The Other Hidden Secret in Olivia Nuzzi And RFK Jr.’s Affair

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 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.”

Lizza now stands accused by Nuzzi of attempting to blackmail her into staying with him when he discovered the affair this past August. Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out,” Nuzzi wrote in a filing to DC Superior Court on Sept. 30.

On Tuesday, Lizza will have to answer Nuzzi’s charges in a D.C. court room; he had initially escaped scrutiny when news of her relationship with Kennedy broke on Sept. 19. An error of judgment that could have remained private has spiraled into a totemic national story, with first Lizza (if Nuzzi is to be believed) and now Nuzzi inviting the press to cover their fracturing lives.

Outside the CBS News after-party for the White House Correspondents’ Association at the French embassy in April 2023, all of that was still to come. Everything the pair had worked for–all the fruits of their hustle, ambition and industry–was still intact.

The Teflon Reporter And the Teflon Don

As the pair headed inside, it was Lizza who harbored his own secret history: his family’s.

The world he had grown up in, the one no-one in DC seemed to know, was imploding. A local empire made on the roads of Long Island was now embroiled in the courts of New York. Three months earlier, his elder brother Frank Jr. had been charged by federal prosecutors with defrauding a union benefit fund and making false statements, becoming the third Lizza to be investigated by authorities. He would soon become the family’s second convicted felon in the space of three years.

The Lizza wealth had been built on decades of government contracts across a web of road, asphalt, and construction businesses. Lizza’s grandfather Carlo, the son of an Italian laborer , started the family’s first eponymous company in America . It paved much of the Long Island Expressway. Carlo’s sons all went on to found construction firms of their own. Some of these firms, and some of the sons, would later be indicted on conspiracy to rig bids on federal contracts, conspiracy to bribe local officials, and in one instance, to be accused of mob ties to John Gotti, the “Teflon Don” and head of the Gambino crime family in late 1980s New York.

This was the world Ryan Lizza had escaped. He had spent 25 years rising through D.C. thanks to his energy and talent–without anyone knowing anything about it.

The Double Drop-Out Who Became the Toast of D.C.

The society from which Olivia Nuzzi rose was better known. She was proud of her path and spoke openly about it. The only daughter of a New York City sanitation worker , she grew up in Red Bank , New Jersey: a pleasant commuter town with good schools and wide lawns an hour south of the city, where membership of the local beach club marked your social standing.

She left Middletown High South early and dropped out of Fordham University in the Bronx too. Yet by the time she was 24 New York Magazine had poached her from the Daily Beast to be their correspondent in D.C. She was soon interviewing then-Pres. Trump in the Oval Office and being lauded on CNN . She rose and she kept rising. Her progressive magazine ignored her progressive detractors. Her work was too valuable, her copy too fun, her access too good. She was their Trump whisperer, and she could write. “Olivia, write like you talk,” her first editor on the local paper, New Jersey’s triCityNews, had told her when she was still in college. “Just be real.”

Networks– AMC , Showtime , MSNBC , HBO , Bloomberg –fell over themselves to work with her, while rival journalists who couldn’t stand her, or her standing, fell over themselves in rage. Nuzzi, wrote a future Washington Post reporter in Deadspin, was nothing but a “white-supremacist whisperer” who writes “alarmingly credulous profiles of right-wing ghouls” and, along with Lizza, “conveniently ignore[s] the real and human cost of political decisions.”

How Lizza Paved His Own Path to Success

Lizza’s path was, on the surface, better paved: a backwater New England boarding school ( Berkshire , in western Massachusetts), then U.C. Berkeley in the Bay Area, one of the more prestigious colleges you can find 3,000 miles from Long Island. He won an internship at The New Republic, impressing editor Chuck Lane as a good guy, self-effacing and eager to learn. Six years later The Washington Post featured him atop an article on the next generation of political reporters, crediting his revelatory reporting on John Kerry’s 2004 run for president. He wrote one of the first major profiles of Barack Obama , and signed a $250,000 deal with HarperCollins to write a book ahead of the 2008 campaign.

Then David Remnick called and asked him to be The New Yorker ’s man in D.C . Remnick vetoed the book; he wanted Lizza filing for him. Lizza’s publisher at HarperCollins was so depressed he refused to find another author. “A reporter of his [Lizza’s] caliber is still where I set the bar,” the publisher said, and no one else met it. Lizza was 32. A career atop the D.C. elite stretched out before him.

He enjoyed it for a decade: signing another deal in “the mid six figures” to write a revised book on 2008 that also went unwritten, appearing on Charlie Rose in 2011 , and, in 2017, reporting for The New Yorker a profanity-laced phone call that immortalized Anthony Scaramucci – and got him fired as Trump’s communications director 10 days after he took the job. Scaramucci thought the call was off the record. Lizza ran the story. His star was at its peak. (Scaramucci, who later described Lizza as “f---ing dead to me,” declined to comment on Lizza’s current situation.)

