of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Once a Washington correspondent for the heralded publication, the 32-year-old Nuzzi left NYMag last year after her “personal” affair with the married politician was publicized, and for a while, she laid low.
Then, just a year after the scandal broke, Nuzzi began making her comeback. This September, she was hired at Vanity Fair. About a month after, news leaked that the journalist had written a tea-spilling memoir titled American Canto, about her career and the Kennedy affair, set for publication on Dec. 2. Promotion for the book kicked off in earnest this month, with an exclusive and widely mocked excerpt in Vanity Fair that included sensational claims that Nuzzi and RFK Jr. had fallen in love and much more. But whatever professional rehabilitation Nuzzi might have expected was soon derailed by her aggrieved ex-fiancé, veteran political journalist Ryan Lizza, who posted a newsletter Monday night accusing her of also having slept with Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and long-shot GOP presidential candidate who’d likewise been profiled by Nuzzi in 2019.
After that, every bit of Nuzzi’s internet presence was up for grabs, from an old tweet that appeared to lust after Rick Perry, to a now-deleted MySpace profile for a pop singer named “Livvy” who released a single titled “Jailbait” and sure appears to be Nuzzi herself. (She has not confirmed this publicly.) And all this has landed in the same month that RFK Jr.’s longtime wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines, released a memoir of her own. (The cheating is mentioned there, but Nuzzi isn’t called out specifically.) All completely nuts—and there’s more.
Why do I know who Olivia Nuzzi is, and why should I care about any of this?
You may remember her dishy stories as a former intern for Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign. Or her chat with President Donald Trump’s ex-wife Marla Maples. Or her access-heavy profiles of Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks from the early weeks of Trump’s first term. Or her exclusive interviews with the chief executive himself. Or her texts with Rudy Giuliani. Or her 2022 cameo on Showtime’s Billions. Or her postdebate 2024 report “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”
Nuzzi was about as big a star as any print journalist could hope to be in the digital age. She gained a reputation as a skilled and indefatigable reporter who earned close, privileged access to key Beltway power figures and laid out the machinations of Trumpworld, in exacting detail, to horrified readers clicking from home. And she pulled it off as a young woman covering a horrifically sexist administration as the journalism industry was facing its own #MeToo reckoning. There were controversies along the way, naturally, like her “friendly” relationship with Milo Yiannopoulos during the Gamergate era, her longtime adoration of Ann Coulter, and her admitted break-in to Corey Lewandowski’s home while reporting the Hicks profile. But, outside of the occasional ratioed tweet, her position was undeniable.
So, in light of what you mentioned about Kennedy and Sanford, some of that reporting may have been compromised?
It’s difficult to tell. Nuzzi did not write in depth about RFK Jr. after her late-2023 campaign-trail dispatch, and her former employer’s internal and external probes of Nuzzi’s conduct failed to find any “inaccuracies nor evidence of bias.” (However, the publication added, “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign.”) As for Sanford, it should be noted up front that neither he nor Nuzzi has confirmed Lizza’s accusations, and that New York magazine’s reviews did not cover the 2020 campaign. (Slate managed to reach Sanford via cellphone but was unable to hold a substantive conversation because the ex-politician hung up.)
Lizza’s newsletter travels back to pre-COVID 2020, a time when he and Nuzzi were living together in Georgetown and had a joint deal with Simon & Schuster for a book about the year’s upcoming election cycle. At their town house, Lizza stumbled across “an unfinished love letter” from Nuzzi to Sanford (addressed only as “Mark”), which “included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out.” He then heard more from her firsthand:
She later explained to me that she became “infatuated” with him after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night.
Sanford himself had faced a cheating scandal during his gubernatorial reign. In 2009, the head of state randomly disappeared from Charleston for a week, with his spokesperson telling reporters that the politician had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. When the married governor returned, however, he confessed that he’d been to Buenos Aires to visit an Argentinian journalist with whom he’d been carrying a yearlong affair.
Wait, but the Sanford-Nuzzi relationship was five years ago? And the RFK Jr. story broke last year. So why is Lizza sharing this now?
According to Lizza’s Substack, he and Nuzzi had both discussed keeping things private after they broke up last year, following the RFK Jr. bombshell. But the American Canto announcement, along with the recent New York Times and Vanity Fair pieces, nullified that handshake agreement in his eyes.
Here, it also warrants mention that Nuzzi has accused Lizza of some pretty horrendous things, and that Lizza has a checkered history of his own. The two got together not long after Lizza was fired from the New Yorker in 2017 for “engaging in what we believe was improper sexual conduct,” per a statement from the magazine.
Details of the couple’s ugly split reached public view via litigation. In October 2024, Nuzzi filed for a temporary restraining order at the D.C. Superior Court, writing that Lizza had attempted to “blackmail her back into a relationship with him and punish her when she wouldn’t acquiesce,” according to CNN. She also claimed that Lizza had hacked her devices and attempted to farm private information out to the media in order to anonymously disparage her.
The judge initially granted the order, but Lizza responded in a filing, denying all the allegations, delving into what she had reportedly confessed to him in mid-August, and detailing more about the RFK Jr. affair. This included assertions that Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” Nuzzi, according to CNN. Lizza also mentioned that their 2024-election book had been “sabotaged,” just like it had been in 2020—after Nuzzi had engaged in a different “personal affair.”
Oh, so that’s Sanford, right?
