The book got a big feature in The New York Times over the weekend, in addition to that excerpt in Vanity Fair – this is truly the kind of promotion you can only get when you throw sanity to the wind and sext the brain-wormed Kennedy.
Olivia Nuzzi speaks at an event in Florida in 2022.Credit: Getty Images for Vox Media
The coverage through Monday afternoon revealed a lot of atmosphere but not a lot of details. And then, several hours after Nuzzi’s excerpt was released, her ex-fiance unfurled a Substack letter that revealed more than anyone was ever expecting.
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“I spent hours hacking at the sprouts to keep the bamboo at bay, just as I had with all the secrets Olivia and I shared,” Lizza wrote in a newsletter instalment released Monday night and ominously labelled “Part 1.”
I did not bother to count how many paragraphs were about bamboo (haha I did: six paragraphs), but the gist of it is that Lizza alleges that while he was back tending their shared Georgetown home, he discovered, via discarded love letters and hotel stationery, that Nuzzi was off having an affair with a presidential candidate three decades her senior.
The plot twist he reveals at the end: He’s not even talking about RFK Jr but about another prior dalliance. Nuzzi, in his telling, had allegedly previously had her little soul swallowed without ceremony by former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
Ryan Lizza attends an event in Washington DC in March 2022.Credit: Getty Images
“Like bamboo,” he writes, “the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open.”
(Nuzzi, via her publicist, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Sanford – who, if you remember him at all, it’s likely for his 2009 creation of the euphemism “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” which he used to explain a multi-day vanishing act while carrying on an affair with an Argentine journalist.)
We will get back to the scandal in a minute, but any recovering English majors read these tortured, florid confessions and thought the exact same thing: Aha, so it turns out four Zs is how many surname Zs a relationship can accommodate before it implodes.
The stories Lizza and Nuzzi tell give you the extremely wrong idea of what it means to be a journalist. We, despite what every Hollywood property from House of Cards to The West Wing would have you believe, do not date our sources. (We don’t become friends with them. We don’t even let them buy us coffee.) Also, what with Tweedledum talking about moving into a three-storey Georgetown house with a courtyard, and Tweedledidion tooling around Malibu in a convertible, I feel compelled to clarify that most reporters are tooling around Costco parking lots in Hyundai Elantras. We’re not rich, guys. The only skill that exceeds our ability to sniff out stories is our ability to sniff out the leftovers from someone else’s taco-bar lunch meeting.
The White House press pack in the Oval Office in October.Credit: AP
Anyway, back to the alleged affair(s). What can we take from this, besides the fact that everyone has a type, and somebody has to be interested exclusively in elder long-shot politicians who have public and storied histories of infidelity?
Is the point that to understand another person – to really understand them, well enough to explain them to the American public, as Nuzzi did repeatedly in her stories – you have to fall in love with them a little bit? That these are men who manage to pry votes from thousands of citizens, and of course they’re also going to work magic on a 20-something from Jersey?
We don’t have celebrity scandals quite like we used to. They are stage-managed now. Everything is co-ordinated through publicists, released in time for a new project, workshopped to death via a crisis management firm.
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But into this sanitised celebrity culture, Nuzzi and Lizza – two comparative normies whose private lives we should know nothing about – have brought unto us the salaciousness of sex, plus the weight of Washington, plus the navel-gazing introspection available only to people who have spent their entire careers dissecting the foibles and private behaviours of other powerful people, and who finally have the opportunity and extensive vocabulary to turn the pen upon themselves and say, it’s my turn now!
These people. God. These people.
Monica Hesse is a screens critic for The Washington Post’s Style section. Previously, she was an opinion columnist who frequently wrote about gender and its impact on society.
