Vanity Fair is parting ways with West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi after weeks of headlines about her relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr during the period when she was covering him for New York magazine.
Both Nuzzi and the magazine said in a joint statement that they have reportedly mutually agreed in the best interest of the magazine to let her contract expire at the end of the year. She had only recently joined as West Coast editor in September.
Nuzzi, who is 32 and had built a strong reputation for political profiles, saw her career unravel in the fall of 2024. That was when it became public that she had an intense personal relationship with Kennedy, who was a presidential candidate at the time and is now leading the Department of Health and Human Services. New York magazine fired her for not disclosing that relationship.
She wrote about the turmoil and her connection with Kennedy in her memoir American Canto, where she calls him The Politician and refers to her former fiancé Ryan Lizza as the man I did not marry. Vanity Fair published an excerpt even as Lizza posted a string of Substack essays filled with allegations that grabbed more attention than the book itself.
The feud between the two quickly spread through media circles. Lizza claimed she had also been involved with another profile subject and had offered Kennedy political advice, actions that are widely seen as crossing ethical lines for journalists.
He even released personal text messages from Kennedy to Nuzzi that he had intercepted. Nuzzi rejected his posts in a Substack interview with Emily Sundberg, calling them fiction slash revenge porn.
The timing of the announcement from Vanity Fair was tough for Nuzzi. It landed just days after the release of American Canto, which critics dismissed and readers mostly ignored. By Friday afternoon the book sat at 6094 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
Reviewers did not hold back. A tell all memoir Ha This is a tell nothing memoir wrote Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Trying to stay upbeat, Nuzzi posted a light Substack column titled Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry and included one line that captured the rough week Monica Lewinsky reaches out to check on your mental health.
