The return of Olivia Nuzzi this past week, complete with a soft-focus New York Times profile and Vanity Fair book excerpt, has renewed interest in a past inappropriate relationship with a politician — and has led to a shocking claim of a second.
New York Magazine, where Nuzzi worked for seven years, and Vanity Fair, where she’s been employed the past nine weeks, declined to comment on allegations by former fiancée Ryan Lizza that Nuzzi had a sexual relationship with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford as she covered his long-shot bid for the White House in 2019. Lizza’s claim on Substack came hours after Vanity Fair published an excerpt of Nuzzi’s upcoming book, “American Canto,” where she detailed elements of her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though not by name.
Newly minted Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci made the splashy hire of Nuzzi in September, and the magazine promoted her photo-filled excerpt atop the site Monday and on social media. While other journalists who have gotten a second chance after an ethical breach have tended to keep their heads down and let their work do the talking, Nuzzi is leaning into the spotlight, evident in the photo-heavy Times rollout of her forthcoming book.
But the silence from her current employer, and her previous one, suggests they would rather not engage with the latest Nuzzi drama, which raises questions about her past coverage of Sanford for New York and her ethical boundaries going forward as West Coast editor for Vanity Fair.
“The organizations who choose to hire someone or publish someone who has broken rules, the onus is on them,” said Chris Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Alabama and the vice chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee. “The stakes are so much higher because they gave a reporter a second chance.”
Last year’s revelation of Nuzzi’s “personal” relationship with Kennedy — who she profiled for the magazine — prompted scrutiny of her coverage of the 2024 election, in which Kennedy first ran unsuccessfully for president only to eventually bow out and back Donald Trump. In a September 2024 statement, Nuzzi admitted the relationship “should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict.” (I previously reported that Nuzzi had initially denied a relationship to New York editor David Haskell.) Meanwhile, Kennedy, at the time, said he “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
Though New York said a review of “her published work” indicated no inaccuracies or biases, which a third-party review by a law firm later confirmed, the magazine and Nuzzi parted ways. Nuzzi launched a legal fight against Lizza over accusations of hacking and harassment. (Nuzzi dropped the protective order against Lizza in November last year, ending the legal dispute.)
During that dispute, Lizza claimed in a court filing last year that the Kennedy affair was “the second presidential cycle in a row where Ms. Nuzzi’s personal indiscretions have sabotaged” a planned joint book deal. That somewhat cryptic accusation takes on new resonance in light of Lizza’s piece.
Sanford garnered headlines in 2009 after admitting to having an extramarital affair in Argentina after the governor’s office initially said he’d been hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Sanford did not immediately respond for comment on Lizza’s claim, which has not been substantiated. A representative for Nuzzi declined to comment.
Lizza, too, has faced unflattering headlines, having been fired by the New Yorker in 2017 for “improper sexual conduct,” an allegation he denied. Lizza later worked at Politico before launching “Telos” on Substack earlier this year.
How Vanity Fair handles Nuzzi’s future work remains to be seen because, save for her book excerpt, her byline has not appeared on its website since her hiring.
“There’s that old cliché, ‘fool me once, shame on you,’” Roberts said. ”This is a situation where, [for] the new employer, it’s going to be shame on them if this doesn’t go right.”
Some critics are already questioning the judgment of Nuzzi’s employer in light of Lizza’s claim and the magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, which fired four reporters earlier this month after confronting its head of human resources about its decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue, behavior deemed “gross misconduct and policy violations.”
“So Condé Nast hires Olivia Nuzzi to cover politics at Vanity Fair after alleged affairs with two candidates & fires [Jake Lahut], an accomplished political reporter [at] Wired, because he dared complain to HR about killing the important political coverage of Teen Vogue,” media critic Jeff Jarvis wrote on Bluesky. “Priorities, I guess.”
