Are Political Sex Scandals A Thing Of The Past?

By now the story of how New York Magazine’s star political reporter Olivia Nuzzi was caught up in a weird, mostly one-sided sexual obsession with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has saturated X feeds and gossip rags. Allegedly, Nuzzi bombarded RFK Jr., a man not exactly known for being chaste, with various provocative pictures of herself. Nuzzi has acknowledged that “some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal.”

Nuzzi is a skilled writer known for her ability to get access to notorious figures in politics — she’s profiled everyone from Trump fixer Michael Cohen to Democratic congressman and Chinese spy consort Eric Swalwell — and write pieces that get talked about. But saying Nuzzi is a skilled writer isn’t to be confused with saying she’s a good writer; I’ve probably read a few dozen pieces by her and not one struck me as genuinely memorable or revelatory. Her real talent, as we’ve unfortunately learned, was getting access.  

The most complete account of what happened between her and RFK Jr. seems to have come from Jessica Reed Kraus, a mommyblogger-turned-entrepreneurial reporter, who, caveat lector, is known for her RFK Jr. sympathies. Kraus authored a juicy Substack about her own relationship with Nuzzi and provided all manner of interesting details. Still, this bit of Kraus’ account, where she speaks to a source who previously dealt with Nuzzi, gave me pause, because it’s presented as if Nuzzi was pioneering some devious new tactic for women in proximity to power. Apparently, other subjects besides RFK Jr. are telling tales of how Nuzzi was “flirtatious with me, and not in a professional way” — though how one flirts in a professional manner will remain a mystery:  

Clarifying that the flirtation wasn’t overtly sexual, the source elaborated, “I’m not saying she was inviting me to sleep with her, but working with Olivia is very different from any other journalist, male or female. There’s a fine line between sexual seduction and informational seduction — and she crosses it. All the time.”

According to the source, Nuzzi employs subtle methods to create a personal connection — misconstrued words, friendly giggles, and telltale signs. The source emphasized that Nuzzi’s tactics are not unique but have become a model for many young female journalists. “What Olivia Nuzzi has perfected has become a talent that others are emulating. Being flirtatious, being inappropriate — this is how she gains unique access.”

Ah, yes a 31-year-old woman using sexual allure to obtain access to powerful men and advance her career, whoever heard of such a thing! To that end, there was a lot of snickering about this nearly 10-year-old tweet where a young, aspirational Nuzzi gripes that the female journalist character in “House of Cards” has an affair with the psychopathic congressman she happens to be covering, thus unfairly blurring the public perception of Nuzzi’s chosen profession and the world’s oldest:

To bring this full circle, Nuzzi would later make a cameo on another buzzy TV show about politics, “Billions,” which itself was co-created by Andrew Ross Sorkin — a New York Times journalist. Nuzzi appears in a scene where she’s inquiring about the main character of the show, a U.S. attorney with grand political ambitions who’s secretly very into S&M in ways that might compromise his career. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t many people in the real world who would say portraying politicians as sexual deviants is unfair, just as the only people who haven’t been in a coma the last couple of decades who are willing to defend the ethics of journalists are other journalists.   

Of course, one reason Hollywood occasionally indulges in a lurid portrayal of female journalists sleeping with sources is that it is very much a thing that really happens. In 2018, a young New York Times reporter was caught sleeping with a much older married man, who also happened to have access to a lot of sensitive information in the intelligence community. The reporter got some notable scoops out of the relationship, so she wasn’t fired by the Times, just reassigned. Years before that, a political reporter for a major magazine was let go after rumors abounded she was having an improper relationship with a top aide to a presidential candidate. A friend of mine quipped, “She wasn’t fired for sleeping with a source — she was fired for sleeping with a source and not getting anything out of it.”

Of course, even with some notable exceptions, many will protest that this behavior is not the norm. While not every journalist is literally meretricious, rather than merely pimping their integrity, the fact remains that one of the most under-covered stories in America is sex and power. We get glimpses of how bad it is — see New York financier Jeff Epstein, the very recent revelations about P. Diddy palling around with the Obamas one moment and hosting “freak offs” the next, or the fact that New York’s COVID czar was hosting orgies even as he was ruining lives by enforcing draconian COVID restrictions forbidding normal social interactions.

