Olivia Nuzzi's Got a Fuzzi and She Wants All the World to See It

Olivia Nuzzi is -- then was -- and now is again a fantastically overpromoted "journalist."

I first noticed her suddenly appearing everywhere in media about six or eight years ago. I didn't understand why she was suddenly ubiquitous, as she had broken no major stories. She did cover... Anthony Weiner's mayoral campaign, and got the pretty minor scoop that his campaign manager had quit after he lied to her, I think probably about the affair that was revealed during that campaign.

But that's not really enough to make a media star, is it? She seemed to be yet another "on author" attitudinal writer, mostly writing slightly-disguised opinion pieces in which the primary point of view was her own and the primary subject was always herself.

She was Wonkette with a more aggressive agent.

She recently had a fall from grace -- a brief and shallow fall from grace -- when her former fiance, the damp liberal cuckold Ryan Lizza, revealed that she had been having a torrid "digital affair" -- which is a nice way of saying "sexting and dirty pictures with mutual masturbation" -- with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while writing a piece about him. And, liberals spat: as she was writing unfavorably about his then-opponent, Joe Biden.

The left hissed that this breached journalistic ethics but may I ask: what journalistic ethics? What the fuck are you even talking about?

Yes, she had a conflict of interest in that she had an emotional attachment to the subject she was writing about and therefore a bias against his political rivals.

Which she did not disclose.

This is true of the entire media, which has been having an equally torrid "digital affair" (and often, a physical one) with the Democrat Party for decades.

Yes, Olivia Nuzzi should have disclosed that she was unable to evaluate RFKJr. objectively.

And so should "former" Democrat aide and Gun Control, Inc. spokesman Jake Tapper declare that he, too, in unable to cover the object of his passionate affections with the level of objectivity the media used to pretend to require.

Anyway. Olivia Nuzzi's back in the news. She served the briefest exile from "journalism" -- I think she was fired and exiled from "journalism" for, what, a year? -- and is now hired again to be celebrity gossip sheet and reactionary liberal rag Vanity Fair's west coast editor.

She also sat for an "interview" with the New York Times as public relations for her return to "journalism."

And she's written a book, which I assume is mostly about her adventures in celebrity dick-riding.

Vanity Fair excerpted it. Here, she deploys all her Airport Thriller skill as a novelist, by which I mean she can't write worth a f**, to wax eloquently about... the worm that died in RFKJr.'s head, and how she learned to hate that worm and love that worm.

Later, when the affair turns cold and RFKJr. seems uninterested, she complains:

Okay, that one is not real, that one is a parody of Nuzzi's breathlessly-indiscreet style by a guy calling himself "Magilla." But I chuckled when I read that and I have to admit it took me in. I wanted you to have that same pleasure.

And given Nuzzi's actual writing, can you really blame me for falling for it?

Her former fiance, Ryan Lizza, himself an overpromoted left-wing "journalist" but nearly to the extent of his almost-wife, was a cuck before he was actually a cuckold. To fire back at Nuzzi, and maybe to anticipate nasty things she has to say about him (she has accused him of "hacking" her email and stalking her), Lizza has just dropped another piece about his former bed-partner, and it's... well it's something.

I don't know if I really appreciate this vengeance-by-online-trashing kind of article, but I can't say he doesn't reveal a few things about Olivia Nuzzi, and answer questions I had, like "How did this low-talent nothing who looks like Faye Dunaway -- and when I say that understand that I do not find Faye Dunaway actually attractive, just... "strking" -- suddenly become the It Girl of the leftwing media?"

The answer may surprise you.

Or, if you've followed the career of MSNBC's -- excuse me, MS NOW's -- Katie Tur, it might not surprise you all that much.

Lizza begins with some bad attempts to sound like a trash novelist. In this, he's competing with Olivia Nuzzi herself, who's also now attempting to sound like a bad trash novelist. They're competing to see who can get Harold Robbins to roll over in his grave the most vigorously.

Olivia had just returned from a reporting trip--at least that's what she told me it was--and her Herschel backpack, the one with the flap that never quite closed properly, was tossed beside our bed, its contents scattered on the floor.

