Ryan Lizza on Olivia Nuzzi, RFK Jr., and the Substack-ification of a scandal

Max Tani:
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semafor, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I’m Max Tani. I’m the media editor here at Semafor, and with me as always is Semafor’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith. Ben. This week on the show, we have a very interesting guest, a guest who I think a lot of listeners of the show were probably reading over the holiday season. That’s Ryan Lizza. He is the founder and publisher of Telos, which is a Substack about Washington, and politics, and more recently about Ryan’s own personal life, his relationship with his former fiance, Olivia Nuzzi, and her romantic relationship with then presidential candidate R.F.K., Jr. Ben, for those who haven’t been keeping up with every element and step of this whole saga, can you just explain Lizza and his position in the Washington, New York political media environment?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, Ryan is a journalist of exactly my generation and was a real star political reporter who came up in a collapsing magazine world. Had an incredibly successful career, was a defining writer for the New Republic during its last major run and then at the New Yorker. Spent time at CNN and at Politico. He was also engaged to a magazine writer named Olivia Nuzzi, who it emerged last September, had had a romantic relationship while they were engaged to the presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. She told her version of that at times, attacking Ryan. Kennedy has largely declined to comment. But when Olivia’s book came out, Ryan responded with a eight-part 25,000 word Substack series, giving a totally alternate view in which she was not just kind of a reporter who’d fallen in love with a source, but was somebody committing huge journalistic sins and really acting on behalf of a political campaign.

Max Tani:
And that’s really what we’re going to get into today. We’re going to ask Ryan about this saga. We’re going to push him a little bit on why he decided to do this, when he decided to do it, some of the kind of details. For some listeners, I guess the disclosure that we should make is that to really know all the ins and outs of this scandal, you have to be maybe a little bit sick, I think. You have to be people like us and have a voracious appetite for media, gossip and scandal. So, there are going to be a lot of details here that I think would be helped if you’ve read the series or at least have been following it on Twitter, like so many people have. I guess it should also be noted that I worked with Ryan. We briefly crossed over when he was at Politico and I was also at Politico. And Ben, of course, you’ve known him and we’ve all known Olivia as well personally and professionally for a long time. We know a lot of the players mentioned in this story.

Ben Smith:
I think we’re fully disclaimed.

Max Tani:
All right. Let’s jump into it. We are going to get to our interview with Ryan Lizza right after the break. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s start with the basics here. So, your Substack series, which pretty much I think everybody who’s listening to this podcast probably is familiar with to a certain degree, one degree or another. When did you decide to do this? When did you decide that you were going to kind of lay out this whole saga in this manner?

Ryan Lizza:
I think if I had to pinpoint it to a moment, it was the moment I got off the phone with Jacob Bernstein at The New York Times, who wrote this pretty puffy piece about Olivia’s comeback, and the book and the Vanity Fair excerpt. And I had a long conversation with Jacob and trying to explain to him a lot of what I eventually wrote in the series. He had read the book, I hadn’t. And I asked him a lot of questions about Olivia’s book. And I said, “Well, does she talk about how this happened previously?” Sorry, I’ve got a little puppy here that’s running around. Did she talk about how this happened previously in 2020 and how it blew up our book project? No. I asked him a series of questions based on pretty controversial stuff that I knew and asked him whether that stuff was in the book.
And I told him the book was a work of fiction because the real story is not told. And if you publish this, you’re going to be humiliated. People are going to mock this piece. And this was the night before they were going to press. I talked to him for like two hours. And I said, Jacob, you’ve got to go take what I told you to your editors. And I know people, a lot of people in The New York Times Bureau who I’ve told a lot of this stuff to, and don’t think you should be resurrecting the career of a modern day Stephen Glass or Jason Blair. And go talk to your editors and give them a download on what I’ve explained to you. And he did do that. They came back to me with they didn’t have time to pull the piece.
It had video associated with it. There were PR people involved with it on Olivia’s end and they ran the piece. And we’ll get into this. And this was just one of three or four, maybe five attempts to get this story out in the last year. And I realized that the only way to do it, to the extent that it was important to do, was I had to finally tell it myself. Once I saw that piece, once I saw the excerpt, once I learned about the book, I realized, oh, my God. Not only did she blow me up with these insane accusations and abuse, a domestic violence court in Washington at the behest of a top Trump cabinet official, although he wasn’t official just yet. But now she’s written a book with information about me that is false, because one of the things that happened in that conversation with Jacob is he wanted to get my response to something she had published in the book.
I explained to Jacob why that accusation was false. He was satisfied with what I explained to him and he removed it. I said, “Jacob, this is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ve removed this because I’ve convinced you it’s false. The rest of the book is false too. But more importantly, there are just sins of omission that you’re going to be very embarrassed by when this all comes out if you do some big, puffy profile.” So, I think that was the spark.

