Vanity Fair and West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi have “mutually agreed” to part their ways after her contract with the Condé Nast-owned magazine expires. The decision came after the controversy over allegations of Nuzzi’s affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other past behavior.A joint statement Friday from Vanity Fair and West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi said they “have mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year.” Nuzzi had joined the magazine in September as West Coast editor, AP news agency reported.The decision followed controversy over Nuzzi’s personal relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr. while she was a Washington correspondent for New York magazine. The relationship emerged in the fall of 2024, when it was revealed that Kennedy, then a presidential candidate and now head of the Department of Health and Human Services, had been intimately involved with Nuzzi.New York magazine dismissed Nuzzi for failing to disclose the relationship. She later reflected on the affair and its consequences in her memoir American Canto, which refers to Kennedy as “The Politician” and ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza as “the man I did not marry.” Excerpts appeared in Vanity Fair but competed for attention with a series of Substack posts by Lizza containing embarrassing allegations.The feud between Nuzzi and Lizza gripped media insiders after he alleged that she had an affair with another profile subject and had given Kennedy political advice—both considered off limits for journalists. Lizza also published salacious, cringeworthy text messages from Kennedy to Nuzzi that he had intercepted.Following the revelation, the magazine placed Nuzzi on leave, and they later parted ways. But Nuzzi had recently returned to a newsroom after Vanity Fair’s recently appointed global editorial director Mark Guiducci named her West Coast editor in September.In a Substack interview with Emily Sundberg, Nuzzi denounced her ex-fiancé’s posts as “fiction-slash-revenge porn.”Friday’s announcement came only days after the publication of American Canto, which critics disdained and readers largely ignored. The book ranked just 6,094 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list as of Friday afternoon.During the turbulent week, Nuzzi published a humorous Substack column titled “Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry,” including the entry “Monica Lewinsky reaches out to check on your mental health.”
