There they stood, his arm around her waist, boldly dressed as well they might be. She was 30, beautiful and talented, dressed in a leopard-print top and red slit skirt—beloved by her editors, chased by producers, and envied by much of the journalistic world in New York and D.C.
He was 48, sharply cut in a navy tux, bow tie, and a pair of glasses that would have been loud for the 1970s, let alone the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2023. He had worn somber straighter ties as a younger man, before he met her. Now they were characters in their own story, a modern-day Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, as they liked to say.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza’s lives hadn’t yet been upended by that lost son of American aristocracy: Robert Kennedy Jr., 70, the failed presidential candidate, serial adulterer and perennial tormentor of his wives, of whom Cheryl Hines is only the latest. Nuzzi hadn’t yet met Kennedy for a profile, and started a perilous months-long electronic affair with him in its wake, then failed to disclose it to her employer, New York Magazine; to the public; or to Lizza, her fiancé since 2022.
“I think she was overwhelmed by what he [RFK Jr] is, not who he is,” says someone who knows her. “As a Catholic kid in New York, JFK was like a god.”
Lizza now stands accused by Nuzzi of attempting to blackmail her into staying with him when he discovered the affair this past August. Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out,” Nuzzi wrote in a filing to DC Superior Court on Sept. 30.
On Tuesday, Lizza will have to answer Nuzzi’s charges in a D.C. courtroom; he had initially escaped scrutiny when news of her relationship with Kennedy broke on Sept. 19. An error of judgment that could have remained private has spiraled into a totemic national story, with first Lizza (if Nuzzi is to be believed) and now Nuzzi inviting the press to cover their fracturing lives.
Outside the CBS News after-party for the White House Correspondents’ Association at the French embassy in April 2023, all of that was still to come. Everything the pair had worked for—all the fruits of their hustle, ambition and industry—was still intact.
The Teflon Reporter And the Teflon Don
As the pair headed inside, it was Lizza who harbored his own secret history—his family’s.
The Lizza wealth had been built on decades of government contracts across a web of road, asphalt, and construction businesses. Lizza’s grandfather Carlo, the son of an Italian laborer, started the family’s first eponymous company in America. It paved much of the Long Island Expressway. Carlo’s sons all went on to found construction firms of their own. Some of these firms, and some of the sons, would later be indicted on conspiracy to rig bids on federal contracts, conspiracy to bribe local officials, and in one instance, to be accused of mob ties to John Gotti, the “Teflon Don” and head of the Gambino crime family in late 1980s New York.
Reuters
This was the world Ryan Lizza had escaped. He had spent 25 years rising through D.C. thanks to his energy and talent—without anyone knowing anything about it.
The Double Drop-Out Who Became the Toast of D.C.
The society from which Olivia Nuzzi rose was better known. She was proud of her path and spoke openly about it. The only daughter of a New York City sanitation worker, she grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, a pleasant commuter town with good schools and wide lawns an hour south of the city, where membership of the local beach club marked your social standing.
She left Middletown High South early and dropped out of Fordham University in the Bronx, too. Yet by the time she was 24, New York Magazine had poached her from the Daily Beast to be its correspondent in D.C. She was soon interviewing then-President Trump in the Oval Office and being lauded on CNN. She rose and kept rising. Her progressive magazine ignored her progressive detractors. Her work was too valuable, her copy too fun, her access too good. She was their Trump whisperer, and she could write. “Olivia, write like you talk,” her first editor on the local paper, New Jersey’s triCityNews, had told her when she was still in college. “Just be real.”
Networks—AMC, Showtime, MSNBC, HBO, Bloomberg—fell over themselves to work with her, while rival journalists who couldn’t stand her, or her standing, fell over themselves in rage. Nuzzi, wrote a future Washington Post reporter in Deadspin, was nothing but a “white-supremacist whisperer” who writes “alarmingly credulous profiles of right-wing ghouls” and, along with Lizza, “conveniently ignore[s] the real and human cost of political decisions.”
