Well, Ryan Lizza released Part 2 of his Substack series on Olivia Nuzzi and her many affairs with much-older freaks. Lizza and Nuzzi were together for years, living together and engaged even after her 2020 affair with Mark Sanford in South Carolina, which was one of the big reveals of Lizza’s “Part 1” Substack. The other reveal was that Nuzzi was a sugar baby to Keith Olbermann when she was in college and in her early 20s. After Olbermann, Lizza possibly left his wife and kids for Nuzzi, and then she kept cheating on him with even older men. Like Robert Kennedy Jr. Lizza’s Part 2 gets into some more of the private fallout after Nuzzi’s affair with Sanford, but the bulk of it is about Robert Kennedy’s batsh-t crazy poetry and how Nuzzi was doing work for his campaign while she was technically a political reporter, and a lot more. You can read the full piece here (you have to pay for the whole thing). Here are some highlights (and no, I’m not including the grossest parts):

Kennedy’s poetry to Olivia Nuzzi: “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had written to my then-fiancé. “Drink from me Love.” He continued, “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.”

Nuzzi claimed she only slept with Mark Sanford once: I did not believe Olivia’s version of events. I believed she had engaged in a long affair with Mark. She insisted that while her “infatuation” lasted months, it was one-sided and they only ever slept together that one night. She insisted that I search her phone and laptop to corroborate her story, but, of course, she had already erased everything that was incriminating.

What Nuzzi did not delete after her affair with Sanford: Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how “sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,” who was described as “one of the most famous political reporters in America,” a “blonde beauty” who “gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.” Olivia told me she wrote the fake article as an exercise to think through what might be the worst that could be said publicly if the affair became known, though that didn’t really make sense to me given the piece’s tone.

Nuzzi “conquers” older men: I eventually came to believe Olivia’s account of the affair, but it took her a long time to get over Mark. Olivia develops addictive-like attachments to the men she loves, who are generally older and more powerful, and she pursues them until she conquers them. “I’m three for three,” she said to me in a moment of levity after the affair with Mark.

Nuzzi swore up & down that she never had a physical affair with Kennedy: Olivia first interviewed Bobby in July 2023 for a piece about Fran Drescher that was never published. She had texted me at the time. “Just talked to RFK,” she said. “He’s crazy.” She loved crazy people, so it should have been a red flag, though I thought nothing of it. But a seed had been planted, and she soon returned to L.A. and interviewed him during a hike, when he grabbed her hand hard and wouldn’t let go, which, she told me and others, had frightened and disturbed her. Her profile of Bobby came out in November. It was now August. Could it really be possible that they carried on for all this time, and she never touched him, at least not since he grabbed her on that hike?

She was deeply in love with Kennedy: I have never been able to convey her near-total obsession with Bobby properly. What I can say with authority is that it seeped into every corner of her life, affected every relationship she had, and drove every decision she made in late 2023 and all of 2024, including her catch-and-kill operations on his behalf, the campaign strategy memos she wrote him, and the other journalistic transgressions that have still not been disclosed.

She was afraid that Kennedy would kill her: “People are going to ask me what happened,” I told Olivia, “and I’m going to tell the truth.” She seemed paralyzed with fear, and I frankly didn’t quite understand why. “If anyone ever finds out,” Olivia [later] told me, “I’m afraid Bobby will kill me.”

[From Ryan Lizza’s Substack]

Like Lizza, I don’t believe Nuzzi’s claims that she never had a physical affair with Kennedy, nor do I believe that she only slept with Mark Sanford once. This seems to be the key observation too: “She loved crazy people, so it should have been a red flag.” Like attracts like. Birds of a feather. While the details about Kennedy’s gross poetry are notable, I’m much more interested in the years-long inappropriate behavior and the complete lack of ethics. There’s a reason why New York Magazine let Nuzzi go without burning her or blacklisting her – they were covering up her huge ethics breaches because they didn’t want larger questions being asked of what they knew and for how long. They didn’t want to know how far her ethical lapses went back. And don’t forget Lizza’s unethical behavior too – he sat on intimate knowledge of Kennedy’s behavior when sharing it would have arguably saved lives by sinking Kennedy’s nomination to HHS. Instead, Lizza chose to parcel out this information at a specific moment to get back at Olivia Nuzzi as she tries to promote HER book.

Speaking of all of that, Nuzzi is (as of this moment) still the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, a cushy job she got earlier this year. Well, VF’s new editor-in-chief has ordered a review into Nuzzi’s past conduct following the publication of Lizza’s essays. VF’s spokesperson told the NY Times: “We were taken by surprise, and we are looking at all the facts.”

Additionally, Lizza’s lawyers have now sent a legal threat to Nuzzi’s publisher and editor because of Nuzzi’s claims, in her book American Canto, that Lizza confessed to her that he had an affair with a Democratic aide. Lizza called the story “false and defamatory.”

Photos courtesy of Lizza’s IG, Nuzzi’s IG, Cover Images and HBO/Real Time with Bill Maher.