RFK Jr., Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza have provided us the best soap opera of the year, but is there more to it than that?
Olivia Nuzzi’s long hyped “American Canto” finally dropped today.
As far as memoir rollouts go, it’s been bizarre. Or to be more accurate, a tabloid feeding frenzy.
The former New York Magazine Washington Correspondent “parted ways” with the publication after it was revealed she had a “personal relationship” with the married Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she profiled in 2023 when the now Health and Human Services Secretary was running for president.
It was a spectacular career implosion for the star political reporter – and sure to make for good copy.
But before a spine was even cracked, the story of Nuzzi’s story devolved into an American farce – the most absurd soap opera exposing the dysfunction and ego that exist around power in this country.
Vanity Fair – which hired Nuzzi as their West Coast editor in September – released an excerpt of her book, and her writing was savaged on social media. Indeed, it was pretentious and precious. She wrote so much, and said so little.
On that same day, Nuzzi’s scorned fiancé and fellow journalist Ryan Lizza launched his version – a series of revenge dispatches published on his new Substack, Telos News.
Lizza started with a bang, the one that his ex-allegedly had with the presidential candidate she profiled. Not that one, silly (Nuzzi insists she never had a physical relationship with Kennedy, whom she refers to as “the politician” throughout “American Canto”).
He meant Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor best known for “disappearing” on the Appalachian trail in 2009. The then-married Sanford actually turned out to be in Argentina with his mistress.
Lizza didn’t just detail the salacious Sanford tale. He tempted us to google a sex act best left un-googled and revealed that Kennedy, who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, said he wanted to impregnate Nuzzi. And he dug into his ex’s sugar daddy relationship with lunatic Keith Olbermann.
We learned that Olbermann, who was 34 years older than Nuzzi, reportedly paid for her tuition at Fordham and lavished her with Tom Ford clothes and $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry.
Nuzzi, Lizza wrote, “loved crazy people.”
You don’t say!
Meanwhile, Lizza has been strategically releasing his dispatches for maximum impact. However, the bombshells he teases haven’t quite materialized. Are his ex-files like the 2025 New York Giants — starting like a beast only to peter out in the fourth quarter?
Who knows. Maybe he’s saved the best for last. Perhaps he’ll hit us with something sure to sink Nuzzi’s career for good.
I’ve read a lot about the political scribe in the last few months. She’s has been described as controlling and conniving. The New York Times generously painted her as a mysterious femme fatale.
According to many on X, her pretentious prose is a poor man’s stab at Joan Didion and thus she’s been dubbed Joan “Midion.” If we’re to rely on Lizza’s words, she’s lousy girlfriend and an unethical journalist whose objectivity cannot be trusted.
Maybe she’s all of those things, but she certainly isn’t boring.
And for that, I admit that I have an affinity for her.
Aged 32 and precocious, Nuzzi feels like a throwback to time when media was filled with great characters and personalities, who misbehaved as salaciously as the stories they told.
She came up during the time of #metoo when some men were cast aside for good reason but far too many were banished for microaggressions or far less. Even worse, women were portrayed as helpless creatures with no agency.
They were casualties. Victims of entitled men and the so-called “power dynamics.”
Somehow, she’s escaped that mentality – and never paints herself as a victim. In “American Canto” she doesn’t make excuses for her own behavior and blame Kennedy, who is much older and apparently well-practiced at adultery. Absent from her book is the insufferable self-help language of millennial and Gen Z influencers. She doesn’t inform us about “her truth” or her “lived experience.”
Instead, she’s unapologetically ambitious. And a keen observer.
At one point in the book, she writes about ditching planes to drive the country, so she can better understand the people and the stories on the ground.
It’s a step a lot of journalists skip nowadays because they’re lazy, incurious and intolerant of half the country.
Reports are swirling her current job is in peril and her bosses may decide her past indiscretions crossed too many ethical lines. But they cannot deny Nuzzi has a certain sizzle absent at glossies like Vanity Fair for some time.