That's when I noticed the sheets of Kimpton Hotel stationery that would alter the course of our lives.

It is surreal now to think back to that room, the one overlooking the courtyard garden that became a metaphor for our decade-long entanglement. It was dazzling during spring's full bloom and foreboding when winter stripped all signs of life. And lurking underground, way in the back, was the invasive bamboo, which grows like a cancer, and if not tamed, would march through the entire courtyard and kill everything.

Your metaphors are strained and gay. And how did we move from deciduous trees to bamboo? Pick an arboreal lane, Sir.

I spent hours hacking at the sprouts to keep the bamboo at bay, just as I had with all the secrets that Olivia and I shared.

Any chance we're going to get off the bamboo metaphor any time soon?

I tried to poison the roots, cut off the supply of water and nutrients, and repair the underground wall meant to halt their advance. I should have known that it was futile and that, at some point, the bamboo would take over the garden, and that's all anyone would see.

Okay, so this is what we're doing now. This is about bamboo now.

This is a story of bamboo.

I can still picture the hotel paper and reporting notepads spilling into the walk-in closet, where a year earlier I had spent an afternoon on my knees carefully arranging scores of her boots, high heels, sneakers, and slippers on an enormous shoe rack.

Olivia almost cried when she saw the results. "Nobody has ever done anything like that for me," she said.

It is tempting now to forget those moments, to see it as a lost decade, and to cast her as a cartoon villain. After all, she deceived me for a year and smeared me with false allegations. And not just little lies but big fantastical falsehoods-- blackmail!, (A former child actor, Olivia always had a keen sense for the dramatic.) She orchestrated a plot with the help of a senior Trump official to try to have me imprisoned, and now she's written what appears to be a largely fictitious and self-serving account about it all.

So, yes, I have reason to be annoyed, maybe even a little angry.

She was a former child actor? I don't see anything about that on IMDB, except for an appearance on Billions, which I assume was one of those grating journalist-appears-as-herself things.

Wikipedia does offer this:

In 2010, Nuzzi, as "Livvy," released a song titled "Jailbait," as part of an attempt to launch a music career.

Jailbait? That's going to be very relevant soon.

Some math tells me that Nuzzi, born in 1993, would be 17 or 18 when she recorded "Jailbait" as "Livvy."

Maybe she did her child acting work under a different name, and wants to keep that out of the press. Maybe Lizza will tells us more about it in future reports. (This is Part 1.)

Enough about Lizza's style. Here's his first dirt-drop, the first actually interesting facts he has to disclose.

But first: More fucking bamboo.

Amor fati, the Stoics advised--love your fate. I have admired that sentiment more than I have practiced it, but that's the spirit that will guide this series of posts. You have one life, so find beauty and humor and wisdom even in the seemingly darkest and most embarrassing chapters.

Besides, like bamboo, the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open. And in this case, the true story is more bizarre, and ultimately more illuminating about politics and media and love, than anything I've ever covered, let alone experienced.

Do we have all that out of our systems now?

I just got an email:

I'm RIVETED.

Signed,

A panda

Okay, on to the actual dirt.

Remember when I said "Jailbait" would soon be important?

I wasn't just saying that. I wasn't just providing roughage and filler to this post without providing real nourishment. I was offering a scaffolding to the next disclosure.

Like stalks of bamboo, perhaps. (The panda told me to work that in.)

[I] was used to cleaning up Olivia's messes.

Not that long ago, I had helped her untangle herself from an unusual relationship with Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host.

What? This is an Olbermann story now?

The twists! The turns!

Keith is tall and plain and rigid and quivers in the wind.

Like, say, bamboo.

She had messaged him out of the blue. They started talking, and soon after, she fled her unhappy home in suburban New Jersey and started living with Keith in Manhattan. He paid for her to attend college, outfitted her in Tom Ford and Hervé Léger dresses and some $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry.

She started living with him just out of college?

When she was 17 or 18?

When she was recording "Jailbait"?

This Keith Olbermann, huh?

Later, he covered her rent and furnished her apartment in a doorman building in the West Village. While Keith, who was 34 years older, was generous, there were strings attached.

