A White House love story: The very public break-up that has Washington gripped

3 months ago 5

By Monica Hesse

November 19, 2025 — 7.30pm

Long ago, whether they realised it or not, Americans absorbed via cultural osmosis the significance of Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza.

She: a swaggering reporter for New York Magazine who approached each piece like a knife fight. Hope Hicks, Joe Biden, Mehmet Oz, Donald Trump – she shivved everyone, but they kept talking to her anyway. And yes, some jealous people wondered whether that was because she was blonde and young and beautiful, but more importantly, she was a hell of a reporter.

Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza attend a White House Correspondents’ Dinner after party in April 2023.

He: a star correspondent for the New Yorker, Politico and CNN whose interview with Anthony Scaramucci led to the very short-term White House communications director’s termination (back in 2017, or roughly 5 million years ago).

They helped shape our understanding of politics and politicians in the Trump era. They were also in love, sharing a Georgetown home and a glittering Washington social life, as well as a fat contract with Simon & Schuster to co-write a postmortem on the 2020 presidential campaign. But both personal and professional relationships dissolved a little more than a year ago when it was revealed that Nuzzi had entered into a murky “personal relationship” with vaccine-loathing E. coli-bather Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the former Democratic scion who was soon to become Trump’s health secretary.

(Representatives for Kennedy deflected when asked about it at the time, emphasising that they had met in person only once, when she interviewed him.)

Nuzzi had covered RFK’s presidential campaign, so this was very, very bad. She lost her job and parted ways with Lizza. And this might have all been memory-holed into the bin of minor Washington scandals, except that, like moths to a flaming porta-potty, they both reappeared this week, each with their own literary account of the events.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr at home in Los Angeles in June 2024.

“I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain,” Nuzzi writes in an excerpt, published on Monday by Vanity Fair, where she now works, from her forthcoming American Canto. The memoir chronicles the affair while referring to RFK Jr as simply “the Politician”.

You want a book to explain exactly how one lusts after a man who left two wives and wears jeans to the gym. From excerpts, though, this book seems instead to explain California wildfires. We’re thousands of words in and caught in an endless metaphor. Olivia is driving from flames in her car. Olivia is watching the coast burn from her deck and worrying about woodland creatures: “How many like the rattlesnake, his little soul swallowed without ceremony in one breath?”

The book got a big feature in The New York Times over the weekend, in addition to that excerpt in Vanity Fair – this is truly the kind of promotion you can only get when you throw sanity to the wind and sext the brain-wormed Kennedy.

Olivia Nuzzi speaks at an event in Florida in 2022.

The coverage through Monday afternoon revealed a lot of atmosphere but not a lot of details. And then, several hours after Nuzzi’s excerpt was released, her ex-fiance unfurled a Substack letter that revealed more than anyone was ever expecting.

“I spent hours hacking at the sprouts to keep the bamboo at bay, just as I had with all the secrets Olivia and I shared,” Lizza wrote in a newsletter instalment released Monday night and ominously labelled “Part 1.”

I did not bother to count how many paragraphs were about bamboo (haha I did: six paragraphs), but the gist of it is that Lizza alleges that while he was back tending their shared Georgetown home, he discovered, via discarded love letters and hotel stationery, that Nuzzi was off having an affair with a presidential candidate three decades her senior.

The plot twist he reveals at the end: He’s not even talking about RFK Jr but about another prior dalliance. Nuzzi, in his telling, had allegedly previously had her little soul swallowed without ceremony by former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

Ryan Lizza attends an event in Washington DC in March 2022.

“Like bamboo,” he writes, “the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open.”

(Nuzzi, via her publicist, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Sanford – who, if you remember him at all, it’s likely for his 2009 creation of the euphemism “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” which he used to explain a multi-day vanishing act while carrying on an affair with an Argentine journalist.)

We will get back to the scandal in a minute, but any recovering English majors read these tortured, florid confessions and thought the exact same thing: Aha, so it turns out four Zs is how many surname Zs a relationship can accommodate before it implodes.

The stories Lizza and Nuzzi tell give you the extremely wrong idea of what it means to be a journalist. We, despite what every Hollywood property from House of Cards to The West Wing would have you believe, do not date our sources. (We don’t become friends with them. We don’t even let them buy us coffee.) Also, what with Tweedledum talking about moving into a three-storey Georgetown house with a courtyard, and Tweedledidion tooling around Malibu in a convertible, I feel compelled to clarify that most reporters are tooling around Costco parking lots in Hyundai Elantras. We’re not rich, guys. The only skill that exceeds our ability to sniff out stories is our ability to sniff out the leftovers from someone else’s taco-bar lunch meeting.

The White House press pack in the Oval Office in October.

Anyway, back to the alleged affair(s). What can we take from this, besides the fact that everyone has a type, and somebody has to be interested exclusively in elder long-shot politicians who have public and storied histories of infidelity?

Is the point that to understand another person – to really understand them, well enough to explain them to the American public, as Nuzzi did repeatedly in her stories – you have to fall in love with them a little bit? That these are men who manage to pry votes from thousands of citizens, and of course they’re also going to work magic on a 20-something from Jersey?

We don’t have celebrity scandals quite like we used to. They are stage-managed now. Everything is co-ordinated through publicists, released in time for a new project, workshopped to death via a crisis management firm.

But into this sanitised celebrity culture, Nuzzi and Lizza – two comparative normies whose private lives we should know nothing about – have brought unto us the salaciousness of sex, plus the weight of Washington, plus the navel-gazing introspection available only to people who have spent their entire careers dissecting the foibles and private behaviours of other powerful people, and who finally have the opportunity and extensive vocabulary to turn the pen upon themselves and say, it’s my turn now!

These people. God. These people.

Monica Hesse is a screens critic for The Washington Post’s Style section. Previously, she was an opinion columnist who frequently wrote about gender and its impact on society.