Who Is Olivia Nuzzi, the Star Reporter Engulfed in RFK Jr ‘Sexting’ Scandal?

New York magazine’s star political reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, is at the center of a bombshell report that emerged Thursday revealing that she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the failed presidential candidate who’s nearly four decades her senior.

News of the affair spread like wildfire, with the scandal being all-the-more intriguing because Nuzzi, 31, was engaged while Kennedy, 70, has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014.

She also profiled Kennedy for a splashy story in the magazine in November 2023.

Nuzzi isn’t out of a job over the scandal — New York opted to put its star Washington correspondent on leave instead — but her engagement to Politico’s Ryan Lizza is no more.

“Because of my connection to this story through my ex-fiancée, my editors and I have agreed that I won’t be involved in any coverage of Kennedy in Playbook or elsewhere,” Lizza said in his lone statement on the matter.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Nuzzi and Lizza, 50, split “recently” after getting engaged in September 2022, sources told the New York Post.

It’s unclear how long the couple have been together, but photos of Lizza on Nuzzi’s Instagram go as far back as Jan. 2018. That was just after he was fired at the New Yorker for allegations of “improper sexual conduct.”

Meanwhile, Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy reportedly began sometime earlier this year, though the journalist has insisted that the relationship was only “digital in nature.”

Kennedy has distanced himself from the scandal without outright denying he and Nuzzi were “sexting,” as a source described the relationship to the New York Post.

“Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece,” a Kennedy spokesperson told CNN.

This scandal isn’t the only time Nuzzi, a New York native and Fordham University graduate, has been the center of headlines. She first gained national attention in 2013 when she wrote about her treatment by Anthony Weiner while she worked on his New York City mayoral campaign.

She wrote a blog post for NSFWcorp about the experience, claiming that Weiner referred to her and other interns as “Monica” in a reference to Monica Lewinsky. Days after the blog was published, she was paid by the New York Daily News to pen a follow-up piece that ran on its front page.

New York Daily News

Weiner and his team were enraged by the stories. Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the campaign, referred to Nuzzi as a “b—h,” “s–tbag,” “t–t,” and a “c–t” in an interview with Talking Points Memo.

Morgan later apologized, claiming she thought the interview was off-the-record, but the comments only brought more eyes to the scandal—further thrusting Nuzzi into the spotlight. She was hired by the Daily Beast in 2014 while she was still attending Fordham.

Nuzzi covered the political rise of Donald Trump and was listed as one of Forbes’ 25 “most influential” people in news media in 2016. Two years later, the magazine listed Nuzzi on its annual “30 Under 30” list.

Alexander Tamargo/Reuters

Nuzzi, then still in her mid-20s, left the Beast in 2017 to take a job with New York that’d have her based in Washington. Scandal followed her to the beltway and, in 2018, she admitted to entering the home office of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s ex-campaign manager, to take a photo without permission. Lewandowski alleged that she also stole a photo album.

“You know, I just walked into the house, because nobody was answering at the door,” she said of the incident, adding that she left at the advice of her boyfriend who told her it was illegal.

“I was like, ‘f–k,’” she told The Hill.

The incident was merely a brief speed bump in Nuzzi’s career, however. She was invited into the Oval Office later in 2018 for a sit down interview with Trump and has landed big interview after big interview ever since.

She made headlines again while covering a story when she was thrown out of Manhattan court for taking photos from the overflow room of Trump’s hush money trial.

But Nuzzi again scored an exclusive sit-down with Trump this summer, just weeks after he narrowly survived the first attempt on his life. That article was New York’s cover story on Sept. 9 and focussed on Trump’s ear, which seemed to heal incredibly quickly for someone who’d been shot there.

Nuzzi, who’s typically an avid poster to X, has gone quiet on the platform since Sept. 13. On the other side of the scandal, Kennedy—a noted womanizer and serial cheater—was hit with a nasty, unrelated story in itself on Friday.

The Post reported that it obtained a 2001 diary that Kennedy used to document the dozens of women he took to bed that year and on what dates, complete with their first names and occupations. He was in his seventh year of marriage to Mary Richardson Kennedy at the time.

Reuters

The tabloid wrote that Kennedy appeared to be taken aback by the alleged discovery.

“A Post reporter who questioned Kennedy on Friday about the diary was first met with six seconds of stunned silence,” the paper wrote.

Kennedy eventually responded: “I don’t think there is any way you could have a diary or journal of mine from 2001. I don’t have any comment on it. I have no diary from 2001.”