A Bed of Brainworms

If you’re not following the Olivia Nuzzi / RFK Jr. fiasco, you are missing out on a mother-lode of sleazy shenanigans that are more delightful by the hour. A festival of icky hook-ups and betrayals, it deserves its own chart to follow, but here’s where it stands so far.

Olivia Nuzzi is (was) a political reporter at New York magazine. Her columns were low-grade snarky, and always seemed to me like something anyone could make up on the fly. Like, “Ivanka resents Melania but tries to get along with her.” Really??  She has long windswept blonde hair and is described as a film- staresque beauty, but has an enormous chin.

The chin has been overlooked by various older, important men, including her former fiance, journalist Ryan Lizza. How can a couple have so many Z’s in their names? I can’t get over it.

Lizza discovered that Olivia had engaged in a steamy “digital” (ahem) affair with RFK Jr while “covering” his run for president in 2024, thanks to a leak by another reporter. New York magazine put her on leave while they investigated the story. Lizza broke up with Olivia, who then filed a restraining order against him, dropping it a month later. Olivia was fired, and Lizza was also fired from his job at Politico.

Now! Here’s where the real fun begins. Olivia’s memoir comes out in December, but an excerpt was published in Vanity Fair, who has inexplicably hired her as its West Coast editor. The NYT did a fawning profile on her. And Lizza got mad. He has just published his own side of the story, including a poem from RFK Jr  that he found in Olivia’s text messages. Ready? You’re actually not, so brace yourself:

Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. Drink from me Love. I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. Dont spill a drop. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.

Ew doesn’t suffice, does it?  Lizza notes with resentment that he learned about felching from another text. Felching poetry from our Secretary of Health should be the last straw but no, he’s still busy trying to kill schoolchildren who need vaccines.

And if you can somehow find it in your heart to forgive him, remember that he had 37 affairs while married to his previous wife, who killed herself, leaving him her considerable estate. But his brainworm? No problem. Olivia loves it:

I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. “Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.”

But Bobby, you said it was! Which is it, motherfucker?

Does it matter that Olivia once lived with reporter Keith Olbermann, who was her sugar daddy when she was 18?  Or that she slept with horndog Mark Sanford while reporting on him? Or that she broke into Trump henchman Corey Lewandowski’s office? Not really. She’s a bonifide piece of work. Let’s give her credit for that. I only hope she’ll continue to amuse us for years to come with her purple prose and enormous chin.