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
How Lizza Paved His Own Path to Success
Lizza’s path was, on the surface, better paved: a backwater New England boarding school (Berkshire, in western Massachusetts), then U.C. Berkeley in the Bay Area, one of the more prestigious colleges you can find 3,000 miles from Long Island. He won an internship at The New Republic, impressing editor Chuck Lane as a good guy, self-effacing and eager to learn. Six years later The Washington Post featured him atop an article on the next generation of political reporters, crediting his revelatory reporting on John Kerry’s 2004 run for president. He wrote one of the first major profiles of Barack Obama, and signed a $250,000 deal with HarperCollins to write a book ahead of the 2008 campaign.
Then David Remnick called and asked him to be The New Yorker’s man in D.C. Remnick vetoed the book; he wanted Lizza filing for him. Lizza’s publisher at HarperCollins was so depressed he refused to find another author. “A reporter of his [Lizza’s] caliber is still where I set the bar,” the publisher said, and no one else met it. Lizza was 32. A career among the D.C. elite stretched out before him.
He enjoyed it for a decade: signing another deal in “the mid six figures” to write a revised book on 2008 that also went unwritten, appearing on Charlie Rose in 2011, and, in 2017, reporting for The New Yorker a profanity-laced phone call that immortalized Anthony Scaramucci—and got him fired as Trump’s communications director 10 days after he took the job. Scaramucci thought the call was off the record. Lizza ran the story. His star was at its zenith. (Scaramucci, who later described Lizza as “f—ing dead to me,” declined to comment on Lizza’s current situation.)
Five months later, however, The New Yorker fired him. At the height of the Me Too movement, a woman with whom he had a previous relationship accused him of sexual misconduct, which he denied. Thrown from a great height, he was offered a lifeline by Jay Fielden, then editor of Esquire. He had to meet with Hearst executives first, to assuage their anxieties. He brought his new girlfriend—Olivia Nuzzi, at 25, 19 years his junior—to one meeting. She offered the air cover of a supportive politician’s wife.
“A reporter of his caliber is still where I set the bar.”
— Lizza’s publisher
Lizza had split from his first wife, a family physician with whom he had two children, a few years earlier. Nuzzi had recently lost her father. They made an odd couple in one sense: one the Trump whisperer, the other a left-leaning reporter ever eager to lean into denouncing Trump. (“I definitely try to get close to the people involved in the campaign,” Lizza told The Washington Post in 2004, “and not fall into the laziness of sitting in the office and reading blogs all day.” But the “moral clarity” of outraged tweets had its rewards in the late 2010s. Lizza went where the energy was.)
Yet their apparent differences betrayed a shared background, one more similar than it appeared. Both had grown up in sight of New York, a city out of reach. Nuzzi would walk around it with her father as a girl. “Any building in Manhattan,” she wrote in the Daily Beast after he died, “he knew the interesting folks who inhabited it.”
In D.C. she and Lizza became two of the interesting folks. His career recovered, with Politico poaching him to co-write Playbook, the town bible, in 2019. “They had a salon-style life,” says a prominent D.C. journalist. Lizza had a big home in Georgetown he’d bought for more than $2m in 2008, only ten years into his career. It was a place you could go to crack open “nice bottles of Scotch” with Ryan and Olivia, who managed to assume a position for themselves as “arbiters at the cool table. They complemented each other. He had money, and she had glamour.”
The Young Woman Who Rose Too Far, Too Fast
Lizza had attracted respect as he rose in the 2000s. He was a man following an expected path for a Washington boy wonder, who rose quickly but not too quickly. Nuzzi’s rise, which came later, was much faster, and played out online, attracting a far harsher glare. Women weren’t meant to interview the president in the Oval Office at the age of 25, and have the president’s vice president, chief of staff and secretary of state drop by when they did.
They certainly weren’t meant to look good doing it. Rival journalists who trailed Trump in 2016 had felt Nuzzi stood out too much. “She dressed really well,” one of them remembers, “and other women in the press [pack] would play ‘ID the outfit’: Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Stella McCartney.”