Ben Smith:
And Ryan, you’re not the first person in the world to have been attacked in public, smeared, and have a big narrative told that they really disliked and had factual evidence to object to. And I think the playbook for that is often, “I’m going to put out a statement debunking the details. I’m going to respond directly and no further questions.” And I think the thing that very effectively that you did was instead to take reformidable skills as a magazine writer and storyteller. And in some sense, fight fire with fire at this very intense way. And was that an obvious thing for you to do? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody do that before.

Ryan Lizza:
I originally was going to write about this when I was at Politico, and there were two moments when I was thinking about doing it. One was before the court drama between me and Olivia, and then after the court drama. One of the reasons we ended up in court is because it got back to her and Bobby that I was planning on writing about this. And so, I was doing two things at that moment. I was helping The Wall Street Journal with a piece that would have, in my view, corrected the record on some of the stuff that was floating out there. And then I decided that I’m going to write this myself. They hadn’t signed off on it at Politico, but there was an editor at the magazine who liked it. And I started to make some phone calls and do some reporting. Anyway, the restraining order drama blew that all up.
I just had to go totally silent through that whole thing. I mean, once lawyers got involved and everything, and also I was on leave from Politico. So, I’m pointing this out because one of the very legitimate questions has been like, why didn’t I talk about this previously? And so, there were a few opportunities for me to do it. One was at Politico before the court drama, that all got blown up. During the court drama, I had recused myself and I was on leave, so I couldn’t do anything. And then I went back, and this gets a little complicated. And for complicated reasons with what happened between me and Politico when I came back, I just came to the conclusion that Politico did not want to deal with this, did not want to run this story. They were transitioning into basically sucking up to the Trump administration, and they didn’t want this messy story about this crazy situation.
To me, that was a huge mistake. They missed one of the great scoops of the moment, and they missed out on getting this story told before his confirmation hearings. And that’s on Politico. They made it very clear to me that they didn’t want that story.

Ben Smith:
Can you be a little more explicit? Who made it clear to you and how?

Ryan Lizza:
I think that folks at the magazine were interested, but John Harris just was not interested.

Max Tani:
Just for our listeners and viewers, that’s the editor-in-chief of Politico. Sorry to interrupt, Ryan. Go ahead.

Ryan Lizza:
No, look, I sent John a memo and I said, “John, this is your first test of the Trump administration of whether you were going to stand by a reporter who has been blown up by a Trump official.” At first, he did not understand what had happened, and we can’t blame him for that. He didn’t understand that Kennedy and Olivia essentially conspired to use this court to shut down my reporting before the election and make it impossible for me to disclose anything that had happened. I explained that to him. He kind of got a little bit of religion about that, took it under advisement, but then it just got very kind of... There’s a lot of friction between me and him, because I was pushing him very hard.
I said, “John, if you do anything that looks like you’re demoting me or changing my title, you’re going to be caving to the Trump administration. That’s the signal you’re going to be sending.” And that caused a big fight between the two of us. And it eventually just led to me deciding to leave and not write the piece for them. And I think that was a huge mistake. I think he failed that test and I told him as much. And then I left in April and started on Substack. And to be honest, I was actually planning on writing about this, guys. And then Kennedy was confirmed. I frankly never thought it would really matter one way or the other, telling this story. I know there’s a lot of after the fact thinking that it could’ve affected the election or could’ve affected his confirmation hearings. Maybe that’s true, but the world we live in was Senator Cassidy or any other guys on the relevant committee really going to care about this.
And then just other issues became so much more important that I decided, all right, I’m not going to get into this. It’s too ugly. Olivia sent me a signal through a mutual friend that she was never going to talk about this again. During the court drama, she actually tried to negotiate a non-disclosure agreement on the whole thing. And I just decided for now I’m not going to do it. I talked to Simon & Schuster a little bit about potentially including it in a book. But then when I found out that Simon & Schuster was going to publish Olivia’s book, I decided that was not a relationship I wanted to engage in anymore. People always ask, “Why didn’t I get this out? Why didn’t I get this out?” I tried to write it for Politico. That didn’t work out for reasons I explained.
I went to the publisher of Avid Reader Press, sat down for a two-hour lunch at the Harvard Club and explained just about everything that I ended up writing in the bamboo series. And I thought, okay, these guys now know that they’ve got a Stephen Glass, Jason Blair person in their midst. They should go do some due diligence. And then that never happened. So, Simon & Schuster knew just about everything that I’ve published. I laid out that entire story for them. The New York Times knew the night before they published that story, I told them everything. Politico knew. They never pursued the story and Vanity Fair should’ve known. I told Shawn McCreesh everything. Shawn McCreesh is the boyfriend of the editor of Vanity Fair.
And instead of warning him like, “Hey, this person’s ex fiance says that she was doing catch and kill operations for Kennedy,” Shawn recommended her for the job. By the time The New York Times thing happened, I’m like, fuck, I’ve got to do this myself if to the extent that I care about the real story coming out. And so, yeah, that’s what happened.

