Olivia Nuzzi’s Cringey Affair Memoir
Disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi had a “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and wrote a cringey memoir about it.
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I’m sorry CN, we need to talk about Olivia Nuzzi‘s memoir.
No! Please anything but media celebrity Sturm und Drang! I’d rather suck my eye out with a turkey baster!
Look, I know you’re very busy the day before Thanksgiving with actual things to attend to, like watching jello salads set. But we must. There’s dick wandering and bad poetry.
You had me at bad poetry. Proceed.
It’s a very thorny path. First I’ll have to explain all the characters in this clusterfuck — none of them sympathetic. Before we climax with “I am a river. You are my canyon.”
If you need the backstory, you can read my snark from September 2024 when Nuzzi got shitcanned from her job at New York Magazine for getting too intimate with the subject she was profiling — then-third party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Now we know how close. (She threw her career away for their online affair.) Meanwhile RFK, Jr. remains very much employed in the current administration as our worm-brained, vaccine-denying health secretary. (Because we live in the End Times.)
My head is spinning Tracy, slow down.
Okay, let’s take them one by one.
Olivia Nuzzi
Dazzling prose stylist/nitwit in a fitted sweater, who cheated on her then-fiancee Ryan Lizza to have some sort of unconsummated affair thingy with the Kennedy who eats roadkill.
She wrote a memoir, American Canto, ostensibly about her work covering Trump’s rise to power. But all anyone cares about is who Nuzzi is banging. Hey, it’s all the same to Nuzzi, just please someone give her centrality and a job. Her current one at Vanity Fair is shaky.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Recovering heroin addict. Science denier. Heart throb. His second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson, hung herself after she discovered the extent of his double life. (JFK, Jr. recorded sexual encounters with 37 different women in his journal. Which Richardson found and promptly killed herself.) Then he sued his wife’s family — and won — the right to bury Richardson in the Kennedy family cemetery. Only to later disinter her body and dump it in a random field. Because… misogyny.
Yet apparently serial cheating and batshit insanity is catnip to the ladies. Because not only did Nuzzi fling her digital panties at this guy, he remains inexplicably married to his third wife, actress Cheryl Hines.
Cheryl Hines
Not to be outdone in the pick me dance Thunderdome, Cheryl Hines is now attempting to one-up Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir with her OWN memoir — Unscripted.
According to the UK Times newspaper review, there is exactly zero mention of second wife Richardson. (Just laudatory accounts of what a devoted stepmother she is to Bobby’s “troubled” motherless teenage daughter.) But she does discuss her cute meet with Bobby.
She reveals that although she originally met Kennedy twenty years ago, they properly connected at a charity event in 2011 when he was separated from his second wife, Mary.
“This felt like the first time I truly saw Bobby,” Hines writes. “He pulled me aside and spoke quietly, ‘Sit next to me at dinner.’ It seems cliché, but I was thunderstruck from the moment we started talking … I don’t know how I missed before how blue his eyes are. I felt his magnetic energy … The instantaneous electric connection swept me along. He has since told me he felt the same way.”
You too, could be dispatched to a field! Bobby feels for a lot of women. But you won’t be surprised to learn that his philandering has made their marriage stronger.
Regarding this incident, Hines, who declines to use Nuzzi’s name, wrote that the news broke while she was skiing in Italy with Cat and Kyra and “Bobby called to warn me”.
“The swirl of headlines, rumours and insinuations was upsetting and overwhelming,” the book adds. “I had hit a wall . . . I stayed in Europe with my girls for a while. I had little to no privacy for long talks on the phone.”
Upon her return, Kennedy “picked me up from the airport . . . For the next few days, we stopped everything and drilled down on the truth. We locked ourselves in our room and laid it all on the table . . . Through those soul-searching days, we tightened our ties that bind.”
According to a Mediaite report, RFK Jr. was simultaneously searching for his soul in other women, who provided texts of their trysts. Also, a babysitter came forward in 2024 to say she was sexually assaulted. (Kennedy denied it.) Anyway, Cheryl seems to be freebasing a lot of Esther Perel.
“The people who are happiest are the ones who are most comfortable with uncertainty,” she writes, adding: “But if ‘The very essence of romance is uncertainty,’ at least it’s sure to be full of romance.”
Speaking of romance…
Ryan Lizza
At the time of her dalliance with RFK Jr., Olivia Nuzzi was engaged to journalist Ryan Lizza. He does not get the chump seal of kinship, alas, because Ryan is also a fuckwit. When they first connected, he’d just been fired from his political reporting job at the New Yorker for sexual misconduct. Shitcanning being a defining life event he and Olivia now share.
But Ryan Lizza is not taking this cheating story lying down. Olivia Nuzzi gets a memoir? Ryan Lizza gets revenge.
