In September 2024, a particularly crazy story broke. “Journalist” Olivia Nuzzi was put on leave from New York Magazine after it was confirmed that she had been carrying on some kind of months-long affair with Robert Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi was engaged, at the time, to Ryan Lizza, a major Politico journalist and editor. Kennedy was and is married to Cheryl Hines. For weeks, there was a steady drip of scandal – Nuzzi had sent “demure nudes” to Kennedy, Kennedy had told her that he loved her and wanted a baby with her, Lizza and Kennedy spoke on the phone angrily, and Nuzzi told a convoluted story about Lizza stalking her or harassing her (when he broke off their engagement and encouraged her to stop screwing around with a married man who is clearly insane). One year later, we learned that Nuzzi wrote a book about her “affair” with Kennedy, a book eyerollingly called American Canto. Well, the New York Times has now published an exclusive summary/puff piece on Nuzzi and the book. You can read the devastatingly stupid piece here. Some highlights:

Her affair with Kennedy: Olivia Nuzzi loved him. She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter and he was then a presidential candidate she had written about. She loved his eyes, “blue as the flame.” She loved that “the sight of something as trivial as a rose” could move him to tears. She loved his insatiable appetites and his “particular complications and particular darkness.” But she said “I love you” only after he said it first. He called her “Livvy” and wrote her poems. He said he wanted her to have his baby. He promised to take a bullet for her. This is what Nuzzi writes in her book, “American Canto,” never naming the politician who readers will deduce is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

She swears she & Kennedy didn’t consummate anything: Nuzzi disappeared for a year, in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles where she wrote “American Canto” in secret. The book, which comes out Dec. 2 and is described here for the first time, paints a picture of a nation and a personal life on fire. She describes the mutual infatuation that consumed her, even if it was never consummated. (She is ambiguous in the book, but said in one of many interviews, “We were not sleeping together.”) But “American Canto” is far more about bearing witness to Trumpworld and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.

A vaccine joke: Sitting under a pine tree in Los Angeles one night last month, Nuzzi gave up the pretense of trying to explain the unexplainable and reached for a joke for the people who simply could not fathom what came over her. “Maybe it was the vaccines.”

I despise this woman: Nuzzi, 32, lives in a tiny house in the heart of Malibu where lizards crawl into her kitchen and the King James Bible and “The Divine Comedy” — two books she was reading while she was writing “American Canto” — sit on her dining room table. She drives around in a white Mustang convertible, like a Lana Del Rey song come to life. She fled to the West Coast a year ago when the nation seemed to be “up my skirt,” as she puts it, aided by paparazzi who were determined to keep her in the news. Here she can hike in peace, though she feels hunted. Drones fly overhead; she wonders if it’s merely a coincidence.

She wrote the book on her phone: The book — most of which she punched into her phone while hiking — is not exactly a memoir, though much of it is about her decade in journalism before she met Kennedy and her early years growing up on the Navesink River in New Jersey. Her father was a union man with the Department of Sanitation and her mother was a former catalog model who drank way too much and had what Nuzzi describes in the book as a “borderline personality gaze.”

[From The New York Times]

That’s where I tapped out – she wrote this sh-t on her phone? She wrote a BOOK on her phone? And the “just a blonde in Malibu, hiding from the drones and the paparazzi because the world is looking up my skirt” shtick is f–king gross. Nuzzi is very much the archetype of a certain kind of white woman who expects to be infantilized at every turn. People were “up my skirt!” Because you sent nudes to ROBERT KENNEDY JR, you f–king dumbass. She was a political journalist who gave favorable coverage to Kennedy and MAGA world because she was stupid enough to fall in love with a man whose brain has been half-eaten by a WORM. Her unethical behavior should make her persona non grata across ALL media. She didn’t need a book deal and a cushy job with Vanity Fair – she needed to be blacklisted by every TV show, cable channel and print-media outlet. “But ‘American Canto’ is far more about bearing witness to Trumpworld and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.” F–king spare me. Olivia Nuzzi enabled these monsters because she thought it was funny and it would help her career. She believed that whatever hell they unleashed wouldn’t affect her in the slightest.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Nuzzi’s IG. Screengrabs from New York Magazine and HBO/Bill Maher’s show.