Ben Smith:
You were saying that a lot of people were asking you, why didn’t you tell this story earlier? I mean, I think other people, and to some degree, this is my personal impulse and we’ve known each other a long time, are asking, why did you do this at all? And when I read your stuff on this saga, you and Olivia obviously have this horrible breakup and I feel bad for her. You describe her at one point in there as being in a mental health crisis. And then you write this thing, not as a kind of, “I feel compelled to do this, to make these disclosures to defend my reputation,” but as a stylish, gleefuls eight-part magazine piece.

Ryan Lizza:
I wouldn’t say it as gleeful.

Ben Smith:
You were on installment eight, you’re clearly having fun writing it just in the reading, you can tell. And part of me is a little appalled by that.

Ryan Lizza:
I wouldn’t call it gleeful. If you read the first piece where I lay out why I did this, the choice, Ben, was between letting a book that attacked me with false and defamatory claims go unresponded to, as the author presumably does a media tour. And additionally, leave the accusations of a year ago in court, in US Superior Court in Washington, D.C., leave those unaddressed. I never responded to them. I did what you said earlier. I put out a statement and moved on. I moved on. So, Ben, I don’t know if you’ve ever been accused of blackmail. I don’t know if you’ve ever falsely been accused of threatening violence against your fiance or a number of other criminal accusations that she at the behest of our current HHS secretary made in a court in D.C. and then abandoned all the claims without ever putting forward a single shred of evidence.
Then wrote a 300-page book about the entire drama and never again alleged any of those things, because she knew that she could get away with filing that in a court where you can’t sue someone for defamation, but she couldn’t do it in a book. So, she said a lot of things that I let go. And I thought we were going to move on, and live our lives, and then she wrote a book. So, at that point, I have this decision. One, just be silent, let it go, move on, do what I’m doing, or respond to in full, finally, to a series of extremely serious accusations, that if you Google my name, will live with me for the rest of my life.
So, I don’t know if you’ve ever been accused of those things. But when you’re accused of something like that, you tend to think you should correct the record, especially when the accuser comes back with a new life and a new set of accusations. And so, it’s not a great choice. I knew this was going to not be fun to go through this.

Ben Smith:
I know, I hear that. But you wrote in that first thing. And again, I actually thought this was extraordinary writing and I read it. I read the hell out of it.

Ryan Lizza:
You liked the bamboo?

Ben Smith:
You write this thing about loving your fate. What did you mean?

Ryan Lizza:
It’s amor fati. It’s a stoic expression about no matter what happens to you, embrace it because you only have one life and you shouldn’t sit around being regretful or remorseful. And when something happens to you, it now is a part of your life, whether you like it or not. And you have to find a way to embrace it. That doesn’t mean you necessarily love it or want more of it, but you do have to grapple with it and lean into it even if it’s hard. And so, it’s not a great decision, but I don’t think I would’ve been able to face my children if I had lived without ever rebutting some really serious stuff. Now, your question is about style, and the series and how it was done. There was a lot to say, and I didn’t prepare any of this. I just started writing.
So, I just started writing. First one with the surprise ending, I just dashed that out. It was nothing prepared. I thought, “Oh, this will catch people’s attention.” And then you’re off to the races and you’ve got to finish the fucking story, which by the way, is still not finished. So, it became a bit of an anchor at a certain point, but there was a lot to say. Maybe I could’ve said it in half as many words, but I had something that I had to get off my chest.

Max Tani:
Ryan, just to go back to the timeline a second, then we’ll move forward. It seems like something happened in terms of your views on how you wanted to approach this between when the story came out, initially when Oliver Darcy at Status broke some of this news and this court filing, by which time you were obviously vigorously defending yourself and pushing back on Olivia’s claims. But during some of this interim period, you were exploring, thinking about writing about this for Politico or something like that. Was there a moment in between that we don’t know about where your perspective on it shifted? Because I mean, the sense that at least I got initially is that this was something that you had wanted to go away.