In his Substack, part 1, he reveals how he found out. Not about RFK Jr. No, about Nuzzi’s affair with Mark Sanford (of Appalachian Trail fame) who was then running for governor.
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.
I was not a perfect partner, but the scale of Olivia’s betrayal was devastating. She had an affair with someone who would provide the maximum level of humiliation and personal and professional ruin, perhaps for both of us.
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.
So, you’re saying Olivia is a star fucker, Ryan?
In Part 2, She Did It Again, Ryan gets into the details of the Nuzzi-Kennedy affair. Which was conducted by more terrible poetry about thirst.
The (alleged) Bad Poetry
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Allegedly)
Drink from me Love.
I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth.
I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow.
‘Dont spill a drop’.
I am a river
You are my canyon.
I mean to flow through you.
I mean to subdue and tame you.
My Love.
I don’t want to guess what “harvest” is referring to here. All I could think of with this imagery was how mama birds feed their babies with regurgitated worms. Or farmers delousing cattle by syringe. Besides being sophomoric and mortifying, doesn’t this weird word salad strike you as violent?
Is force feeding cum a turn-on? I can’t pretend to understand the kink of a guy who beheads bears, but “subdue and tame you”? WTF? This is probably pillow talk for a man who disinters his ex-partner. I mean, Olivia, he just wants to squeeze your cheeks. It’s not like he’s leaving you dead in an anonymous potter’s field. But play your cards right, and he might!
What in holy hell is going on here?
I’m fascinated to see how some woman journalists are standing up for Olivia Nuzzi saying she was a really talented writer with some character issues. Trying to defend her against a backlash for her truth telling. Not me. I see a Vichy woman. A dick-sucker of the patriarchy. Who made every misogynistic trope about sleeping your way to the top her aspiration. She doesn’t condemn Mark Sanford, or Bobby Kennedy Jr. for their wandering dicks, but rewards them instead. Treats them like rock stars, and not as the contemptible pieces of shit they are. Olivia Nuzzi thrills to the power imbalance and wants desperately, so desperately, to sit at the cool kids table.
Yeah, so she can write, you say. So can a LOT of worthy people. Who don’t get through the gatekeepers because they aren’t perky-titted young blondes with the right kind of connected boyfriends. (Keith Olbermann, Ryan Lizza, Mark Sanford, Bobby Kennedy, Jr.)
But your girl Olivia, she’ll hate all the right people. Remember her racist tweets about Obama? (“You don’t have to wear a tie in Kenya!” “Kenyan Anti-Colonial Shows Teeth To Small Child”.)
Olivia Nuzzi doesn’t speak truth to power, she swallows. She’s team “Tame and Subdue.” Go fuck a canyon.
The only character in this whole tawdry affair that doesn’t come out of it looking just plain old fashioned awful if RFK’s Brain Worm.
And, to quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
LFTT
Justice for the worm!
Free the worm!
That brain worm must’ve had an eating disorder.
Parasites that run out of food will eventually starve, after all.
*”is RFK’s Brain Worm.”
Must find my glasses.
I had to look up the she-shills defending Nuzzi.
Christie Smythe, Pharma-bro Martin Shkreli’s prison groupie.
Heather Havrilesky, contributor to The Cut who, in her own memoir, described her husband as a “wretched snoring heap of meat” along with her wandering eye for other “meat.”
It’s notable that The Cut is the same publication that condemned Sarah Manguso’s Liars as misandrist whining. Also notable is that the NY Times– which also condemned Sarah Manguso– reprinted a whole swath of Havrilesky’s memoir.
But this made me finally understand that the commercial media is actually fine with misandrist women writers as long as men are being condemned for failing on patriarchal measures of masculinity and as long as the woman in question trades in the insufficiently commanding, unvirile meat heap for a properly priapic, entitled psychopath.
Handmaidens. The patriarchy loves them.
It’s a political career track these days. All these surgically uniform women who seem to specialize in out-jingo-ing the most violent patriarchal jingoists and war-mongers.
It’s interesting that there’s a precise parallel to this found among our closest ape cousins where “token female” chimps who join male lethal raids and show an extra amount of gory Clockwork Orange sadism against members of rival troops can earn themselves extra bits of banana or hunks monkey meat and possibly amnesty from the routine battering that most female chimps are subjected to.
But the perks don’t tend to last and these literal flying monkeys apparently have to keep doing service to facilitate patriarchal aggression which doesn’t even serve females since chimp lethal raids are all about kidnapping fertile females from rival troops while killing off these females’ infants and rival males.
What this seems to argue is that wars of aggression, in terms of its evolutionary roots, are really about protracted rape. Which means that handmaidens are, in a way, proxy rapists– sexual creeps in their own rights.
They fit the narrative. Embracing the patriarchy mistakenly thinking it elevates themselves.