That is almost surely the case. At any rate, Nuzzi withdrew her order request a month later; her attorney claimed that “she will garner the greatest protection by disengaging from this process,” as she had become “increasingly worried for her physical safety and well-being.” Lizza denied all of it.
This isn’t the only time Nuzzi was stuck in a clearly toxic relationship, right?
Unfortunately, it isn’t. As Lizza also mentions in his Substack, he had helped Nuzzi break things off with Keith Olbermann, the brash former ESPN and MSNBC host turned online #resistance pundit. Before she could legally consume alcohol, she messaged Olbermann “out of the blue” and started living with him at his home in Manhattan. “He paid for her to attend college, outfitted her in Tom Ford and Hervé Léger dresses and some $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry,” Lizza wrote. “Later, he covered her rent and furnished her apartment in a doorman building in the West Village.” (Olbermann himself has confirmed all of this.)
There were alleged issues with the arrangement, even outside the 34-year age gap. “There were strings attached,” Lizza added. “We hatched a plan for her escape.”
… gross.
We had previously known about a little of this. Last September, as details of the RFK Jr. affair were still emerging, Olbermann preempted a New York Post inquiry about his past with Nuzzi by going into detail on his podcast, stating that they’d dated for three years and both “did some weird things,” even though the courtship and living situation were overall “wholesome.” In other tweets, Olbermann asserted that he’d known Nuzzi since 2011 (when she was 18) and had frequently attacked her Trump-era access reporting. You can go back even further to tweets from 2011, in which he was very clearly reply-guying the 18-year-old. This was after her MySpace days but prior to her claim to fame from the Anthony Weiner campaign.
I’ve been waiting for you to get to the MySpace thing.
Over the past few months, various digital diggers and Beltway reporters have uncovered the now-deleted MySpace profile of an aspiring pop artist named “Livvy,” whose photos certainly resemble Nuzzi. A Wayback Machine cache of the page for “OfficialLivvyMusic” shows an account established in 2007 by a New York–based teenager who reportedly also acted in various ad campaigns and as an extra in cultural landmarks like Saturday Night Live and Coyote Ugly. A still-live—and very critical—Pop Justice blog post from 2010 comments on a press release for a single by Livvy titled “Jailbait.”
Oh, dear Lord.
In case you were wondering, a lot of the music has been scrubbed from MySpace, but the enterprising X user @wkbdyb uncovered the “Jailbait” audio through the cache of a now-deleted website for a music-production team known as Super Buddha, which hosted the “Jailbait” file, along with other songs they had produced for artists like Franz Ferdinand and Debbie Harry.
Do we know for sure that “Livvy” is Nuzzi?
Nuzzi herself has not confirmed this; she has yet to speak out about the Sanford matter, much less any onetime pop-star ambitions. But there are many clues that indicate the connection. Old posts show various people tweeting at the old account @LivvyPop, whose handle later turned into the current @OliviaNuzzi username. Those accounts were linked from the MySpace profile; the remnants of their discussions revolve around popular music, including many of the same artists shouted out on Livvy’s profile (Jay-Z, Goldfrapp, etc.), as well as politics.
On top of that, there’s other music out there. @LivvyPop had some old interactions with a producer named Nathan Jay. (I contacted Jay through multiple channels for comment but received no response; after I reached out, he began taking some his past videos private.) A recently deleted 2010 tweet from Jay shares two separate remixes he did for “Jailbait,” titled “Electro Lolita” and “Just Enough Acid.” In a 2010 Facebook post that’s still up, Jay refers to Livvy as his “writing/singing partner” and links a YouTube video to a dubstep remix he did for Livvy’s gender-swapped cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” (The video was recently taken private, but it’s worth noting that Bowie was also shouted out on Livvy’s old profile.) A “jingle” featuring Livvy and titled “I Love 1983” is still up on Jay’s SoundCloud.
A LinkedIn page for an “Independent Entertainment Professional” named Livvy Grant also includes a link to that MySpace profile—and to Grant’s IMDb profile, which lists a sole screen credit for the 2010 short film Transition. The platform’s photos from the set of Transition purport to include Grant (who’s credited in the short as a “student”), and you can catch her briefly in a live clip from the film.
But there’s yet another video that, to me, appears to all but confirm things. A late-2009 YouTube upload from the NYC-based photographer Dorothy Shi takes us behind the scenes of a photo shoot for Livvy Grant herself. The audio for the clip consists of a song called “Put U in a Trance,” which was included on Livvy’s MySpace and SoundCloud pages; the video credits Grant with “music and lyrics.” (It’s worth noting that one of Lana Del Rey’s original stage names, assumed prior to her 2011 breakout, was “Lizzy Grant.”)
Dude … what is happening?
A star journalist—who had an election-era affair with RFK Jr., replete with FaceTime sex, and was let go from her old reporting job for it—began ramping up her comeback tour, going into how the Camelot scion called her “Livvy” and (allegedly) wanted her to have his baby. From there, her aggrieved ex revealed even more damning info from her past, leading a bunch of online sickos (like yours truly) to sift through even more elements of the reporter’s internet history. If any of this matters, it’s because Olivia Nuzzi herself is a legitimately fascinating public figure, for better or worse, whose acclaimed reporting career now raises a lot of questions about whose professional ambitions get rewarded in this cursèd business, and the plainly unethical steps many take to get there. Sometimes, the personal really is political.
Josh Levin, Sophie Summergrad, and Luke Winkie all contributed reporting to this piece.
