Finn McRedmond: Falling in love with Robert F Kennedy Jr wasn’t Olivia Nuzzi’s biggest mistake
“The journalist must never become the story” is perhaps the most overused, and most untrue, cliches about the industry. I learned at an alarmingly early departure in my career that journalists, particularly woman journalists, could access strata of success denied to everyone else by becoming their own brand. Report, investigate, interview and opine all you want – but offer personal detail and, even better, light social scandal? That’s the route to stardom. That’s how you follow in the wake of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion and Jay McInerney.
No one has heeded this lesson better than Olivia Nuzzi. If you’re new to the story convulsing US media, let me catch you up. Nuzzi was an ingenue in the Washington DC media scene: she wrote funny and revealing profiles of serious politicians throughout her 20s, she was beloved for her unbuttoned and casually disarming style, she had a great job at New York magazine, she was engaged to another media star, political reporter Ryan Lizza, who is nearly 20 years her senior, she was hot, she was blonde, she was cool.
She is still those latter three things, actually. But last year her world, and the media, blew up in her face. During her reportage on the US presidential campaign, the 31-year-old fell in love with Robert F Kennedy jnr, allegedly conducted an over-the-phone (“never physical”, which adds an air of strange glamour to the whole thing) affair with the presidential hopeful nearly 40 years older than her (he denies it). She said the affair began late last year, after she wrote a profile of him, and ended in August.
In the process she seemed to violate every ethical code. Her former fiance accused her of helping out with RFK’s presidential campaign behind the scenes, and of helping him to evade negative press. This was – and is – a shocking breach of basic journalistic principles and should – and did – get an individual fired from their job.
And yet, it may be the best thing Nuzzi has ever done for her career and her response to the whole thing has made me like her even more. After the news broke she fled to the West Coast (cool), got a job as Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor (so chic!) and secretly wrote a book called American Canto (as titles go, this is over the top).
The book allegorises the downward spiral of her own life with that of the social fabric of the United States. Through literary allusion and overwrought metaphor about wild fire she makes the case that she did it all for love. It is not well executed and I don’t recommend you read or buy it. Just read the real Didion instead. Or, in fact, Nora Ephron.
Nuzzi the character is far more interesting than Nuzzi the writer. This impression – faintly sexist, I know – is bolstered by the role of her ex-fiance in all of this. As Nuzzi broke her silence and announced the publication of her book, Lizza took to Substack to give his side and vent his retribution: in a series of blog posts (still more to come) he revealed the contents of RFK and Nuzzi’s sexual communication, that Nuzzi had another affair with another presidential hopeful in 2020, and the full extent of her professional impropriety. Through Lizza’s eyes we learn more about Nuzzi’s messy soul than Nuzzi was able to reveal.
And so, the most troubling thing to me about all of this is that it doesn’t matter that Nuzzi’s book is bad or shallow (I’ve only read part of it; but enough to be able to confirm this is the case). Because the story is so gossipy, fun and salacious, literary quality and journalistic rigour take a back seat. The lesson for young woman journalists is reinforced: be hot, be cool, give up your personal details, write about your messy affairs, exploit your private life, and everything else will fall into place. The personal brand is king and prose doesn’t matter much any more.
We saw this principle take full effect in the 2010s when the confessional, diaristic, memoir-esque personal essay became the quickest route to journalistic fame. Slate magazine called it the “first-person industrial complex” and described a universe where women were encouraged to mine and excavate the darkest parts of their personal life in exchange for a small fee or, if you were lucky, a book deal. Think: “I was cheating on my boyfriend when he died” and the harrowing “I fell in love with my dad” (published in Jezebel). Nuzzi grew up in this ecosystem too, and when she started her tryst with RFK jnr, the subject of her reporting, she probably did not just see a landmine under her engagement to Lizza, she probably saw dollar signs.
I am tempted to become moralising and worthy about all of this: this is a journalistic scandal and Nuzzi has let down the profession, not to mention young women too. But I don’t feel that at all. Instead I see Nuzzi as a woman who is very good at her job. And that job is not prose-on-page or ruthless investigation or even interesting ideas. No, the job for women like her? Perform, dazzle them with your interior darkness, become fodder for the audience’s own sexual fantasies. That’s how Nuzzi won in the end. And I don’t blame her.
