The senior political correspondent for New York Magazine has been placed on a leave of absence after it was discovered that she carried on a personal relationship with one of the leading presidential candidates of the 2024 election cycle.
Olivia Nuzzi, who regularly contributed to cable news panels in addition to delivering hard-hitting journalism from the White House Press Corps, is off the campaign trail after she admitted to personally seeing former candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the side. While Nuzzi claimed that the relationship never ventured into the “physical” realm, it was enough to warrant a full review of her work, the magazine said in a statement to the New York Post.
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“[T]he nature of some communications between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal,” Nuzzi said in her own statement on Thursday shortly before the news was made public, saying she “should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York Magazine.”
Sources told the post that the 31-year-old rising star was allegedly carrying on a “sexting” communication with the 70-year-old black sheep of the storied Democratic family. RFK has boasted about his physical prowess as well, occasionally posting videos showing him lifting weights in the gym, a reminder that the health-obsessed former Democrat is in great shape for his age. The online relationship is said to have begun after Nuzzi published a profile piece on Kennedy in November 2023.
“Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece,” a spokesman for Kennedy told the Post. That’s apparently not what Nuzzi told her editors, who placed her on leave after learning “she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures,” they wrote in response to the news. Under the magazine’s guidelines, Nuzzi would have been banned from covering the 2024 presidential race if they had known about the sexting exchanges, they added.
“An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review,” the statement continued. “We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.” Sources added that Nuzzi did not rely on Kennedy as a direct source for her reporting. Another said they believe the two became romantically involved around the turn of the year.
Even more salacious, Kennedy has been married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress Cheryl Hines, his third wife, since 2014. Nuzzi was coming off a recent breakup with Politico reporter Ryan Lizza, whom she had been engaged with since 2022 but recently called off the expected wedding, sources claimed to the Washington Post. In 2017, Lizza was fired by the New Yorker after having “inappropriate sexual conduct” with a colleague, including derogatory statements about female reporters being “slutty ambition monsters.”
RFK has been openly apologetic about his struggles with “lust demons,” which he calls his “greatest defect.” Before his second wife, Mary Richardson, took her own life in 2012, Kennedy admitted during divorce proceedings to have been romantically involved with upwards of 37 women during their marriage. He had been seeing his current wife for some time.
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