New York The magazine’s star political reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, is at the center of a bombshell report released Thursday that revealed she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the failed presidential candidate nearly 40 years her senior.

News of the affair spread like wildfire, and the scandal was made all the more intriguing because Nuzzi, 31, was engaged, while Kennedy, 70, has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014.

She also wrote a notable story about Kennedy in the November 2023 issue of the magazine.

Nuzzi has not been left unemployed by the scandal — New York instead decided to fire its star Washington correspondent, but her engagement to Politico’s Ryan Lizza has ended.

“Because of my connection to this story through my ex-fiancée, my editors and I have agreed that I will not be involved in any reporting about Kennedy in Playbook or elsewhere,” Lizza said in her only statement on the matter.

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Nuzzi and Lizza, 50, “recently” split after getting engaged in September 2022, sources told the New York Post.

It’s unclear how long the couple has been together, but photos of Lizza on Nuzzi’s Instagram date back to January 2018, just after he was fired from the New Yorker due to allegations of ‘inappropriate sexual conduct’.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Nuzzi and Kennedy is said to have begun sometime earlier this year, although the journalist has insisted that the relationship was only “digital in nature.”

Kennedy has distanced himself from the scandal without outright denying that he and Nuzzi engaged in “sexting,” as one source described the relationship with the New York Post.

“Mr. Kennedy met Olivia Nuzzi only once in his life for an interview she requested, which resulted in a damning article,” a Kennedy spokesperson told CNN.

This scandal isn’t the only time Nuzzi, a New York native and Fordham University graduate, has been in the spotlight. She first gained national attention in 2013 when she wrote about the treatment she received from Anthony Weiner while working on his New York City mayoral campaign.

She wrote a blog post for NSFWcorp about the experience, alleging that Weiner referred to her and other interns as “Monica” in reference to Monica Lewinsky. A few days after the blog was published, she was paid by the New York Daily News to write a follow-up article that ran on its front page.

New York Daily News

Weiner and his team were outraged by the stories. Barbara Morgan, a spokesperson for the campaign, called Nuzzi a “b—h,” “s–tbag,” “t–t” and a “c–t” in an interview with Talking Points Memo.

Morgan later apologized, claiming she thought the interview was off the record, but the comments only drew more attention to the scandal, putting Nuzzi in the spotlight even more. She was hired by the Daily Beast in 2014, while still at Fordham.

Nuzzi covered the political rise of Donald Trump and was named one of the 25 “most influential” people in news media by Forbes in 2016. Two years later, the magazine named Nuzzi to its annual “30 Under 30” list.

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Nuzzi, then in his mid-20s, left the Beast in 2017 to take a job at New York that would have stationed her in Washington. Scandal followed her to the Beltway, and in 2018 she admitted to entering the office of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, to take a photo without permission. Lewandowski claimed she also stole a photo album.

“You know, I just walked into the house because no one answered the door,” she said of the incident, adding that she left on the advice of her boyfriend who told her it was illegal.

“I was like, ‘f–k,’” she said The hill.

The incident, however, was only a short-lived hurdle in Nuzzi’s career. She was later invited to the Oval Office for an interview with Trump in 2018 and has since landed one major interview after another.

She made headlines again when she reported on a story about her being thrown out of a Manhattan courthouse for taking photos in the overflow room of Trump’s hush-hush trial.

But Nuzzi scored another exclusive with Trump this summer, just weeks after he narrowly survived the first attempt on his life. That article was New York‘s cover story on September 9 and focused on Trump’s ear, which appeared to be healing incredibly quickly for someone who had been shot there.

Nuzzi, normally an avid poster of X, has been silent on the platform since September 13. On the other side of the scandal, Kennedy, a known womanizer and serial cheater, was confronted with a nasty, unrelated story on Friday.

The After reported that it had obtained a 2001 diary that Kennedy used to document the dozens of women he took to bed that year and on what dates, complete with their first names and occupations. He was then in his seventh year of marriage to Mary Richardson Kennedy.

Reuters

According to the tabloid, Kennedy appeared stunned by the alleged discovery.

“A After “The reporter who questioned Kennedy about the diary on Friday was first greeted with six seconds of stunned silence,” the newspaper wrote.

Kennedy eventually responded, “I don’t think there’s any way you could have a diary or journal of mine from 2001. I have no comment on it. I don’t have a diary from 2001.”