I’m afraid I’m more cynical that you are. I think they sell out to elevate themselves. Maybe it’s a sinister form of “not like the other girls.”
Maybe you’ll like this anti-Vichy-traitor ballad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUFEhqn810M
I feel kind of hopeful about some of the new feminist alt rockers. They seem a lot less timid and euphemized regarding criticism of gender inequality than predecessors like Patti Smith. Plus a few are the real deals– can actually sing without autotune. Sofia Isella also plays multiple instruments.
Her “doll people” is also genius.
“Art you can f*ck.” Gaaaah, brilliant. Also love the whistle range soprano and violin solos.
It remains fascinating to me how some of these “writers”(and I use that term loosely circle wagons around their fellow fuckwits.
(shrugs) It just reinforces that “horrific behavior is OK as long as we can gather a big enough echo chamber to rationalize it.
I’m just fascinated that a requirement for entry into the halls of power for either gender seems to be a kind of aggressive sexuality.
Pardon me while I continue trying to hash out and define why faux-feminist defenses of people like Nuzzi or Lewinsky, etc., just don’t make sense to me. Though some might think the mainstream media defenses of people like this defy the usual sexual double standards of dah patriarchy, I can’t help noticing that it’s only she-FWs who are spared the usual punishments for indiscriminate female sexuality… and only if their behavior helps to reinforce male sexual entitlement.
I don’t mean these types are showing mere “sexual compliance” but sometimes aggressive enthusiasm as if these folks all share some kind of hormone imbalance or trauma-induced hypersexuality. At least I remember some of the female rabid climbers I worked with as being kind of dude-like in terms of sexual conduct and bragging about sexual conquests. They might cop “demure” girly behavior in certain circumstances but then acted like frat boys behind the scenes, including in their derision of men who weren’t commandingly masculine enough.
For instance, I remember one of these types (similar kind of privileged horsey blond as Nuzzi) sneering about some suitor who’d cooked gourmet cuisine for her, saying, “My Yin needs way more Yang!” (and pointing rapper-style to her crotch as she said this).
I knew the guy and it’s not like he was effeminate or lacked charisma. But apparently he didn’t, for example, “Dutch oven” her in bed and then dump her like one of her prior dad-aged paramours had (??!).
Even if I’m not into that kind of crude over-sharing, it wasn’t so much sporty sexual machismo in women that made me uncomfortable (I wouldn’t want to discriminate against half the Scandinavian women I’ve ever met). What made me slightly nauseous is that her attitude seemed to play right into this misogynist trope that every Incel and Redpiller uses to neg unwilling sexual targets– the idea that women don’t respect men who treat them well and fawn over men who treat them badly. But later I realized that the trope might have some unfortunate basis in fact, though only regarding a specific brand of internalized misogyny she-FW who, no surprise, were also no friends to other women.
True to form, Ms. “Yin/Yang” turned on me ferociously (seriously, she was screaming and I reflexively flinched like she might hit me) after I reported an older manager for harassment and attempted assault. Just like the recent studies on “toxic femininity” report, she had fully drunk the “rape myth acceptance” Koolaid and yelled that I needed to “grow tf up and stop acting like a victim.”
Then she plied the aggressor for a promotion. Part of the reason I cooperated with police in prosecuting the perp was for the satisfaction of foiling the whole flying monkey clusterfuck which included several women throwing me under the bus because serial predators can always be relied on to “buy” loyalty. It just felt politically important to me to demonstrate that victim-blamers are “backing the wrong horse.”
Anyway, this is why I think abusive personalities should get their own gender/sexual preference category entirely separate from male/female or LGBT-nonbinary. Call them all abusosexuals because any inherent differences between them seem to melt away until they become uniform. Even aside from sharing remarkably similar sexist attitudes, I’ll bet male and female “abusosexuals” all start to look like each other by a certain age (rather mushroomy). All the same, it’s still not justified when they end up abusing each other in the process. But, by the same token, even if it’s obvious that she-assholes aren’t statistically causing most of the damage, it’s still not pardonable that these types often throw blood in the water and put other women at risk in multiple ways.
Subdue? Why does anyone have to be subdued? That’s what’s at the core of every FW — power-tripping. Doesn’t matter what kind of job they have. Someone always has to be crushed, or else it’s no fun. WTF?
Also, I notice that Nuzzi defines a politician as “any man who …” Again, WTF? Women are also politicians of course, but not to misogynists like Nuzzi, I guess.
Female Chauvinist Pigs. There’s a book by that title.
The current administration is saturated with hypocrites who reliably diminish women and children. Unfortunately, their headlines perpetuate the entitlement of FWs.
It is times like this where I am sort of glad that a lot of these publications seem to be collapsing under their own weight.