Ryan Lizza:
I would say from the moment this thing exploded, September 19th, when Oliver’s piece came out, and maybe even before that, I have wrestled with on the one hand, what do I need to tell the world about what I know? And on the other hand, I just want this all to fucking go away and move on with my life. I don’t think there’s been a day where I wasn’t... up until sitting here right now. And just to go back to Ben’s question, I’ll probably always think, was this the smartest thing to do? But I talked to my lawyers about this when I was wrestling with this, and lawyers tend to be very conservative. They were never in favor of doing much public. But one of them at one point said, “You can’t unknow what you know.” And specifically about Kennedy. Olivia spent hours and hours on the phone with this guy, and thousands and thousands of texts back and forth. And only a small percentage of that was the romantic part of the relationship.
And she spent weeks after I found out telling me everything and showing me everything. And I just learned a lot about one of the most important officials in America. And I tried to get some of that information out before the election via The Wall Street Journal and via Politico, and that blew up because of what Olivia and Bobby did. And ever since learning stuff, I’ve thought, what responsibility do I have to tell people about this and how should I do it? So, depending on what day of the week we were talking, Max, back in the fall of 2024, I may have been telling you, “There’s no fucking way I’m ever going to write about this. It’s crazy. It’s too embarrassing. It’s too difficult.” Or the opposite, because I’ve wrestled with it. I’ve wrestled with it for over a year.
But the Vanity Fair excerpt, the ridiculous New York Times profile and the book just made it impossible to stay silent anymore, because everyone was calling me anyway. I was going to be called and harassed by you and the whole universe of media reporters. And what was I going to do? Get in a tit-for-tat every day about this part of the book or that part of the book? No. I’m a writer. I have a platform and I knew that people would pay attention to the story. And then there’s a whole separate part of this whereas if I just take myself out of it, it is one of the craziest stories I have ever seen in all my years covering Washington. And through weird set of circumstances, I just happened to be in the middle of it. And I was the only other person besides Olivia and Bobby who knew just about everything. And so, I’m just amor fati.

Max Tani:
This has been obviously a really big moment, obviously, for your Substack. Can you talk to us, how many subscribers do you have? I know I’ve asked, and I’m sure many people have asked how much money you’re making from this thing, but how many subscribers? How much is this bringing in?

Ryan Lizza:
On the money part, not enough. Olivia left me with a $127,000 legal bill that is still unpaid. And there’s nothing that can compensate me for the damage that her recklessness did.

Ben Smith:
You’re under the legal fees on the Substack subscriptions so far?

Ryan Lizza:
Look, the original piece got a lot of attention and a flood of subscriptions. Most of it I didn’t actually pay well. The whole thing was about 25,000 words. And I was just looking at this morning, because I knew you guys would ask about this, but 60% of the series was not actually paywalled, for better or worse. So, there was a flood of subscribers. A lot of those people are not people that are going to stick around. A lot of them will. I think we did better than her book, but that’s a very low bar. Once you’re in the Substack world, and once you are in the independent journalism world, it is kind of funny to see how the mainstream media thinks of that world still.
A lot of people would call it like in a blog post. And there’s just this very antiquated sense of the media where people don’t understand, the media doesn’t just mean a few institutions anymore. I mean, this is a lesson most of us learned 30 years ago. But there is still that sense that somehow writing something in a book or a magazine is different than doing it on Substack or a podcast. And that is not the world that we live in anymore.

Max Tani:
Well, we have a lot more questions that we want to get to with Ryan, but we have to take a short break and we’ll be right back after this.

Ben Smith:
Do you think that if you weren’t on Substack, if there wasn’t Substack, you would’ve written what you wrote about Olivia?

Ryan Lizza:
I don’t know. I mean, I guess we’re just not... Is it really a question though? Because there would’ve been something, right? I mean, we’re in a world where-

Ben Smith:
You could’ve had a blog.

Ryan Lizza:
You could’ve had a blog. I mean, there are thousands of paid subscribers that I had who know my Substack largely from things like I published these two pieces by Judge Michael Luttig. A lot of people who came to me last year were big Luttig fans and loved those pieces. Other people or people who have been following my political coverage for a long time. And some of them sent me notes like, “What is this? What are you doing? I want you to go back to talking about the Supreme Court with Michael Luttig and doing Substack lives with people who are talking about the Trump administration.” So, there’s a risk in making this the thing that that Substack is known for. And it’s going to be tricky to turn the corner away from this and move on to the kind of journalism that I want to get back to.

Max Tani:
That’s one of the things that we wanted to ask you about though, Ryan. Clearly, you’ve thought about having to make the pivot back to doing what you were doing before, which is more of a Washington reporting that doesn’t involve you as a character in the story. And I guess as a part of that question, when do you see this series ending?

Ryan Lizza:
It should’ve ended last week, but I’ve had a lot of trouble writing this last piece. And I was frankly trying to get it done before we had this conversation today so we could talk about it. Some of the stuff I’ve talked about with you guys will be at that piece. But I really want to try hard and I don’t think I’ve successfully done it in this conversation, but I want to end this on not talking about the salacious stuff. I tried to be clear in one of the early pieces that this was not a sex scandal, this was a journalism scandal. And there were really important things I needed to say about my ex. And she suffered enough and I have nothing left to say about that part of the story. But unfortunately, and this was by design, when she blew me up in 2024, it turned this thing into a scandal about me and her.
And the person who has just been floating above it all is this very influential, important cabinet secretary who has done some things that I think deserve more scrutiny. And I’d like to, with this last piece, bring it back to him and why some of the things that I’ve learned in the course of this bizarre story, what they reveal about his recklessness. I mean, this is someone who is bringing back polio, and measles, and whooping cough, is making a series of decisions at HHS that are killing people. And he very effectively used Olivia to escape scrutiny in this whole sorted drama.
And I admit that I’ve played a little bit of a role in that, because some of the things I had to say contributed to this being this cat fight between me and Olivia. And I do want to take it back to a focus on him and a focus on how the media failed in this story. And in some ways it’s the most important piece to get right, so that’s why some of these things have been on my mind in our conversation today.

