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Political journalist Olivia Nuzzi spoke candidly in a new interview about her alleged intimate relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 election cycle, saying she messed up.
“I had f—ed up,” Nuzzi told The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in an interview released Tuesday. “I did something wrong. Those ethics rules exist for a reason. They’re very good rules, and I had violated that.”
Nuzzi, who is out with her book “American Canto,” spoke about the importance of “shame” and how some tried to convince her to be “shameless” when the scandal emerged last year.
“There were a lot of people telling me, ‘Oh, just keep going. Cover [until] the end of the election and take some other assignment. Be shameless because everyone else involved is shameless and you should be shameless too.’ I think shame is very important,” Nuzzi said.
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“It struck me, that it’s not like you just wake up one day and you make a mistake, right? That it had to have been many imperceptible errors that contributed to really just a malformed perspective that led to that type of mistake. And I took it really seriously,” she continued. “And I thought it was like this big, important spiritual event in my life that I didn’t want to just pretend that it didn’t happen… At first, it’s like an intoxicating thought, you know, like, oh, could I just do that? And then immediately, it’s just, ‘No. Of course I can’t do that and live with myself.'”
Nuzzi said she had maintained a “diluted perspective” during the campaign that her tryst with RFK Jr., who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, was “so irrelevant” because his polling had cratered after she had penned her profile of him for New York Magazine in Nov. 2023.
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She also addressed the claims that she had aided him on how to handle the looming report about him once leaving a bear carcass in Central Park. Nuzzi told Miller that her “approach was Socratic mostly” and “help him talk it out” versus telling him what he should do.
“Anytime I ever gave him prescriptive advice, he never took it,” Nuzzi said. “I didn’t view my role as telling him what to do, right? As unbelievable as it is, I loved him, right? I cared about him. And I didn’t think that — I just didn’t think it was my place to tell him what to do. And I wouldn’t have wanted to tell him what to do anyhow.”
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New York Magazine parted ways with Nuzzi following the revelations and conducted a probe that concluded that it found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her work.
A Kennedy spokesperson previously denied any sort of physical relationship had occurred and said he had only met Nuzzi once.
Last month, Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, former Politico journalist Ryan Lizza, alleged she also had an affair with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who she had covered during his short-lived GOP primary challenge against President Donald Trump in the 2020 election cycle.
Nuzzi’s lawyer told The New York Times that her book “discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.” Miller did not address the alleged Sanford affair during his hour-long interview with Nuzzi.
Vanity Fair, which hired Nuzzi in September as its West Coast editor, previously told Fox News Digital it was taken by surprise by the Sanford allegations and that a spokesperson said the magazine was “looking at all the facts.” Vanity Fair has not responded to multiple requests for comment since, but insiders at Condé Nast told Fox News Digital a review is still ongoing.
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