Olivia Nuzzi had a digital affair with Robert Kennedy Jr. for many months last year, and in the wake of the affair, she lost her job at New York Magazine, her engagement to Ryan Lizza and her East Coast life. She bounced back though, because the American media is apparently always in need of unethical, self-infantilizing blonde a–holes. Nuzzi wrote a book – on her phone!! – about her affair with Kennedy, and wouldn’t you know, Nuzzi gave an exclusive excerpt to her new employer, Vanity Fair. You can read the American Canto excerpt here. She didn’t bury the lede – only a few paragraphs in, she’s already talking about Robert Kennedy’s brain worm.

“I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.

I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. “Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.” A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.

[From Vanity Fair]

“Trust me, bro” – the worm eating Kennedy’s brain AND the snake-oil salesman masquerading as a doctor who “reviewed” the brain scans. “I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein.” Do we want to discuss the possibility that Olivia Nuzzi is f–king stupid and that a worm possibly ate part of her brain as well? Can brain-worms be transferred via demure nudes? “I winced when he joked about the worm” – I’m dying to know what “jokes” he made about the worm, actually.

Incidentally, I’ve never believed that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s affair was purely digital and that there was never any physical assignations between them, but maybe that’s just me. She certainly doesn’t write about him like their affair never involved physical contact. This moron was getting hot and bothered over his worm-brained lunacy, after all.

Note: this VF excerpt was published before Nuzzi’s ex-fiance published his scathing Substack piece.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images. Screencaps courtesy of New York Magazine and HBO/Real Time with Bill Maher.