Olivia Nuzzi Breaks Silence on RFK Scandal: I Did Something Wrong

High-profile journalist Olivia Nuzzi has broken her silence amid a media storm over her alleged digital relationship with 2024 presidential candidate and current health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“I think shame is really important, and I had fucked up, right? I did something wrong, like those ethics rules exist for a reason,” Nuzzi told Tim Miller on his Bulwark podcast that released Tuesday. Nuzzi spoke after the release of her memoir,American Canto, in which she shares her perspective on the RFK Jr. scandal, though she doesn’t name the politician directly in her book.

But she did address the HHS secretary in the podcast, including whether she gave him campaign advice. “I loved him, right? I cared about him. And I didn’t think that it was my place to tell him what to do,” Nuzzi said.

She said she held a “deluded perspective” that because RFK was down in the polls and she had a “private thing” with him that she felt the relationship wouldn’t blow up, which itdid when RFK Jr. became a meme on social media. “And then lo and behold, it unfurled in this way where it just directly collided with the main event that I was covering,” Nuzzi admitted.

She punted on answering a question from Miller on whether she kissed RFK Jr., but did expand on their relationship.

“I think we’re both alone, a lot. We’re both on the road a lot. I was avoiding trying to figure out what I was doing in my personal life. I wasn’t happy. I was being a coward about it, right?” she said.

Nuzzi insisted she didn’t write a “tell-all” book about RFK Jr. as she had to balance her own revelations and be responsible about writing about her life on the campaign trail covering politicians, including about President Trump’s “distortion of reality” over the last 10 years. “My job was to talk to monstrous people, including Donald Trump, and to make sense of them and translate for people who would never or could never do that,” Nuzzi insisted.

Her former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, recently made allegations about Nuzzi in the lead up to the release of her memoir American Canto, where he accused her of having an affair with former U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford during his 2020 presidential campaign a little more than a year after her interactions with Kennedy made headlines.

About Lizza, Nuzzi said: “He has presented his harassment of me in this humiliation campaign, as some sort of crusade that’s in the public interest, that somehow the country will be saved by him writing. Some combination of like fan fiction and revenge porn.”

Nuzzi added that her life had been “destabilized” by the media storm that erupted around her. “It has been a shock and disturbing to see people engage with this harassment, and to not call it that, to not observe it for what it is,” she told Miller.