Max Tani:
Ryan, have you talked to him or anybody in his team at all? Have you engaged them at all? Do you reach out to them for comment or anything like that?

Ryan Lizza:
I haven’t. It would be a waste of time. It’s a good question, but no. And every reporter that has tried to get anything from HHS, they just shut down. I mean, we’re living in a world where you pay no price for that anymore, so I have not reached out to him. The last communication I had with him was when he called me. I didn’t answer the phone. And he texted me, “Apologies, butt dial.” He did some things that I think are important to get some more mainstream media attention on.

Ben Smith:
What in particular, what do you think? Because I think you’re right. It’s been covered as kind of a salacious tabloid story. What here isn’t that?

Ryan Lizza:
Olivia’s book did reveal something really important, something I knew, but that she put some important details on. She had a conversation with him as a piece by Isabella Simonetti, who was working with me as an anonymous source to get some of this information out in the run-up to the election.

Ben Smith:
Wall Street Journal Reporter?

Ryan Lizza:
Wall Street Journal Reporter. He freaked out about that. And he freaked out about the fact that I was calling around telling people that I was going to write about this for Politico. And he had a conversation with Olivia and said, according to her book, he just needed to get past the election. And he had two concerns. One was about his wife. If she knew how serious the relationship was with Olivia, that it wasn’t just sexual, but it was emotional, that she might leave him, and he didn’t want that to happen. And the second thing was about his relationship with Donald Trump. It was precarious at that point. Trump wasn’t sure about this MAHA bullshit. He wasn’t sure about Kennedy. Kennedy had a terrible reputation.
And I believe this, and Olivia writes in her book, and I think this is something that’s for the most part true. He communicated that to her, told her that she had to take a bullet for him. And the bullet was actually not at Olivia, it was at me. And he ordered her to file a false restraining order against me in D.C. Superior Court.

Ben Smith:
And that’s your interpretation, yeah?

Ryan Lizza:
That is not my interpretation. That is based on two sources who had contemporaneous conversations with Olivia after she got off the phone with him. That’s in the series. It’s not an interpretation. And we were prepared to present this in court back on October 15th. And then in November when the date got changed of 2024, and of course, she was never going to subject herself to that kind of questioning and she threw out the case. That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. Kennedy used Olivia to kill reporting in the run-up to the election, to save his marriage and more importantly, to save his relationship with Trump. Within days of being elected, Olivia then withdrew the restraining order application. To me, that’s a big deal.
Now, maybe he’ll come out and say, “That’s bullshit. Olivia lied. I didn’t tell her to do that.” Whatever his part of the story is, it’s important to hear it. Because to your point, Ben, my information is based on two people close to Olivia who talked to her after that conversation happened. So, I wasn’t on the call. But that’s a big important story in my mind. And I’ve been shocked that the media hasn’t pursued it aggressively. Now, maybe they just can’t get anything out of him. Maybe Olivia, to a large extent, she’s still protecting him. Maybe she’s tried to shut it down, said it’s not true, although I haven’t seen her say that publicly. So, that to me is a big deal. The fact that he told Olivia that he was using psychedelics and using ketamine. He’s a former addict. That’s a big deal. He runs the FDA. There are important policy decisions he has to make on psychedelics and ketamine.
According to Olivia, he was using both of them as recently as 2024. He engaged in an insanely reckless pattern of behavior with her. And this is one of those things, frankly, I’ve wrestled with how much to disclose, because this stuff is extremely salacious. And I got a lot of shit for releasing that poem. But this guy who was running for president was on this high-wire and was engaging in this insanely reckless relationship, sending information that could have damaged him, damaged the campaign, damaged Trump, could’ve been used for blackmail if had gotten in the hands of a foreign security service. None of this came out in the confirmation hearings. To me, that’s all big, important stuff about him.

Max Tani:
Yeah. To do the thing that you’ve criticized about the media, I want to turn this back to you. I’m curious, what have people in your life thought about you putting this out there? I became aware of this because somebody who I think we mutually talked to was like, “Have you seen in Washington, have you seen this?” I’m curious what people in your life, both professionally and personally have thought about this.