Five months later, however, The New Yorker fired him . At the height of the Me Too movement, a woman with whom he had a previous relationship accused him of sexual misconduct, which he denied. Thrown from a great height, he was offered a lifeline by Jay Fielden, then editor of Esquire . He had to meet with Hearst executives to assuage them first. He brought his new girlfriend–Olivia Nuzzi, at 25, 19 years his junior–to one meeting. She offered the air cover of a supportive politician’s wife.

Lizza had split from his first wife, a family physician with whom he had two children, a few years earlier. Nuzzi had recently lost her father. They made an odd couple in one sense: one the Trump whisperer, the other a left-leaning reporter ever eager to lean into denouncing Trump. (“I definitely try to get close to the people involved in the campaign,” Lizza told The Washington Post in 2004, “and not fall into the laziness of sitting in the office and reading blogs all day.” But the “moral clarity” of outraged tweets had its rewards in the late 2010s. Lizza went where the energy was.)

Yet their apparent differences betrayed a shared background, one more similar than it appeared. Both had grown up in sight of New York, a city out of reach. Nuzzi would walk around it with her father as a girl. “Any building in Manhattan,” she wrote in the Daily Beast after he died , “he knew the interesting folks who inhabited it.”

In D.C. she and Lizza became two of the interesting folks. His career recovered, with Politico poaching him to co-write Playbook, the town bible, in 2019. “They had a salon-style life,” says a prominent D.C. journalist. Lizza had a big home in Georgetown he’d bought for more than $2m in 2008, only ten years into his career. It was a place you could go to crack open “nice bottles of Scotch” with Ryan and Olivia, who managed to assume a position for themselves as “arbiters at the cool table. They complimented each other. He had money, and she had glamor.”

The Young Woman Who Rose Too Far, Too Fast

Lizza had attracted respect as he rose in the 2000s. He was a man following an expected path for a Washington boy wonder, who rose quickly but not too quickly. Nuzzi’s rise, which came later, was much faster, and played out online, attracted a far harsher glare. Women weren’t meant to interview the president in the Oval Office at the age of 25, and have the president’s vice president, chief of staff and secretary of state drop by when they did.

They certainly weren’t meant to look good doing it. Rival journalists who trailed Trump in 2016 had felt Nuzzi stood out too much. “She dressed really well,” one of them remembers, “and other women in the press [pack] would play ‘ID the outfit’: Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Stella McCartney.”

New York and Washington were full of Ivy Leaguers with multiple degrees and the children of the already connected. They weren’t expecting to be eclipsed by a high school dropout from Jersey. Nuzzi had, while still at Fordham, landed herself on the front page of the New York Daily News by writing up an amusing account of interning on Anthony Wiener’s failed mayoral campaign in 2013 .

The piece elicited an unprintable response from Wiener’s press chief, whom Nuzzi had lightly implied was ill-qualified. She called Nuzzi a “f---ing slutbag”–no, “a f---ing t--t”–a “little c---”, in fact. Nuzzi, 20, had the temerity to judge her, and to write what she saw: an office full of people chasing power. The press chief later apologized, but her anger presaged a rage to come.

Sometimes Nuzzi gave her critics ammunition. In 2018 she let herself into the D.C. home of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, an act he reasonably described as trespassing. And in April this year she was thrown out of Manhattan Criminal Courthouse during Trump’s hush money trial for twice taking pictures, then wrote her report as if she hadn’t been removed.

But most of the time she simply did her job, which those enraged by her disliked even more. “Anyone that young and successful,” says a veteran reporter, “people line up to hate them.”

Trump gave her access again in 2022 , when his latest bid for president seemed ill-fated. Nuzzi wrote a piece that was brutal and fair and wrong: Trump wasn’t in the throes of delusion, as she suggested. He was about to steamroll through the Republican primary from his golf buggy. Trump cast her out, calling her in his unique diction and spelling “a shaky and unattractive wack job.” It appeared she had finally burned her best source. Then he called her back to talk again after his assassination attempt this summer.

She attempted to find Trump’s “humanity” while getting close enough to let him hang himself (“You saw the new name? Kamabla,” he said… He gave me an expectant look, but I was confused. He repeated it again. “Kamabla.”). The piece has since been recast by her denigrators as pro-RFK Jr. propaganda. She hasn’t written for New York since: news of her entanglement with Kennedy broke 10 days later.

Just When He Thought He Was Out...

RFK Jr. has spent his life riding off his family’s reputation. Ryan Lizza has done the opposite. He had to escape their gravitational pull, at least professionally. He wasn’t the first Lizza to go to the Berkshire School–his brother Frank Jr. went there before him, and is now facing jail. (The office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York told the Beast prosecutors are seeking a sentence of up to a year.)

All of Lizza’s brothers were pulled into his family’s line of work; they were the nepo-babies of Long Island construction. Ryan was the exception. He arrived in D.C. independent of his family, if not of their wealth, and defined himself solely through years of dogged work as an incisive chronicler of the city’s elite and its characters.

