Who is Olivia Nuzzi?
The story of Olivia Nuzzi starts with, of all people, Anthony Weiner, the once rising star of the Democratic Party who threw it all away – his career, his beautiful/talented/accomplished wife and son – for sexting. Three times. And, not to mention, helping sink the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign in the process.
In 2013, Olivia Nuzzi interned for Weiner’s campaign for mayor of New York City (were we ever so young?), and wrote blog posts for NSFWcorp, and subsequently a front-page story for the New York Daily News, about the experience. In the piece, Nuzzi claimed fellow interns only joined the campaign to get access to Huma Abedin, who they all assumed would be working for a future President Hillary Clinton, and that Weiner would refer to her and other female staffers as “Monica.” Weiner’s communications director responded to the piece by referring to Nuzzi as a “slutbag” in an interview with Talking Points Memo, and a new political celebrity was born. As an aside, if a paragraph gets more 2013 than that, I surely haven’t written it.
Flash forward to 2016, when the election of Donald Trump suddenly elevated the profile of several right-wing provocateurs, including Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and of course, Steve Bannon. In this period, Nuzzi established herself as a go-to beat reporter covering the alt-right, leveraging her longtime “ironic” friendship with and fandom of people like Ann Coulter.
Sometime in 2018, she made news again for dating then-recently Me Too’d The New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza, and the pair announced their engagement in 2022. He has since go on to take a job with POLITICO, running the outlet’s morning newsletter.
This year, in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Nuzzi wrote a widely read piece on the whispers within the Biden circle about his mental condition. (You may remember it from that day’s TOTI.)
It was the first major piece to report that Biden allies, not just his detractors, were worried about his ability to campaign for and govern as president for four more years, and without a doubt accelerated elected officials calling on him to step down.
So if all that weren’t enough:
Some days you open up Twitter and you see a bunch of reactions and need to scroll and scroll some more before seeing the actual news. Last night was 100% one of those nights.
What a run it’s been for RFK Jr. this cycle.
Naturally, folks turned to her RFK Jr. profile to search for clues, not to mention her writing since then.
While any presidential candidate, and one as whackadoo as RFK Jr. in particular, having an affair is major news, for those of us residents of Online who have witness/enjoyed/suffered through the Olivia Nuzzi experience for over a decade, this news was akin to aliens making landfall on Planet Earth.
Nuzzi’s New York Magazine, specifically its The Cut vertical, has become famous in recent years for the viral personal essay. The irony wasn’t lost on people.
Just as the slow march of death inevitably comes for us all, nothing is as inevitable on Twitter as age gap discourse:
In case you inhabit an information ecosystem very different than mine and happened to forget, RFK Jr. is somehow still married to Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines – and Larry David gave his blessing to the pair before they started dating.
As for Olivia Nuzzi’s significant other, well:
So that’s that, at least for now. As always, this newsletter is on 24/7 SchlossWatch and will report back if he has something to say.
Continued in Part 2
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