Believe it or not, this post is still up on Olivia Nuzzi’s X account…
THE LEAD: As much as I wished this weren’t the case, we aren’t finished learning all the lurid details of the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. debacle:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote disgraced political reporter Olivia Nuzzi an outrageously raunchy “poem,” which was dramatically revealed by her ex-fiancé and reporter Ryan Lizza in the second part of his series exposing the secrets of his ethics-challenged ex.
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, wrote to Nuzzi in undated texts recounted by Lizza in a piece published on his Substack early Saturday.
The poem was included in Lizza’s second part of his series about the affair between his former fiancee and the current Health and Human Services secretary. The post titled “Part 2: She did it again” is available on Lizza’s Substack.
I’m not linking to it here for three specific reasons:
- The piece is behind a paywall and I can’t in good conscience promote this as journalism or something worth spending $10 on. I would rather set fire to a ten dollar bill than pay for whatever the hell is back there.
- The teaser paragraphs alone introduced enough “explicit content” that would have my editors at Sage literally having aneurysms.
- My mother reads this blog and I don’t know what would be worse if she clicked that link: Having her asking me what certain sexual terms Lizza uses mean or having her tell tell me she completely understood everything and didn’t need a translator.
Either way, it’d feel like this:
THE BACKGROUND: Oh, hell, where to begin?
Nuzzi was booted from her job with New York magazine after her “inappropriate relationship” with RFK Jr. came to light. Nuzzi had written a glowing profile of the Kennedy offspring, while also finding herself infatuated with him to the point of having a long-distance-messaging-with-sexy-photos-but-we-pinky-swear-we-didn’t-bang relationship.
Lizza, Nuzzi’s fiance at the time, who has his own history of icky sex allegations, broke off the engagement and made some very public statements about Nuzzi and this situation.
Both mercifully dropped off the map until this month, when Nuzzi’s “American Canto” book hit the shelves, leading to a “little girl lost” style profile on her by the NY Times. In response to some of the stuff in the book, Lizza took to his Substack to publish a response titled, “Part 1: How I found out.” In that post, he pulled a “Sixth Sense” twist at the end to reveal his whole “I can’t believe she’s cheating on me” build up wasn’t about RFK, but instead about former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
Meanwhile, Nuzzi is now working for Vanity Fair, and media folks are a-flutter discussing this situation.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: It’s too easy to crap all over Nuzzi, Lizza and everyone else involved in this situation. Right now, this feels like staring at a multiple-vehicle car wreck on the interstate. Instead of taking the easy path, consider the following difficult advice:
BASIC ADVICE TO FELLOW EDUCATORS AND MEDIA PROS: We need to be honest with ourselves, the public and our students, even though it really sucks.
Whenever a situation like Nuzzi-gate (as we’re apparently calling it now) pops up, a common refrain that emerges is, “Female journalists don’t sleep with sources.” I know a number of professors, former journalists and current journalists who hate it when this kind of thing happens, because it reinforces thread-bare stereotypes about women and it debases the work quality female journalists have done.
Here’s the problem: Lousy examples exist in almost every field and they create misery for the rest of the folks in that field. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s the reality of our surroundings.
Trust me, every time some jagwad professor decides to treat his undergraduates like a sexual charcuterie board, I want to die inside a little. I hate that I find myself second-guessing every interaction I have with students for at least two weeks, wondering if they think I might be “one of those.”
That said, I can’t tell students, “Professors don’t sleep with students,” because despite the ever-present blank stares they give me in class, I know they aren’t completely unaware of reality. I’ve even overheard students I know talking among themselves about skeezy professors hitting on them or their friends.
I also can’t just say, “Well, I don’t do that…” because that’s just really creepy to make them think that I’m thinking that I have to tell them that and too damned specific to make anyone feel better about it. It’s usually why I just shake my head and say, “What the hell is wrong with people?”
In regard to journalism, I’ve met multiple former and current journalists who “engaged in inappropriate sexual relationships” with people they cover. In one case, a local reporter who also worked at a local university was accused of sleeping with someone she had profiled. A friend told me that his wife worked with her years earlier, so I asked what she recalled about the reporter. The response: “Tell Vince she was a whore who occasionally wrote stuff.”
Another friend who worked with this journalist in another newsroom told me the majority of the staff knew about multiple similar indiscretions, so they referred to her by a nickname that merged part of her last name with the word “rabbit.”
In another case, one guy confessed to me that as a student journalist he “accidentally” slept with a student athlete while he was a sports reporter and editor at the student newspaper. The following is my recollection of the conversation:
Him: “Um…” Blank stare. “This is not good, right?”
Me: “Well, I wouldn’t add it to my resume… I don’t get how you “accidentally” slept with her. Did you trip and fall on something?”
Him: “No, I mean I didn’t know she was on the team until just before we… you know…”
Me: “I’ve got so many questions, not the least of which would be, ‘How did her athletic affiliation come up at that exact moment?’ ‘How little did you know about her before you decided to sleep with her that this nugget of information didn’t come up?’ and ‘Did you maybe think about not doing this when you became aware of this situation?'”