What do you call it when an older man pays the rent for a much, much younger college student and expects "strings" in return?

I guess you could call it a Sugarbaby/Money-Daddy situation.

You can also call it a kissing cousin of de facto prostitution.

Olbermann himself brags that he did most of Katie Tur's work for her -- he claims he wrote her articles and edited them into a comprehensible state. So he seems to often providing money or service in kind for his much-younger SugarBabies.

Olivia had concealed the relationship from me and other friends...

This sounds like prostitution.

On the other hand, I can't blame her. Who wants a sexual relationship with Keith "This is the finger I write my Special Comments with?" Olbermann publicly known?

And if you're not a long-enough reader to get that -- a long time ago, one of his fans wrote a blog-post about him having taken her to a hotel to have sex with her. After he... digitally pleasured her, and this time I don't mean by use of a computer, he triumphantly held up his finger and boasted, "This is the finger I write my Special Comments with!"

Allegedly.

But who are we kidding?

...but one day she told me everything--too much, actually--and together we hatched a plan for her escape.

To escape the Olbermann-fronted apartment, they built a long but sturdy ladder out of ten stalks of bamboo.

Or at least, I like to imagine that's what they did. I have a feeling it was more boring than that. I would guess that Lizza had to front money to pay for her new, non-Olbermann-fronted apartment. He doesn't confirm that but I'm seeing a pattern with this Nuzzi woman. She climbs and advances chiefly on her back.

Now I will give away the main interesting fact divulged by this article. This is a spoiler, because, while Lizza's actual style is dogshit, he does in fact structure this vengeance piece to have a payoff and punchline.

So you can read it now if you like. Otherwise, I'm going to ruin it for you.

Throughout the article he leads you to believe that when he speaks of Nuzzi's return from the Kimpton Hotel, he's about to talk about his realization that she had an affair with RFKJr. Let me credit him, he builds to this well. He crafts a fine, sturdy structure of bamboo held together firmly by strips of bamboo-skin, flattened and scraped-out to serve as fine ligatures.

No but really, he keeps talking about Nuzzi's penchant for older men, for older male political men, and particularly for older male politicians with presidential ambitions. He talks about her having indiscreet relations with sources she's writing about.

And then you think, ah, the final piece of the bamboo puzzle. He's about to discover her affair with RFKJr.

As he approaches that, we get this, Ryan Lizza's bad writing framing Olivia Nuzzi's bad writing:

But one mess at a time. As I tidied up the desk, something on the Kimpton stationery caught my eye. I started to read.

"If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house," Olivia had written, "I would still thirst for you."

Unfortunately, the lack of a water tower on our Georgetown home's roof ruled me out as the note's intended recipient.

But it's not RJKJR. That comes in later part.

This part is about him discovering, in 2020, after she traveled to South Carolina to "interview" another politician involved in a sex scandal, that she apparently had an affair with...

(...last chance to read it before the spoiler...)

She later explained to me that she became "infatuated" with him after their interview, that she couldn't get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother.

I was sure our relationship was over. And certainly our book project was dead. She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates?

I looked at the date on her aborted letter to "Mark": March 5, 2020--just a few days ago.

I called my agent.

"We have a big problem," I said. "Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford."

...Mark Sanford.

You remember him, right? The Republican governor who disappeared from work without notice for a week or two only to later be found in the company of an Argentinian woman whom he later abandoned his wife for?

So that's Part 1, and we're only up to 2020. I imagine we will have multiple parts and multiple bouts of shameless infidelity before we reach 2024 and Nuzzi's "digital affair" with RFKJr.

The legend of Olivia Nuzzi's indiscretions grows rapidly -- much like the fast-growing bamboo forests of India.

And I can't lie, I am, like the panda, RIVETED.

Here's my takeaway: We must always TrUsT tHe MeDiA because they are all smart, ethical, informed, well-socialized, of unimpeachable character and powerful moral fiber (bamboo-like, one might say) and most of all sane, and have no biases at all that they routinely hide from the public.

Oh, and there's this:

And this:

posted by Ace at 04:15 PM

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