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!
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.
They fit the narrative. Embracing the patriarchy mistakenly thinking it elevates themselves.
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.
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..
🤮
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.
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?
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!!!
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.