Ryan Lizza:
It’s been polarizing. I mean, I think one thing that I didn’t consider enough was how it was going to affect some people that I’m personally close to. I mean, just to be perfectly candid, it’s been extremely difficult for my partner. Nobody wants their partner to be spending all this much time writing about a previous relationship. Some very close friends told me not to do it. One of my best friends who’s a journalist who you guys know and whose opinion I take very seriously was just like, “Do not do this. It won’t end well and you’ll always be known for this story.” And my view was it was too late. I was already going to be known for this in some way. But there are other friends and other family members who were, I guess I would call them the hawks, who were like, “You absolutely have to do this.”
People, frankly, who were disgusted and appalled by what Olivia did, knew the whole story and for over a year have been telling me, “You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this. You need to tell your side. You haven’t told your side.” A friend of mine called. I was talking to him the other day about some Substack stuff and she was just like, “First, I got to talk to you about this series. I don’t think you should’ve done it. I just need to get this out in the open. I don’t like the way you did it.” And then after I started talking to her, I realized she hadn’t really read the whole thing. And in fairness, it’s 25,000 words. Can’t expect everyone to read the whole thing. And as you guys know, people base their opinions on things through fragments, and what they see on social media and clips.

Max Tani:
Ben has definitely read the whole thing.

Ben Smith:
I read it. I paid my $79 to tell this.

Ryan Lizza:
So, anyway, it’s been what you think it would be. It’s been polarized. I think the people who mattered the most to me for the most part believed what I believed, is that it was not a great choice either way, but that I had to tell some version of this story. And first of all, correct the record on my own behalf, but also let the media know that there were these journalistic crimes that were committed, that were never uncovered, because New York Magazine, at the end of the day, didn’t want to get to the bottom of it. I hate to criticize them, because they were victimized in this whole thing. But I sent them a long memo and said, “These are the questions you need to ask in this investigation.”
So, after I learned there was going to be an investigation, I privately sent a very detailed memo and said, “You need to ask, has this ever happened before? Were any journalistic lines crossed? Were catch and kill operations done on behalf of Kennedy? Did she write strategy memos to him? Did she become a political operative for him?” I laid it all out in a series of questions. And frankly, there was no evidence that they ever pursued any of that. I know I’m blasting a lot of media organizations today.

Max Tani:
That is true.

Ben Smith:
I have to reach out to a bunch of people for comment after this, Ryan. I’m keeping a little mental log.

Ryan Lizza:
Not to now turn my wrath on you guys, but you guys wrote a really stupid piece defending her.

Ben Smith:
That was me. Don’t blame Max.

Max Tani:
That was something that, actually, we were discussing beforehand.

Ben Smith:
The piece was September 23rd actually.

Ryan Lizza:
You didn’t though. You didn’t know. In fact, you didn’t know.

Ben Smith:
Just looking at The New York Post coverage of that piece. I’m curious your reaction to it beyond just it being stupid, which I think my piece was like, look, journalists are human beings. They make mistakes.

Ryan Lizza:
That’s true.

Ben Smith:
They have complicated personal lives.

Ryan Lizza:
That’s fair.

Ben Smith:
And out of control magazine writers have always been a feature of the American landscape. There are worse things than sex, et cetera, et cetera. I’m curious, you thought that was idiotic at the time, obviously.

Ryan Lizza:
I did, but in fairness to you, Ben, only because I knew the real story wasn’t about sex. It was about her running around. And I’m trying hard to put this part of the story in the past because I genuinely think she suffered enough and I’ve had my say. But she was running around collecting opposition research from Liz Smith at the DNC, and from Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden’s lawyer, who were the source for the bear story. And for these old friends of Bobby and women who she learned about through Jessica Reed Kraus, she was collecting all this stuff, affirmatively going out and getting it. It’s not just that it was coming to her. And giving it to him, both because she wanted to and also he manipulated her in these very complicated ways. And so, she was constantly trying to get back in with him when he would cut her off.
It was a very sad dynamic they had, another reason that there should be more of a focus on him. And we just can’t do that as journalists. You can’t cross those lines. There’s a young campaign aide who came to her with a detailed account of the wild and crazy selection process of Bobby’s VP candidate, and she sent it to Bobby. She outed him, all right?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. That’s a lot worse.

Ryan Lizza:
So, I knew all this stuff and I knew that this was not like, oh, she had a little... she exchanged some flirtatious texts with someone she wrote a profile of. If that were all that happened, I would probably agree with your assessment back in September, but I knew it was so much worse than that.

Max Tani:
So, Ryan, I wanted to wrap this up, but I realize I have a follow-up question that I kind of want to ask you here, because you knew about the Mark Sanford situation which you wrote about in your first entry, in which you say that Olivia slept with Mark Sanford, which is somebody else that she profiled. It seems like you’re implying there that this is a part of a pattern of behavior. How did that factor into how you saw the R.F.K. situation?