It went downhill from there…
I don’t think I’m that special that I knew at least a handful of people who had violated this basic tenet of journalism, so I imagine more than a few other folks reading this have a “Hooo boy…. not good…” story of this nature.
We need to stop pretending that this kind of thing doesn’t happen and be more on point about what we want to say here:
- Most journalists do not sleep with sources period, let alone to gain special access for stories. A small number of journalists are bad actors, but to paint all journalists with a wide brush because of them is unfair to those who aren’t.
- None of us who don’t violate the rules are thrilled by the people who do, particularly when their actions reinforce negative stereotypes against people who have already had to work harder than they should to make it in the field.
- Those of us who take this job seriously are not going to pretend that those people don’t exist, but we are going to make damned sure you know we aren’t like them.
I’m sure there’s a better way to say this, but at least we’re being honest and letting people we aren’t thrilled by this, either.
BASIC ADVICE FOR STUDENT JOURNALISTS: I can’t stress this enough, but for every situation like this, where it seems like the world turns out great by flouting the rules, there are dozens more that are just god-awful disasterbacles that never get a book deal.
Colby Hall of Media-ite made the case that Nuzzi, his DM buddy, really just learned how to play the game based on the way the system has shifted, so we can’t really hold it against her:
The glamorous photo shoots, the Lana Del Rey cosplay with the white Mustang convertible on PCH, the literary ambiguity about Kennedy’s identity in her book, the defiant framing that positions her as a victim bearing witness to power.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: This isn’t tone-deaf. It’s the only move that makes economic sense in 2025.
Nuzzi has correctly read our current media ecosystem. There is no path back to institutional credibility for her—those institutions are dying anyway, and they were never going to reward rule-following in the first place. But there IS a path forward through celebrity, through controversy, through the monetization of scandal itself.
The Vanity Fair job. The book deal. The rehabilitation tour that’s a Klieg light away from what it really wants to be. She’s not trying to rebuild her reputation as a journalist—she’s building a different kind of brand entirely, one where being interesting matters more than being ethical, where attention is the only currency that still spends.
Please don’t buy into that line of thinking. She’s the “it” thing at the moment, but that fades pretty quickly and even if it doesn’t for her, it doesn’t follow it will work for you. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who tried to become a millionaire starting an “Only Fans” account.
As much as it might seem like a great idea to be that rule-breaking, cool-as-hell rebel in the moment, these things don’t end well. As someone who has watched almost every VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode, I can pretty much guarantee short-term career thinking leads to some long-term misery. And unlike video games, you can’t just hit the reset button once things start going bad.
Follow the rules, behave better than the attention-seeking toddler at the grocery store and do the job to the best of your ability. You might not become famous, but that’s likely to be a good thing.
BASIC ADVICE TO PROFESSIONAL MEDIA OUTLETS: Watching Vanity Fair hire Nuzzi is like watching pro sports teams picking up troubled players who have talent, arguing that, in their system, the player will thrive. What they fail to realize is that even if the talent is in there somewhere, the human foibles are going to massively undercut it and you’re essentially just buying trouble.
With that in mind, I’m begging you. Stop buying trouble.
First, the juice is rarely ever worth the squeeze. Everyone is out there thinking they are buying the next Hunter S. Thompson. Instead, they’re buying the next Ruth S. Barrett. Hiring people like this has the same internal logic of cashing in your 401K and using it to buy lottery tickets to secure your retirement.
Second, you’ll make my job a lot easier as a professor because I won’t have explain to students that to get their dream job, they should work hard, play by the rules, and then pray they don’t lose out to someone who banged a source and now has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.
I’m having a hard enough time getting them avoid bias in their writing, abide by grammar rules and attribute the hell out of things, what with all the god-awful crap that’s passing journalism these days. I don’t want to have this conversation:
ME: You can’t write a profile story about your best friend. It’s not ethically sound.
STUDENT: So, why can (REPORTER X) sleep with a profile subject and land a job with a six-figure salary?
ME: Go read your AP style book.
Third, you need to understand the “Cockroach Theory of Terrible Behavior.” When you see one cockroach in a house, rest assured it’s not the only one around, like he’s on vacation or something. For every one you see, there are several more just waiting to show up.
I remember being at my college newspaper during an editor election, where one candidate was trying to justify some bad behavior, explaining, “Oh, that was an isolated incident.” Once we retired to debate his candidacy, the one guy piped up with, “I counted 10 or 11 ‘isolated incidents.’ How many does it take to make a trend?”
Vanity Fair is already playing defense on the hiring, as they were “take by surprise” at Lizza’s accusations about Nuzzi’s nuzzling with Sanford. The magazine is “looking at all the facts” in this situation as it decides how the hell it’s going to get out of this situation before another cockroach comes crawling out of the corner.
If you want to see the best of journalism, hire good quality people. Promote and showcase them as what’s worth doing in the field. Let us in the classroom highlight the good work done in the right circumstances.
None of this will stop another Nuzzi situation, but at least you can help us point to this as a cautionary tale and not a smooth career move.