My book on the Kennedys was used as a ‘mistress manual’ by Olivia Nuzzi… then this wannabe Carolyn Bessette had the nerve to hound me with these outrageous texts: MAUREEN CALLAHAN

The scene: Friday night on a work trip, a Los Angeles hotel bar, a martini and an iPhone, belonging to yours truly, that begins blowing up.

The gist of these texts, from friends and colleagues: ‘OMG!!!!’

What followed was part of a Substack by disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s ex, Ryan Lizza, explaining how he discovered his then-fiancée was having an alleged ’emotional’ affair with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

‘I can’t say there weren’t any signs,’ Lizza wrote. ‘I did find it odd that Olivia was simultaneously reading Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction and Maureen Callahan’s Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.’

I find that odd, too, for a couple of reasons.

For one, this is the opposite of what I’d heard on good authority: Not only had Nuzzi not read my book during her involvement with RFK Jr. in the summer of 2024, but after the scandal blew up and she lost her job at New York magazine that October, she still hadn’t read the book.

Secondly, Ask Not isn’t a ‘how-to-snag-an-alpha-Kennedy-male’ manual. Far from it!

Ask Not is a damning portrayal of the systemic, generational abuses that Kennedy men have visited upon women they seduced, used, abused, left for dead and, in one case, lobotomized.

Darker still: an entire chapter is devoted to RFK Jr.’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy — and how RFK Jr. repeatedly cheated on her; Mary’s discovery of his ‘sex diaries’; how Bobby very publicly took up with actress Cheryl Hines and moved a stone’s throw from the house Mary renovated for them and their four children while Cheryl tweeted about hanging out with Mary’s kids; Kennedy cutting off Mary’s court-ordered, $20,000-a-month credit card, leaving her to beg other mothers for $20 at the school run; and Mary’s utter decompensation, leading to her suicide.

If you can believe it, things got even worse from there, with RFK Jr. secretly exhuming Mary from the Kennedy family plot and having her reburied, far away and alone.

So that’s the kind of guy Olivia was allegedly reading about and pursuing.

Now, before we get into the very specific sexual act Lizza writes about — the one he claims to have discovered in a text from Kennedy to Nuzzi — I must disclose, like so many in the media these days, that I have had conversations with Nuzzi.

These were over the phone or via text and off-the-record, per her request.

But these talks always felt strange. It was as if she were trying to build goodwill, so that if and when anything else broke — and more clearly was going to, because she was writing a memoir while pretending to have no idea what to do with herself — she would have loyalists in the media. And, to my mind, she was trying to cultivate me as one of them.

My last real conversation with Nuzzi was in March. From time to time she would text, asking for the phone number of some colleague of mine so she could complain about coverage of her or demand a line be reworded.

She’s very controlling about her portrayal in the media. Nuzzi will call to dispute the use of a word, or to insist that any given source has made a fallacious statement against her, all while refusing to go on the record.

I stopped engaging. It felt too bloodless, too transactional.

Then, a few weeks ago, in mid-November, Olivia called me with no warning — no text or email beforehand to see if I might be free.

This, too, felt a little aggressive. We’re not friends.

I let the call go to voicemail.

Olivia quickly followed up with a text saying ‘Hi’, another asking me to call if I had a minute and, after no response to either, she dangled — as she always does — an ‘off-the-record’ potential conversation about her book, which as a journalist is of zero value to me.

With no response to that, I learned that she approached another colleague to see if she could mail an advance copy of her book to me.

I was told it would arrive at the hotel I’d been staying at in LA last weekend.

Spoiler alert: It never showed up.

Meanwhile, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who dated and lived with Nuzzi for years back when she was 21 and he was 55, took to his podcast last week to accuse Nuzzi of manipulation.

He claimed that as they were breaking up, she begged him to keep texting and calling to remind her to visit their dogs and to pick up the clothes she left in their shared apartment — then, Olbermann said, she used those very texts and calls to claim he was stalking her.

Lizza, in the Substack he’s building off this ever-expanding scandal, claims that he helped extricate Nuzzi from that relationship, only to find her cheating with one of her profile subjects — Mark Sanford, another politician who was running for president of the United States.

Nuzzi’s alleged relationship with Sanford predated hers with Kennedy.

If the Sanford claims are true — and Nuzzi has yet to deny them — that would make two presidential candidates Nuzzi was both covering and having an intimate relationship with.

Could there be more?

Bosses at Vanity Fair, where she was recently hired, are reported to now be reconsidering her employment there.

Staffers are already grousing, allegedly, that she’s barely done any work. In the meantime, Vanity Fair plans to run an abstract nude portrait of Nuzzi next week — which I’m guessing pleases her ego.

After all, the now 32-year-old Nuzzi — in a feather-light profile in the New York Times — has remade herself, in my opinion, to strikingly resemble the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, killed by her husband in a wholly avoidable plane crash.

Nuzzi’s hair is newly white blonde (I’m sure I’ll get a text about the word ‘newly’); her eyebrows, like Carolyn’s, are plucked to oblivion; and her sunglasses and new body frame as small as Carolyn’s own.

What exactly is she trying to convey? Is it her most fervent wish to evoke, if not become, a Kennedy wife?

Lizza hints as much. In a story where every person involved seems terrible, Lizza shares, in his Substack, a poem he claims he found written from RFK Jr. to Nuzzi during his presidential run.

‘Yr mouth open awaiting my harvest,’ Kennedy allegedly wrote. ‘I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love’.

Wonder if Olivia has a fact-checking note to give about that?