What did it matter who his family were? His background has become relevant only since Nuzzi filed her extraordinary allegations, describing a thuggery entirely out of keeping with Lizza’s career. They have called his character into question. Some Beltway journalists have already taken a view. “I believe it,” one told me, referring to the filing. “I know that a number of people do.” Other acquaintances of Lizza declined to comment, reluctant to judge a story still short on facts.

The facts of Lizza’s family run like this. In the 1980s, the asphalt industry in Nassau County was controlled by a set of firms dubbed the “Club of Five” by federal investigators. (There were more like eight of them.) They colluded, driving up prices for taxpayers and locking everyone else out. “On Long Island it’s a political-asphalt-concrete-labor complex,” an outside construction contractor told Newsday in 1986. “Those guys play rough. I wouldn’t work over there again if they guaranteed me five million profit.”

Two of the firms participating in this lucrative racket were run by sons of Carlo Lizza, Ryan’s grandfather. A third was co-run by Frank Lizza Sr., Ryan’s father.

Frank’s brother, Carl Lizza Jr., controlled another. In 1984, when Ryan was 10, Carl Jr.’s primary firm, Lizza Industries, was found liable on 32 counts of mail fraud as part of a bid-rigging conspiracy in a federal RICO trial: a statute used to tackle organized crime cases throughout the 1980s.

The case was brought by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time–Rudy Giuliani, in another life. (Later he would butt-dial Nuzzi, apparently after drinking .) Uncle Carl Jr.’s firm was banned from bidding on federal or state contracts for three years.

Years later, in 2000, FBI agent George Gabriel–the head of the bureau’s Long Island office, and a major investigator of the New York mob– would testify in Manhattan Federal Court that Carl Jr. had also served as “a front man for John Gotti,” the famed mob boss, by helping him launder bribes. Carl Jr. was never charged. He went on to become a major player in New York horse racing in the 2000s as the owner of Flying Zee Stables before dying in 2011.

As Carl Jr. transitioned to a life among thoroughbreds, his younger brother Elia “Aly” Lizza–Carlo’s youngest son, and another of Ryan’s uncles–was years deep into a conspiracy of his own: bribing a local government official in Oyster Bay, New York. In 2020 he was indicted for secretly paying the official, a former employee of his, $1.6m as part of a proposed development deal under which he stood to be paid $20m.

It was a watershed case for the Nassau County D.A. Elia Lizza’s conviction was, the D.A. said then, a story of “bribery, rampant nepotism and illegal favors for the friends and family of those in power”, that had exposed the “brazen pay-to-play culture” of Long Island government.

Newsday reported at the time that Elia Lizza’s company, Carlo Lizzo & Sons Paving, had received $99 million in publicly bid county work between 2002 and 2015. Members of the Lizza family had, during that time, given nearly $1 million in donations to Nassau County politicians and officials, including county executives for both parties and a former district attorney. Tom Souzzi, the current Democratic congressman for New York’s 3rd district, was among them.

“The family had a chokehold on local government paving contracts,” says a local reporter. “They spread the money around all the politicians.”

Elia Lizza was fortunate to escape jail. Bribery in the second degree carried a sentence of up to 15 years. He was handed only a three year conditional discharge and ordered to pay $350,000.

These were the men Ryan Lizza was surrounded by growing up. He found different role models in D.C., and a life less prone to overnight collapse. As a reporter he uncovered the untold family secrets of a Republican congressman, the corruption of state politicians, and Trump’s felony conviction for falsifying records. (“Teflon Don to Felon Don,” ran the subtle headline on Lizza’s Playbook that day.) He was writing about worlds he was more familiar with than anyone knew.

Are There Second Acts After Political Sex Scandals?

The Daily Mail trailed Lizza in D.C. after Nuzzi filed her claims , capturing him alone, ashen-faced and clutching a green juice. Nuzzi will return to their former home in north-west DC with a police escort–a request granted by the city’s Superior Court when she filed her Civil Protective Order on Sept 30.

Nuzzi alleged then that Lizza had: hacked her devices “for the purpose of stalking and surveilling me”, recovered “deleted materials” in order to blackmail her, doctored them, and threatened to reveal them to a political campaign. She claimed that he then anonymously tipped off her employer New York Magazine to provoke an investigation into her, and alerted the media to this fact. Finally, he told Nuzzi’s boss, David Haskell, that he didn’t want the story to leak.

Lizza has denied the claims in their totality. “I will defend myself against them vigorously and successfully,” he told CNN last week . Lizza did not provide further comment when reached by the Beast. They have both been put on leave by their employers.

“The issue, to me, is about grace,” Nuzzi said of cancel culture in 2022 , presaging her future and Lizza’s, “and whether and when and how and to whom it is extended.” Nuzzi, who built a character for herself as major journalists do, fell for a myth even greater than the one she and Lizza built together.

The couple they hoped to emulate, Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron, broke up too. At the time it seemed like the end of the world to Ephron. But she took her story and turned it into a novel, Heartburn , that became a film starring Meryl Streep. It led her towards an entirely new life.

Olivia Nuzzi may soon be out of a job, but she has the rights to the best story in town.

Read more at The Daily Beast.