Media reporter Oliver Darcy broke the astonishing news late Thursday night that star New York political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi had been suspended after she disclosed to the magazine that she'd engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a subject of her reporting. That subject, according to several reports, is none other than failed presidential candidate and notable animal corpse defiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was the subject of a November 2023 Nuzzi profile.
Per a statement from New York's comms department, Nuzzi has been placed on leave while the magazine conducts a third-party review. Nuzzi told Darcy after his story broke that "earlier this year, the nature of some communication" between herself and a subject "turned personal." She said the relationship was "never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict." In a note to New York staff, editor David Haskell said Nuzzi, 31, claimed not to have used Kennedy, 70, as a source during their relationship, which started in December 2023 and ended in August. Kennedy's people denied the existence of such a relationship and merely told Darcy, "Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece."
That piece begins with an anecdote about something called "the dog car," which Nuzzi details thusly: "Rearview mirror smashed to bits, seat belts chewed off, cushions gnawed open, filth and dog hair covering every surface. The death machine smells so bad I thought I might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun." That's somehow one of the least notable incidents involving RFK Jr. and an animal that smells crazy in his car; it is not to be confused with the one about the lopped-off whale head leaking precious juices into his family's minivan, or the one about him yoinking a bear carcass from the side of the road and leaving it in Central Park "as a prank." It is also not to be confused with the 2010 incident summed up in the CNN headline, "RFK Jr. denies eating a dog while sidestepping sexual assault allegations in Vanity Fair article." This is a different animal thing.
Nuzzi broke onto the political reporting scene in 2014 when she worked for the Daily Beast, and she was hired at New York in 2017. She is decently sourced up in TrumpWorld, and has produced a number of insightful pieces into the Trump campaign and White House. Her most recent story is a profile of Trump, a man whose makeup abilities she recently praised for the way they made him look "alive and vibrant." Nuzzi is also notable for her weird friendship with Ann Coulter and other white supremacists, laundering the reputations of a bunch of horrible people, having eyebrow-raising takes on raw milk, and her relationship with Ryan Lizza, the Politico newsletter guy who was fired from the New Yorker in December 2017 over alleged "improper sexual conduct."
In 2018, Lizza and Nuzzi sold a book to a Simon & Schuster imprint about the 2020 election, though it was canned three years later. Per Page Six, "senior figures on the Biden team 'don’t trust' Nuzzi in particular, and the couple have struggled to tease out prime information because of it." Lizza and Nuzzi got engaged in 2022, but are no longer together. Lizza released a statement on Friday announcing that he wouldn't be involved in covering the story of Nuzzi's relationship with RFK Jr., "because of my connection to this story through my ex-fiancée."
Kennedy, who is married to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines, was last seen using his jarringly serrated voice to endorse Donald Trump.