But somehow, all the damning revelations seem to ensnare a few sacrificial lambs rather than produce the expansive legal or political accountability these scandals suggest is needed. It’s not enough that Trump has decades of terribly caddish behavior; instead media operatives are libelously calling him a rapist after a Democrat megadonor, who was himself a visitor to Epstein’s island, personally funded a very dubious lawsuit against Trump based on the accusations of an extremely unreliable woman. At the same time, there was radio silence in the media about the fact that Bill Clinton was one of the most prominent speakers at the Democratic National Convention despite decades of horrible treatment of women and years after one of Epstein’s underaged victims claimed she met the former president on the notorious private island.

Where sex and politics was once a scandalous mix, we now seem to accept that the corridors of power are now just one big “Eyes Wide Shut” party and that the one institution dedicated to exposing their corruption is begging for invites. And while Nuzzi bears responsibility for her actions — and to her credit, it’s responsibility that she doesn’t seem to be dodging so far — her career thus far has put her at the center of a farrago of weird sex stuff, and it’s hard to say to what extent she’s made bad decisions, the system is rotten, or likely both.

Nuzzi first gained national notoriety while she was still in college after she penned a series of columns about her time interning on Anthony Weiner’s doomed 2013 New York mayoral campaign. Once a rising star in the Democrat Party, Weiner had resigned from Congress in 2011 after it emerged he had been sending unsolicited naked pics to women, which is ironically the same thing Nuzzi stands accused of doing to RFK Jr. Though Nuzzi’s pics were allegedly more demure and didn’t necessarily involve crimes — Weiner would eventually plead guilty to sending obscene material to a minor, spend time in prison, and is now required to permanently register as a sex offender.

Still, Weiner’s problems were well-known when Nuzzi volunteered to work on Weiner’s mayoral campaign, an unsuccessful last-ditch attempt to save his political career, and Nuzzi was clearly there to exploit it. Nuzzi’s columns about Weiner’s doomed campaign were published by NSFWcorp, colorful but dodgy publication best known for its senior editor Mark Ames, a journalist who had gained notoriety for publishing “rude, cruel, pornographic, self-aggrandizing, infantile, and breathtakingly misogynist” work. Nonetheless, Nuzzi’s star rocketed when Weiner’s campaign manager responded to the columns calling her a “slutbag,” among other things, and this garnered her a profile in The Atlantic.

It was a heckuva springboard to a journalism career. A year later she was dating Keith Olbermann, probably the most unhinged person in journalism, and that’s saying something — she was 21 and he was 55. She was also offered a job as a journalist at the Daily Beast, which she dropped out of college to take. She covered the 2016 election extensively; in 2017 she was hired by New York Magazine and soon became their star political reporter.

Eventually she started dating Ryan Lizza, another star journalist with a questionable relationship history. In 2017, he was fired after more than a decade as the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent after accusations of sexual misconduct. Lizza, who is 19 years Nuzzi’s senior, reportedly left his wife and two kids to be with Nuzzi. They were engaged for two years, and have called it off in the wake of the RFK news. The sordid matter also appears to have come along just as Nuzzi was ramping up her TV career.

While Nuzzi has undeniable talents, so do a lot of other writers toiling in obscurity who dream of getting the breaks she’s gotten. Step back for a moment, and it looks like sex, either as the subject of her reporting or in her personal life, was a catalyst for her entire career. What really separated her from the pack of other writers that would kill to have her job is that she was both deft and damaged enough to use her feminine wiles to capitalize on it.

I don’t think if Nuzzi or her friends read any of this they would take much comfort in the fact that, in the end, I think this is all really an indictment of journalism and politics rather than the decisions of one woman. One high profile female journalist I know a little whose career hit the rocks due to questionable behavior has subsequently been in recovery and converted to Christianity. I don’t know the specifics of Nuzzi’s bad decisions here, but as always, I would love to see a sincere redemption arc for her, whatever that looks like.

But the fact of the matter is that we all understand that in 21^st century America sex is power, and no one really pretends otherwise, even if they try and bury this fact under accusations of moralizing and feminist bromides. The incentives are what they are, you’re just not supposed to notice them.

And you’re definitely not supposed to notice that we’re two months away from the real possibility that our first female president will be a vapid and incompetent cipher who failed the bar exam and owes her entire political career to doing the corrupt bidding of the much older, more powerful man she was sleeping with.   

After all, in politics there’s no such thing as an improper sexual relationship anymore — the only sin is not getting anything out of it.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator