Bizarre Beltway love triangle

Olivia Nuzzi is claiming that it was her ex Ryan Lizza who leaked the news of her virtual affair with RFK to her superiors as an act of revenge:

New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi is publicly accusing her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, a prominent political journalist with Politico, of orchestrating a harassment and blackmail campaign against her after their split and while Nuzzi had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The accusations — which Nuzzi made in a filing and before a judge in Washington, DC’s Superior Court this week and which he denies — are the latest explosive twist to emerge from the fallout of her previously undisclosed relationship with Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate, and as the national political press has turned the saga into a discussion of journalism ethics.

Nuzzi wrote in a court filing that in mid-August, Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”

Nuzzi was placed on leave last month by New York magazine while it conducts a “third-party review” after she acknowledged that she “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.” A person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that the relationship was with RFK Jr., whom she had penned a feature about late last year while he was running for president.

I’m trying not to be unduly prejudiced by the fact that in the picture Lizza looks like Bob Crane toward the end of Paul Schrader’s Autofocus, but especially given the circumstances of Lizza leaving the New Yorker Nuzzi’s claims are at least facially plausible. And obviously RFK Jr. being a massive misogynist shitbag has been well-documented for decades, and his tales about Nuzzi being some kind of stalker do not strike me as very credible.