Curb your enthusiasm

When I type “Olivia” into Google, my auto-fill pulls up Olivia Nuzzi as the first search term, ahead of Olivia Rodrigo, Olivia Culpo, Olivia Newton-John, Olivia Munn, Olivia Cooke, and Olivia Wilde, along with all the other googleable Olivias.

Now what does that suggest? To my hopelessly cynical and polluted imagination, it suggests that the whole “Olivia Nuzzi” had an “emotional” and “digital” (hey editors, maybe you should have said “cyber” or “electronic?”) “affair” with “RFK Jr.” is just one big publicity stunt on her part, and that it’s working beautifully, at least for the moment.

My basis for this is the assumption, which seems well warranted based on my limited knowledge about her, that Nuzzi is not an idiot, and she knew exactly how this thing would play when the fact that she had exchanged some highly inappropriate texts (RFK is married and she was engaged to Ryan Lizza, although apparently that’s been off for a few weeks now) with Kennedy became public.

Nuzzi is a talented writer, but she’s also somebody who very obviously hungers for money and fame in the way that still-young journalists on the edge of what counts as “stardom” in journalism often do. My theory here is that she started messing around with Kennedy in cyberspace earlier this year as some sort of transgressive lark, because she was amusing herself with the whole absurdity of the situation, and also got some cheap thrills from the various sorts of boundary-breaking she was indulging in.

Then at some point — maybe when she broke up with Lizza, which of course may have been because of all this — it occurred to her that she could “leverage” her egregiously bad behavior, involving as it did the betrayal of the most basic personal and professional standards, into fame and fortune and everything that goes with it, just like the subject of her latest profile has done, more successfully than anybody else ever. I mean given the times we live in, the odds that this sordid little story will be eventually be a Netflix series are approximately 53.76%, give or take.

I will consider it definitive evidence for this theory of Nuzzi ends up hosting a prime time show on Fox News at seven figures a year. Strong evidence will be the aforementioned Netflix series, twinned with a confessional yet still sassy memoir.

If I’m being unfair here I’m sorry (but so is Brenda Lee). And yes two posts and counting about this on LGM is part of the (meta)problem, but hate the game not the player. Or something.