Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Olivia Nuzzi – his alleged “paramour,” 39 years his junior – that he wanted to impregnate her during their nearly year-long affair, her ex-fiancé claimed in a court filing revealed Tuesday.
Journalist Ryan Lizza alleged new details about Nuzzi's relationship with Kennedy the day before encountering his former fiancé, who is accusing him of blackmail, in a D.C. court.
In mid-August, Lizza wrote in a filing to the court on Oct. 14, “I discovered that Ms. Nuzzi had been cheating on me with a married man [RFK Jr.] for almost a year. She admitted the affair and over the course of weeks of conversations she confided how she fell into what she described as a “toxic,” “unhealthy,” “stupid,” “psychotic,” “crazy,” “indefensible” relationship with a 70-year-old “sex addict” who told her he wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her.”
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“She told me that there was a huge power disparity between them and that he manipulated her.”
“No device of Ms. Nuzzi's was ever hacked to learn any of this information,” Lizza wrote, challenging one of the main accusations leveled against him by Nuzzi in her filing to the court on Sept. 30. “Almost everything I know about her affair comes directly from Ms. Nuzzi herself.”
Olivia Nuzzi’s counsel has responded with a statement to the Daily Beast: “We reiterate what Ms. Nuzzi said in her request for a protective order: That Mr. Lizza’s intent is to harass and humiliate Ms. Nuzzi and that he is utilizing the press to do so — some of the very issues that drove Ms. Nuzzi to file for a protective order in the DC Superior Court. Filings such as this, full of salacious and irrelevant claims that we will not dignify with a response, further his efforts, as described in her initial filing for the protective order. Her only objective in seeking intervention from law enforcement and the court is to ensure her safety and be left alone.”
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza in 2023.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty ImagesLizza, who has wholly denied the accusations of blackmail against him, says that he discovered the affair on Aug. 17, two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, at which point he asked Nuzzi to move out of their home. He says that Nuzzi then spent weeks trying to convince him to stay with her, following the revelation of her affair with RFK Jr.
Three days after he found out about the affair, Lizza says, Nuzzi “pleaded with me to consider returning to the relationship, telling me “her affair “wasn’t real” and that “I don’t want to give up” on our relationship.” Nuzzi, Lizza claims, also asked him to tell friends that they were still together.
Lizza quotes a series of alleged texts from Nuzzi, in which she supposedly described herself as “heartbroken” regarding the possible end of their relationship. He says that they started discussing the possibility of moving to Manhattan. Nuzzi then came to stay with him in New York in the second week of September.
“Throughout this period,” Lizza stated to the court, “including on our last day together, I told Ms. Nuzzi that I would help her get away from the disturbing relationship with her paramour [Kennedy], but that I seriously doubted that it was possible for us to have a future together, [and] that she needed to make arrangements to move her belongings out of our apartment.”
This entirely contradicts the narrative Nuzzi has told: that Lizza sought to blackmail her into staying with him.
“Ms. Nuzzi resisted any effort to formally end our relationship and she repeatedly asked me for more time to consider our future," Lizza claims. "This remained her position up until the last time we had any discussion about it, on September 15th." He quotes from an apparent text in which he told Nuzzi he would always be there if she needed him.
“Her allegation of [me] trying to blackmail her back into our relationship is a disgraceful lie contradicted by the most basic facts,” Lizza writes. “Ms Nuzzi's own recklessness is solely responsible for the public ridicule, humiliation and professional damage she says she has suffered.”
Lizza goes on to deny that he ever stole a personal device from Nuzzi, as she claimed, or recovered “deleted materials” from one. “These too are defamatory lies that were meant to create sensational headlines, damage my reputation, and distract from press attention about Ms. Nuzzi’s catastrophically reckless behavior.”
He also rejects Nuzzi’s claim that he “threatened physical violence” against her, a claim Nuzzi says Lizza made when she refused to share in the financial responsibility of their abortive co-authored book project.
“I did tell Ms. Nuzzi,” Lizza writes, “that I thought she should be responsible for paying back our book advance since this is the second presidential cycle in a row where Ms. Nuzzi's personal indiscretions have sabotaged our book project.”
Lizza also addressed the question of who leaked news of the affair, or alerted Nuzzi’s employer, New York magazine, to the existence of it. He says that “as Ms. Nuzzi knows, I did not inform her employer about her affair.”
“At every turn,” Lizza claims, “I counseled Ms. Nuzzi to make decisions that would help her and that would limit the damage and embarrassment to her, to me, to our families, to our respective journalistic institutions, and to the family of the person with whom she had an affair. I pleaded with her to break off all contact with her paramour. I strongly urged her to remove reporting material from him that she included in a draft of her most recent article. (She removed the material and later admitted to a mutual friend that the decision may have saved her job.) While we were together in New York, I pleaded with her to go to her editors and disclose her affair before they found out about it on their own. (She refused.)”
“I was also not the source for the reporter who first broke the news of Ms. Nuzzi's affair,” Lizza writes, referring to Oliver Darcy. “Ms. Nuzzi knows this because the reporter told her this.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and wife Cheryl Hines in 2018.
John SciulliLizza concludes by emphasizing his shock at what has happened since he and Nuzzi broke off their relationship for good on Sept. 15, four days before news broke of her affair with RFK Jr.
“For weeks Ms. Nuzzi has harassed me with a coordinated defamation campaign by peddling these false accusations to the press. No responsible reporter would print Ms. Nuzzi's lies. She then repackaged them in this CPO [Court Protective Order] application and leaked it to the media long before I was ever served.”
“Ms. Nuzzi is wasting this Court's time and is abusing the protections meant for survivors of domestic violence to ruin my reputation in a last-ditch effort to salvage her own.”
Court Grants Nuzzi Extension
A D.C. court granted Nuzzi a month-long extension to her restraining order against Lizza, dragging their legal feud over their breakup past Election Day. In a 15-minute hearing Tuesday afternoon, Judge Sean Staples appeared skeptical, however, of Nuzzi’s position that she could not testify due to a “federal investigation” into her case.
“It’s an ongoing investigation,” Nuzzi’s attorney Erik Walter claimed to the judge on her behalf. “The FBI has explained to her that she can’t testify.”
“I don't know of any legal impediment to that,” Staples said. “She brought this case, so she can pursue it or not.The FBI can’t prevent her or not prevent her from talking.”
Lizza’s attorney Simon Latcovich said the FBI investigation, which the bureau has not confirmed, should not be used as a shield to avoid defending her claims under oath. Lizza was seeking an immediate adjudication from the judge.
“This is a proceeding that she asked this court to undertake,” Latcovich said on Lizza’s behalf. “She [Nuzzi] can't use her own FBI complaint, whatever that may be, to delay the proceedings that she asked this court to undertake.”
Nuzzi rolled her eyes as Latcovich pleaded Lizza’s case, then offered a brief “No, Your Honor,” when he asked if the parties had anything to add.
Additional reporting by Corbin Bolies.