Ryan Lizza:
Well, there was a personal component to it, in that I just thought I’m the stupidest person in the world, obviously. I cannot believe this happened twice. I mean, imagine my surprise that almost four years to the day later, the same fucking thing happens. It’s a second presidential campaign. We’ve got another book contract, because the Avid Reader guys were so just patient with us and she did the same exact thing. So, on the one hand, it’s like, well, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. There was a certain amount of that. And I think I’ve been appropriately criticized by a lot of people for giving her a second chance, for trying to repair our relationship, for trying to dig ourselves out of that insane drama.
But I genuinely thought that there were some sort of weird circumstances that led to that thing with Sanford, and we did a lot of work to move past it. I was wrong. I was obviously very wrong. And by that point, I woke up and just realized I didn’t really know this person. This person lived a double life for a year. So, when I would tell this story to people, I would always say it was like waking up and learning that your partner is a heroin addict or has joined a cult. The degree to which I realized I had been completely conned, and fooled, and this person was living a second life was just off the charts. And literally, from that point on, August 17th, 2024, when I confronted her, I viewed this story in a much more detached way, almost anthropologically and as a reporter because I was just so...
Once I got over the shock, I was just so fascinated by it, because it is genuinely a crazy story. And this goes back to what you asked before, Ben. I think that’s what allowed me to write it, I don’t know, in a literary nonfiction way, because it’s a crazy story. It is a genuinely crazy story and why not treat it with a certain sense of humor, because there are some genuinely funny parts to the whole thing and in a hopefully self-deprecating way? And so, that’s how I looked at it.

Ben Smith:
Just to pull it back. You spent your career writing about all this stuff and did find yourself a character in the Daily Mail, getting stalked by paparazzi. And in this funny orthogonal relationship to the media’s attempts to adjust to Donald Trump, and to Donald Trump’s return and his pressure on the media. And I guess to end this conversation at a higher altitude, what do you feel like you’ve learned about the American media through this?

Ryan Lizza:
Oh, we need another hour, guys.

Ben Smith:
That’s what I was afraid of.

Ryan Lizza:
I mean, one obvious lesson, Olivia wrote a book and I wrote a series on Substack. And what mattered in those two mediums was which account was true and which account seemed more real. And I think that was an interesting experience to be in the middle of that, to see Simon & Schuster, this huge conglomerate make this big bet on this book. And spend all that money cutting down trees, and distributing it, and hiring Risa Heller to do PR, and convincing The New York Times to do this puffy piece, and convincing the new editor of Vanity Fair that this was going to be his big splashy debut.
And then just coming along with... I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but just coming along with the truth and was able to cut through all of that bullshit. And there was a asymmetric warfare going on, frankly, between this rinky-dink Substack and this massive consortium of media companies pushing Olivia’s account in front of everyone and the truth in my view went out. That’s an important media lesson with our fragmented landscape and declining trust in media. You can still find an audience if you tell the truth.

Max Tani:
Well, Ryan, that feels like a really good place for us to leave it. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a really interesting conversation. I think we might have to do some reaching out for comment now. I don’t know. Ben and I will discuss. We’ll figure it out. But Ryan, thanks for coming on the show. We appreciate it.

Ryan Lizza:
Thanks, guys. This was a good conversation. First time I’ve done anything like this, so I’m glad-

Max Tani:
I know. Thank you. Yes. That’s a mandatory part of our booking.

Ryan Lizza:
Some people who are going to be mad, but I’m glad I did it with you guys. Thanks for letting me say this.

Manny Fidel:
Hey, everyone. I’m Manny, a producer here at Semafor with a quick note about today’s episode. Max and Ben reached out to everyone Ryan Lizza referred to in this interview and received the following responses. First, Olivia Nuzzi declined to respond to Lizza and hasn’t publicly engaged with his allegations. When she withdrew her request for a protective order last November, her lawyer said, “Ms. Nuzzi has no interest in fighting a public relations battle.” Secondly, in response to Lizza’s comments about Jacob Bernstein’s story in The New York Times, a spokesperson for the paper told us, “The Times publishes information that we are able to confirm through reporting. We require multiple sources to verify facts and we don’t publish innuendo. Our article on Ms. Nuzzi included the details we could confirm and it’s untrue to imply otherwise.”
Thirdly, in a statement, Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris said, “Ryan Lizza never shared with me details of the complicated interactions and drama involving himself, Olivia Nuzzi, Robert Kennedy, Jr., And other political figures that he ultimately described in his Substack column. No one at Politico turned down a piece from him on this subjects, because one was never presented to us.” There is not, “A lot of friction between Ryan and me. I wished him well when he left and still do.” And finally, New York Magazine declined to comment. We’ll be back with the Mixed Signals debrief right after this break.

