Self-destructive conduct may be enjoyable to examine when the principals are handsome, well-known or highly effective. Within the downfall and tried resurrection of the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, we’ve a trifecta of prurience:
A lovely younger political reporter who’s engaged to a a lot older professionally profitable colleague falls in love along with her topic, a a lot older, married presidential candidate from a storied American household.
Together with her fiance at midnight, a yr of passionate telephone intercourse and dangerous poetry reportedly ensues. However the stunning younger reporter can also be one thing of a blabbermouth and phrase will get out. A well-known tech journalist, as soon as Nuzzi’s mentor, reveals her transgressions to her fiance and her employer. Nuzzi’s engagement ends, the lover dumps her, she is fired from her job and — she flees to the West Coast as a result of, you understand, that is the place Easterners come to to allow them to take inventory and search redemption. You’ll be able to’t get any farther from New York than Level Mugu. “Right here,” as Joan Didion as soon as famously wrote, “is the place we run out of continent.”
Nuzzi’s new ebook, “American Canto,” is a disjointed mashup, half obscurantist memoir and half reflection on the weirdness of the period of Donald Trump, whom she has lined for years and who at all times appears joyful to see her it doesn’t matter what she writes about him. “Very younger and really stunning,” Trump says the primary time they meet.
Nuzzi has the unlucky behavior of making an attempt to channel Didion, California’s excessive priestess of angst. Big mistake. Anybody who makes an attempt to mimic the singular Didion simply comes off cringey: “This I’ll let you know,” Nuzzi writes. “Occasions misplaced context. Phrases misplaced that means.”
“I imply to let you know of the canyon the place voices carried.”
“I imply to let you know that, earlier than I used to be consumed by it, I couldn’t have instructed you what it was.”
One other downside: Nuzzi is coy to the purpose of absurdity. She doesn’t title now-Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with whom she allegedly had the affair that derailed her profession. As an alternative, she calls him The Politician. (Kennedy has denied the claims.)
“He known as me his child fowl, child doll, child love,” Nuzzi writes. The Politician skilled her like one of many child ravens in his Brentwood yard, to return when provided a deal with. “He instructed me that he needed me to have his child.” He would take a bullet for her.
She writes that The Politician, a former heroin addict, instructed her he secretly smokes the potent hallucinogenic drug DMT. That is an account that may have been of curiosity to the general public when Kennedy was being confirmed by the Senate.
Nor does Nuzzi title her former fiance, Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker throughout the MeToo period, later resurfaced at Politico and now writes on Substack. As an alternative, she calls him “the person I didn’t marry.”
I did get pleasure from Nuzzi’s transcription of a dialog with President Trump. She asks him why he so typically mentions “Silence of the Lambs” character Hannibal Lecter on the marketing campaign path. Trump presents an prolonged rumination on how international locations are releasing the criminally insane — folks like Lecter! — who then search asylum within the U.S.
“Oh wait,” Trump says. “Is that not clear?”
If you wish to get a extra literal, although one-sided, sense of what occurred between Nuzzi and Lizza, and of the methods by which Nuzzi trampled on journalistic ethics, you’ll be able to learn Lizza’s toxic, paywalled four-part Substack essay about her. The primary installment has racked up greater than 750,000 views. If his accusations are true — and her conduct offers us little motive to assume in any other case — the true scandal right here is her blatant disregard for the tenets most journalists maintain pricey: You don’t turn into emotionally or sexually concerned along with your topics or sources. Interval.
Lizza accuses Nuzzi of dishonest on him lengthy earlier than she met RFK Jr. with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford — he of “mountaineering the Appalachian Path” fame — when Sanford was searching for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. (Neither Sanford nor Nuzzi has commented on the allegations.)
Nuzzi, for her half, accuses Lizza of sleeping with a lady who labored for the Democratic presidential marketing campaign whereas they had been engaged. “She was fairly sufficient that I used to be not offended,” Nuzzi writes, “and never so fairly that I used to be offended.” It’s a surprise these two sexy journos ever bought any work performed. (Lizza has denied the accusation.)
Whereas Nuzzi writes in faux-Didion model that “I didn’t assume it my place to supply prescriptive recommendation” to The Politician when he was dropping out of the 2024 race, Lizza claims Nuzzi labored as RFK Jr.’s “non-public political operative,” advising him on tips on how to cope with the media, what to put on at a information convention and what to say. And, as proof, he revealed the technique memo he says Nuzzi wrote for Kennedy.
And what did Nuzzi get in return?
Kennedy reportedly dumped her in a scorching second after information of their affair leaked, and went on to a high-profile job within the second Trump administration whereas she self-exiled to Malibu to put in writing a ebook that’s now being trashed by critics.
Vainness Truthful not too long ago introduced it had employed Nuzzi to be its West Coast editor. That she would land such a plum job after destroying her credibility is maybe extra a testomony to the cynicism of the journal world than to her shamelessness. Nonetheless, on Friday, the journal introduced they’d parted methods in gentle of the most recent allegations about her breach of ethics.
Anyway, I predict Nuzzi will land on her ft.
In spite of everything, as Maureen Dowd instructed her, “At the least you’re nonetheless younger and delightful!’”
Bluesky: @rabcarian
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