Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza, RFK Jr. & the mob
On the secret history that may help explain the strangest story in US media.
I’ve admired Olivia Nuzzi’s journalism for a while.
She writes like an older generation once did, in copy blissfully free of facile moral condemnations. She gets access and she tells stories.
Or she did. On Sept. 19 news broke of an undisclosed “personal” relationship between her and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – an ongoing subject of her reporting.
I started looking at the story last week after being pointed at it by my new editors at the Daily Beast, which I have joined in New York.
What I found surprised me. The third character in this affair – Ryan Lizza, Nuzzi’s fiancé until this summer – had a backstory no one knew. His family was a closed book. I opened it, and a history of bid-rigging, bribery, multiple felonies and alleged mob ties fell out.
It was an inauspicious world out of which Lizza rose, through his own hustle, ambition and industry, to the heights of D.C. media. Both he and Nuzzi grew up in the shadow of New York – in Long Island (Lizza) and New Jersey (Nuzzi). Nuzzi’s father was a New York City sanitation worker. I’ve looked to tell the story of their rise and apparent fall here. But lives are long. Nuzzi is 31, Lizza 50.
The discovery of this secret family history comes after Lizza has been accused by Nuzzi of having “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out,” as she claimed in a DC court on Sept 30. The piece begins below. The rest runs 3,000~ words.
There they stood, his arm around her waist, boldly dressed as well they might be. She was 30, beautiful and talented, dressed in a leopard-print top and red slit skirt—beloved by her editors, chased by producers, and envied by much of the journalistic world in New York and D.C.
He was 48, sharply cut in a navy tux, bow tie, and a pair of glasses that would have been loud for the 1970s, let alone the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2023. He had worn somber straighter ties as a younger man, before he met her. Now they were characters in their own story, a modern-day Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, as they liked to say.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza’s lives hadn’t yet been upended by that lost son of American aristocracy: Robert Kennedy Jr., 70, the failed presidential candidate, serial adulterer and perennial tormentor of his wives, of whom Cheryl Hines is only the latest. Nuzzi hadn’t yet met Kennedy for a profile, and started a perilous months-long electronic affair with him in its wake, then failed to disclose it to her employer, New York Magazine; to the public; or to Lizza, her fiancé since 2022.
“I think she was overwhelmed by what he [RFK Jr] is, not who he is,” says someone who knows her. “As a Catholic kid in New York, JFK was like a god.”
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to read a fun essay, search “Millennial Snot” on here.