Look, I’m glad that she’s apparently a good writer (or something). That doesn’t mean that she isn’t awful. Her “character flaws” are going to color and texture whatever she does that passes for journalism. And right now, it sounds an awful lot like she’s spent a significant amount of time being influenced by a vaccine denying dipshit that seems to want to bring back plantations (lest we have forgotten “take disadvantaged urban youth out of their homes and have them do farm work.)
Stay Mighty!
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According to Lizza’s report, another thing RFK Jr. enjoyed was “felching”.
Jimmy Kimmel said on his show that he had to google the definition.
I thought, mistakenly it seems, that I was pretty liberal in my attitude towards sexual.practices, but I too had to search for the meaning of ” felching” and now I wish I hadn’t..
And it’s great that he controls the US Health Dept. white eating E. coli for lunch.
I did the same, and now I’m drinking Clorox
At least you won’t get Covid!
RFK has a high regard for his own semen, it seems.
He is preoccupied by the levels of all men’s semen!
Ewww..yuck!
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I’m so glad you wrote on this! I needed your epic snark attack. RFK is a woman-hater. This would be clear just from that poem (I use the word loosely), but your contextualizing makes it clear just how wide and deep his woman-hating runs.
In any other administration, this revelation would prompt him to resign. But not, of course, in this one, with Hegseth and Trump both cheating woman-haters in the same camp as RFK.
who would sleep with that guy?????? omg. i never imagined 2025 would be anything like it is.
I can’t get over the story of Mary Richardson’s burial. She may have been an OW herself, but this doesn’t make it right in any way. Why does anybody voluntarily get involved with powerful people who are capable of such actions? Too few people seem to realize how easily powerful creeps can turn into dangerous creeps. How to feel safe with a family that manages to pull all those strings even after someone’s death?
He lives near me. His eyes are shockingly blue, that’s about it. He wears t-shirts and suits that are too tight, and I think it’s to show how bulging his muscles are. So, kinda try-hard, y’know?
There are contact lenses that will create the intense color of your choice..and there’s the charisma factor by association with his father and uncle which is,a magnet, I guess,; for some people this is an immense draw.
Reading Cheryl Hines’s account of being instantly attracted to him made me feel like I might vomit. Who looks at that craggy, fake tanned old man with a voice that sounds like he gargles glass and swoons?
I’d rather take a vow of celibacy than let him touch me!
Instant electric attraction in my not so humble opinion suggests that one has just met a social predator aka a psychopath
A MOMENT OF SILENCE PLEASE, for the thousands of Journalists that GAVE THEIR LIVES to their chosen careers like Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey and in prison now like Fatah Attaya, plus hundreds if not thousands more RIGHT NOW!!And stayed true to their professions creed. Yes,You can even DONATE to the memorial fund for Fallen Journalists as a sign of support to those who did NOT sleep or lay down their morals, if ever they had them, to touch the hem of disgusting people of power. I say God bless all who have been lost to get the truth and into the trash bin to those who profit from the lowest form of entitled grossness. Let us go MEH as soon as possible with these bottom dwellers, once we uncover their nakedness.
Another note to the chumps who wish to take their lives for their burnt to ashes heart..DO NOT WASTE YOUR PRECIOUS SELF on a CREEP, no matter how important they may be. Go get therapy, get Steaming ANGRY and FILE for whatever assets you can get. THen YOU write that book on being mighty,and however it sells, you took the TOP RUNG of courage!! No ONE NO ONE is worth your life or mental health. Find a lawyer and afterwards …….SING!!!
You make a really great point. In stark contrast to today’s featured media FWs, there are all sorts of far more worthy souls out there dying for the truth.
These creepsazoids are all a few bananas short of a fruit salad. That was painful to read, and I’m not exaggerating. My stomach hurts, and not from laughing too hard, it’s a stress induced digestive upset.
These people (especially RFK) literally make me sick.
Before reading this I was wondering what I might have for breakfast. I don’t even want to eat anymore. That poem alone was enough to turn my stomach.
I hear ya. Unfortunately I had just eaten when I read it. I went straight to digestive enzymes, ginger lemon tea and peppermint oil capsules. Feeling better now. I highly recommend that regimen for freak induced nausea and indigestion.
“Yr mouth open awaiting my harvest.”
Jaysus. And I thought he was mentally ill due to his “scientific” analyses.
Btw RFK Jr, my opinion is that males are not the harvest, they are the seed. And I can prove that with top rated experts in AI generated sciency things.
Not enough, “Ew! Gross!!” in the world to remove this from my consciousness. Ew! Gross!!
I absolutely can’t understand how anyone could find Wormbrain attractive. I guess it’s that thing about water finding its own level.
Without the makeup, anorexia and obvious bottle blonde hair she’s nothing to write home about.
Hair bleach has certainly enabled a lot of NPD pick me girls /she FW to look a heck of a lot “hotter” than they would have 100 years ago.