‘I loved him’: Olivia Nuzzi breaks silence on RFK Jr affair in candid interview

Olivia Nuzzi has finally addressed, in her own words, the scandal that reshaped her life, career and public image. In a new, unusually introspective interview, the political journalist spoke at length about the alleged intimate text relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr during the 2024 campaign cycle — a relationship that led to her exit from New York Magazine, triggered a cascade of personal upheavals and now frames the centre of her new memoir, American Canto.The interview, conducted with Tim Miller, is Nuzzi’s clearest public reckoning with a saga that became a national media fixation. The first half of this report focuses on what she said in that interview. The second half examines the book, the wider allegations that surfaced in its aftermath and how Nuzzi has chosen to tell — and not tell — her own story.

Nuzzi did not pretend the episode was accidental. She described her actions during the 2024 election cycle in direct terms: “I had f—ed up.” She said the scandal forced her to confront not only an ethical breach but the drift in judgment that made it possible. The rules she broke, she emphasised, were “very good rules,” and she had “violated” them knowingly.The strongest theme in her interview was shame. While some around her encouraged her to ignore the fallout, shrug off criticism and simply keep reporting, Nuzzi rejected that approach. “Shame is very important,” she said, insisting that the instinct to bury the incident would have been another mistake layered atop the first.She described the affair — which she has said was intimate but not physical — as the culmination of “imperceptible errors” in her judgment. These small lapses, she reflected, gradually distorted her sense of what was acceptable, especially as Kennedy’s polling declined and the political stakes appeared lower than they truly were.The comments reflect a shift from her public posture a year earlier. Then, she insisted the relationship had not influenced her reporting. Today, she frames it as a failure of perspective, not simply a breach of rules.

For the first time, Nuzzi addressed the emotional dimension directly. She said she had “loved” Kennedy, something she had not publicly articulated with this level of clarity before. She described her involvement as a collision of personal attachment and professional responsibility — a collision she now recognises she was unequipped to navigate.Her remarks about Kennedy’s personal crises — including the resurfaced story of him once leaving a bear carcass in Central Park — painted a picture of a journalist tangled in the inner life of her subject. She said she sometimes played the role of a “Socratic” listener as he tried to manage potential reputational blowback. She repeatedly insisted she never intended to act as an adviser and noted that any prescriptive advice she offered was ignored.The admission of affection does not come across as an excuse. Rather, she frames it as part of the blind spot that cost her her credibility.

The interview also revisited the aftermath. After the scandal broke, New York Magazine opened a review of her work. The publication ultimately found no factual inaccuracies or evidence of bias but concluded that her relationship with a subject she had covered was incompatible with its standards. She left the magazine soon after.She also confirmed that the scandal had upended her personal life. She parted ways with her fiancé, political journalist Ryan Lizza, and moved to California, where she began working for Vanity Fair.But the interview avoided one of the most damaging aftershocks: the fresh allegations from Lizza that she had previously had an affair with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, whom she had covered during his brief 2020 Republican primary challenge. Nuzzi’s legal team has said she had only one improper relationship with a source in her career — the one discussed in the book.Vanity Fair has placed her employment under review as it examines the allegations.

If the interview is forthright, American Canto is elliptical, dense and often evasive. It is not, as many expected, a tell-all. Instead, Nuzzi structures her memoir as a fragmented meditation on America, politics, love and character. The book shuffles between personal history, cultural observation and impressionistic scenes of Los Angeles wildfires and political chaos.The Kennedy relationship appears in the book, but the details remain deliberately blurred. She reiterates that the relationship was not physically consummated, but she introduces new ambiguities — including Kennedy telling her that “if it’s just sex, he can survive” the scandal — which raises questions about what transpired and what she chooses not to reveal.Readers looking for a clearer accounting will struggle. The memoir avoids chronology, offers few specifics and refuses to directly address the timeline of events that dominated Washington gossip for months.

The book casts Nuzzi not as a reporter caught in a scandal but as a character navigating a distorted political universe. She invokes Dante, speaks of fate and character, and positions the story as one of modern American unreality. She revisits her childhood acting classes, her teenage attempt at rebranding herself as a pop figure named “Livvy,” and her long-standing fixation on performance as both identity and survival.This theme — the idea that politics turns everyone into actors — runs throughout the memoir. But the same theatricality also skates close to self-mythology. She describes scenes in heightened language, invokes symbolic fires and apocalyptic landscapes and writes with grand dramatic flourish where readers may expect clarity.The gap between her reflective, grounded interview tone and the melodramatic literary voice of the memoir is striking.

The memoir is also notable for what it does not say. It does not go into detail about Kennedy’s personality outside her own internal monologue. It almost entirely avoids discussing the fallout with her ex-fiancé. It makes no mention of the Sanford allegations. It does not attempt to clarify competing accounts of her relationships, professional decisions or the behind-the-scenes dynamics that shaped the scandal.Instead, American Canto tries to turn her downfall into a meditation on America, on truth, on image, on fame, and on the interplay between media and power.Whether the book succeeds depends on what one expects from it. As a literary artefact, it is ambitious, dramatic and stylistically bold. As an explanation of the RFK Jr episode, it is intentionally incomplete.

Taken together, the interview and the memoir offer two contrasting versions of Olivia Nuzzi.In the interview, she is blunt, remorseful, analytical and painfully self-aware.In the memoir, she is lyrical, symbolic, evasive and often opaque.One is an admission.The other is an interpretation.Both, however, make clear that the RFK Jr chapter is the hinge in her career — the moment she believes forced her to confront her own ambition, vulnerability and contradictions. The interview may finally give her audience the clarity the memoir withholds. Whether it’s enough to rebuild trust, or reshape her public identity, remains to be seen. Go to Source