Before we get into Ryan Lizza’s latest Substack – Part 4 in his series – let’s talk about Olivia Nuzzi. Her book, American Canto, comes out this week. It’s also looking like she’s on the way out at Vanity Fair. She officially started at VF in September, supposedly acting as the magazine’s West Coast editor. Page Six now claims that Nuzzi never picked up her Conde Nast laptop and was skipping meetings. Sources told Page Six: “It looks like they are getting rid of her… I will not be surprised if they drop Olivia….Even before this broke, she didn’t have a single story in the next two issues of the magazine. She never picked up her Condé Nast computer, never came to a meeting, never responded to an email she was cc’d on. The only thing she ‘edited’ in the Hollywood issue got cut.” What’s even funnier/more pathetic is that American Canto will most likely bomb because Nuzzi’s ex-fiance is destroying her and her credibility in his Substack series. Some highlights from Lizza’s Part 4, “Means of Control.”
A planned assignation: Bobby and Olivia planned to consummate their relationship on August 23, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona, after he endorsed Trump at a rally in nearby Glendale. The timing was perfect. 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.) There were two problems. Inconveniently for them, I was also planning to be in Arizona to cover the Trump-Kennedy event. And then, a few days before the rally and the planned hotel room encounter, after Bobby and Olivia had been talking, texting, and FaceTiming for almost a year, I finally learned about their affair. Olivia reluctantly canceled her rendezvous with Bobby, who was about to become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump universe, a fortuitous development because Olivia was wrapping up her latest New York magazine assignment, a profile of Trump.
The secret recording of Trump talking about Butler: But first, you are probably wondering what Izzy told Olivia she believed she had overheard Trump say about his attempted assassination when Izzy was secretly recording Trump and his campaign aides at Mar-a-Lago on August 13, 2024. According to Olivia, Izzy thought Trump said something that cast doubt on the official story behind Trump’s bloody ear, which was injured on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump. I assumed the context of what Izzy thought she overheard was about whether it was one of the eight rounds fired by Crooks that nicked Trump’s ear or something else—ricocheting glass or a bullet fragment—but that’s just speculation. What I know from Olivia is that the quality of the audio recording was poor, that she couldn’t corroborate Izzy’s recollection, that she discussed the recording with Bobby, and that after a phone call with Bobby while he was on vacation with his wife in Baja, Olivia erased the recording.
Lizza spoke to RFK Jr. on the phone on August 24, 2024: Lizza called Kennedy “disturbingly unrattled” and described his voice as “much more broken and difficult to listen to than I had ever realized.” Lizza wondered why in the world anyone would have phone sex with that voice. He also described Kennedy’s indifference to Nuzzi and Kennedy’s promise to never see Nuzzi again.
Nuzzi apparently spilled what she learned about Kennedy to Lizza: Lizza says that Nuzzi claimed that Kennedy has a pregnancy fetish, that he doesn’t actually believe the anti-vaxx stuff he spews, that Kennedy staffers believed he was using drugs again (and Kennedy confessed to Nuzzi that he was using ketamine), and that Nuzzi believed Kennedy was cheating on his wife Cheryl Hines with multiple women.
That’s all I have the stomach for now. Lizza is not an honest broker when discussing the personal details of his intimate conversations with Nuzzi, but I actually appreciate that he was effectively storing up information to scoop Nuzzi ahead of her book’s release AND ruin her credibility forever. I tip my cap to someone so methodically petty, honestly. While I couldn’t care less about the melodrama between Lizza and Nuzzi, I am interested in what this has revealed about Kennedy. It feels like all of the men who really have Trump’s ear are on drugs, right? Oh, and the big reveal about Izzy’s Trump tape is just dumb.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Lizza’s IG and Nuzzi’s IG.
