In a move that no one could have anticipated without, at bare minimum, the possession of an extremely rudimentary brainstem, Vanity Fair has announced today that it’s “parting ways” with reporter Olivia Nuzzi. In a mutually released statement with the high-profile journalist/cause of journalism in others, the Condé Nast publication said that it was “in the best interest of the magazine to let her contract expire at the end of the year.”
What the statement did not say was all the very obvious stuff about Nuzzi’s recent work as the magazine’s West Coast Editor—a job she’s currently held for all of three months—i.e., that it’s been completely, massively overshadowed by drama in her personal life, and specifically her widely reported “personal relationship” with current Secretary Of Health And Human Services Robert F. Kennedy. That “emotional and digital in nature” affair, with a subject she’d been covering as a reporter, already lead Nuzzi’s previous employer, New York magazine, to “part ways” with her back in 2024. (There is a lot of parting ways in this story; the ways, they are a-partin’.) But Vanity Fair‘s editors presumably thought that the Kennedy thing was very literally old news; that the story had been aired out enough to transform it from a huge question of journalistic ethics and judgment into an amusing anecdote about a harmless moral whoopsie of the past.
But that was before Nuzzi’s ex, former New Yorker and Politico correspondent Ryan Lizza, began publishing Substack articles a few weeks ago claiming that Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy went a lot deeper than whatever the hell “emotional and digital in nature” covers, and that she’d also been operating essentially as an operative for the Kennedy political campaign—most damningly with an accusation that she’d been running “catch and kill” operations to stop negative stories about Kennedy from being published. (It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that Lizza is a complicated figure here in his own right, having been dismissed from The New Yorker back in 2017 after a #MeToo allegation; for what it’s worth, Nuzzi has denounced his series of recent writings about her as “obsessive and violating fan fiction-slash-revenge porn.”) The point is that Lizza’s allegations have been sticking in people’s brains—including, apparently, the sort of people who have sway at Vanity Fair.
The upshot is that the whole preceding two paragraphs, obviously, constitute way more drama than the magazine was clearly hoping for when it hired Nuzzi as part of a big, flashy rebranding effort back in September. (Even if the whole thing carries an air of a frog being righteously indignant that it now has to “part ways” with the scorpion that jammed a venomous stinger through its neck two minutes into their trip across the river.) Nuzzi, presumably, will be fine: News of the parting of the ways comes just three days after the publication of her new memoir, American Canto, in which she apparently writes quite a bit about her relationship with a figure identified only as… The Politician. At least one highly negative review has already drubbed the book as a “tell-nothing memoir” that also serves as a handy “portrait of losing your soul”—but we’re guessing that isn’t actually going to hurt book sales too badly.
[via The New York Times]
