In recent days, Olivia Nuzzi’s promotion for her horrid memoir has begun. The book is American Canto, and it’s all about her affair with Robert Kennedy Jr. throughout 2024. She wrote it on her phone, and you can tell. Nuzzi already got a glowing write-up in the New York Times, and Vanity Fair published the first excerpt on Monday. Her prose is juvenile, which makes sense if you understand that her whole shtick is infantilizing herself to pretend that she’s just a little baby incapable of understanding journalism ethics or good sense. Well, in the wake of Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr, her engagement to Ryan Lizza ended and she accused him of stalking her and blackmailing her. Lizza did enough to protect himself and walk away unscathed, and he’s stayed silent… until now. Lizza has now published a piece called How I Found Out – Part 1 on his new Telos Substack, which you can read here. I recommend reading the whole piece (I did so first thing in the morning and jumped out of my skin). Here are the big reveals:
Nuzzi’s false accusations against Lizza: “It is tempting now to forget those moments, to see it as a lost decade, and to cast her as a cartoon villain. After all, she deceived me for a year and smeared me with false allegations. And not just little lies but big fantastical falsehoods—blackmail! (A former child actor, Olivia always had a keen sense for the dramatic.) She orchestrated a plot with the help of a senior Trump official to try to have me imprisoned, and now she’s written what appears to be a largely fictitious and self-serving account about it all. So, yes, I have reason to be annoyed, maybe even a little angry.
Why he’s writing about this now: “Silence was my preference. And Olivia seemed to agree. Last year, she asked to negotiate a non-disclosure agreement. Earlier this year, she sent a message to me via a mutual friend: I will never talk about any of this again, and I hope you will do the same. I’m not sure if she delivered that before or after she had a publication date for her book, arranged a Vanity Fair excerpt, and secured a profile in The New York Times. Either way, it wasn’t true, and, unfortunately, silence no longer seems advisable or even possible.
Keith Olbermann was Olivia’s sugar daddy: “By this point, I was used to cleaning up Olivia’s messes. Not that long ago, I had helped her untangle herself from an unusual relationship with Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host. She had messaged him out of the blue. They started talking, and soon after, she fled her unhappy home in suburban New Jersey and started living with Keith 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. Later, he covered her rent and furnished her apartment in a doorman building in the West Village. While Keith, who was 34 years older, was generous, there were strings attached. Olivia had concealed the relationship from me and other friends, but one day she told me everything—too much, actually—and together we hatched a plan for her escape.
Discovering Nuzzi’s affair: “As I tidied up the desk, something on the Kimpton stationery caught my eye. I started to read. “If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house,” Olivia had written, “I would still thirst for you.” Unfortunately, the lack of a water tower on our Georgetown home’s roof ruled me out as the note’s intended recipient. I flipped to another page and saw a name and the first line of an unfinished love letter to him that included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out. My heart stopped when I realized who he was. He was a famous politician, 32 years older than Olivia, and well-known for a sex scandal. But more importantly, he was a presidential candidate, a source, and the subject of Olivia’s recent profile for New York. I started to build a mental map of the potential blast zone, ticking through the concentric circles of our lives that her recklessness could shatter: the privacy of my children, the wedding Olivia was pressuring me to plan, her journalism career, our book project.
Who was Nuzzi sleeping with? 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 after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother. I was sure our relationship was over. And certainly our book project was dead. She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates? I looked at the date on her aborted letter to “Mark”: March 5, 2020—just a few days ago. I called my agent. “We have a big problem,” I said. “Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford.”
Man, I cannot wait for Part 2!! It sounds like Nuzzi just ran the exact same play on Robert Kennedy – stalking him and worming her way into his life, sending him suggestive and lewd emails, texts and letters until he finally agreed to an affair. As for Mark Sanford… he was governor of South Carolina when he left the state to engage in a torrid affair with an Argentinian woman, in what was one of the big political scandals of 2009. He’s a Republican and, as Lizza writes, he is decades older than Nuzzi.
Photos courtesy of Nuzzi’s Instagram, Lizza’s Instagram and Cover Images.