Max Tani:
Ben, there’s a million ways that we could take this a million directions. This was a pretty crazy and wide-ranging interview, I feel like with Ryan, but I want to get at the claim that I suspect maybe you’re the most dubious of. Did you buy his argument that this is really not a story that’s a sex scandal and that really it’s a scandal about R.F.K., Jr., and the kind of things that he was trying to do to achieve and maintain power, and that ultimately people are getting distracted by the other stuff? I don’t know. What did you think about Ryan casting it that way, I guess, is how I should frame it.

Ben Smith:
I mean, honestly, I found myself a little more persuaded than I expected to be. I genuinely did, having read his stuff, come in thinking a little unpersuaded that this was a real moral imperative to do this. And I do think still, it’s not history’s greatest set of crimes. But I agree, as he alleged, she was narcing on sources essentially to a politician. That’s disturbing. And Kennedy is just an unbelievably interesting figure who, I think it’s not inconceivable, is going to run for president in three years. And so, I do think fundamentally, if you’re going to make the case that this is an important and interesting story, it’s going to be because it’s a story about him.

Max Tani:
I do wonder what happens if Olivia doesn’t file that police report. I think we’re having a very different conversation now. I think that clearly was the thing that sent Ryan over the edge and set him on the path to do this. I wonder if he would be writing the same capital J journalism crimes story without that. Obviously, that element is intertwined with the story in general. But I do think it’s hard for me to see where the personal feelings and the professional journalism concerns begin. He said at one point in the recording that this was just also just a crazy story, one of the crazy stories, and it just happened to be happening to me, which I can see myself having a similar type of reaction I feel like if I’d found myself in this position. I don’t know. What do you think about that assessment, Ben?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I think the reality so often of journalism and of politics is like, you can’t really cleanly disentangle these things. There’s no way to. These are human beings. There’s not some sort of like, “Here are journalism ethics and here are how human beings behave and we’re going to totally separate them.” I have some sympathy for him. I mean, I realize he thought that John Harris was preemptively caving to the Trump administration by not running this story. But I also do think, like you can imagine from an editor’s point of view, this is just inseparably mixed up with this complex personal relationship that has blown up in the most nuclear possible fashion. And maybe I’ll keep my news brand apart from that.

Max Tani:
Ben, would you have run the story if he came to you and said, “Hey, I’ve got this?”

Ben Smith:
It would’ve depended what publication I was editing and in some sense what that place’s brand, and identity, and mission were. I think Buzzfeed, we definitely would’ve published it.

Max Tani:
Buzzfeed runs the story, maybe a longer conversation [inaudible 00:48:48].

Ben Smith:
Maybe you’re going to have to put this one in your Substack at Semafor. What did you think? I mean, in a way, I thought the place that he concluded was really interesting, which is like he saw himself as the David up against the Goliath of this publicity machine around the Nuzzi book, Vanity Fair, Simon & Schuster, these giant 20th century institutions. And that he basically with his little speedboat torpedoed them and destroyed her book bubble, her book launch and won. And that it’s in some sense a story of new media beating old media.

Max Tani:
Actually, I feel like he took it actually in a slightly different direction than that. I thought that’s where he was going to, but he was making a broader point about the capital T truth and the truth went out. I’m sure that there’s more to the story that we don’t know, despite the fact that, obviously I think that much of what he was saying was that we haven’t heard any meaningful pushback on. I do think that he did show that if you have a set of facts that are not known by other people and you are smart about the ways in which you kind of put them out, kind of dribbling them out, writing it in a serialized manner that, yeah, you can beat the big, slow moving, older legacy institutions. Though, obviously, I also think that it’s slightly more complicated than it was presented there. I don’t know, Ben, what did you think about that?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, I guess another thing that I think about and worry about is the kind of journalism we do and that the world is moving toward is so rooted in individuals, and in putting your confidence in an individual journalist, and understanding where they’re coming from. But of course, we’re all flawed. And what happens when that individual’s life really deeply gets in the way of their journalism one way or the other. And there’s going to be true for Ryan as well as for Olivia, right? How do you, as the publisher who has tried to stake out this new modern relationship between the brand, and the individual voice, and creators and talent, sure gets messy. Didn’t have to worry about that back in the days when everybody was a faceless cog.

Max Tani:
That’s true. No. The cogs are more visible than ever.

Ben Smith:
And a cog used to be able just to go out and do depraved things and nobody cared.

Max Tani:
That’s true. Yeah, exactly.

Ben Smith:
But now stakes are high.

Max Tani:
That is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semafor. Our show is produced by Manny Fidel and Josh Billenson, with special thanks to Anna Bozzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Core, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haft. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Steve Bone. Our public editor is all of the editors listed in this episode who Ryan had various problems with. John Harris, editor in chief of Politico, who am I forgetting?

Ben Smith:
David Haskell.

Max Tani:
David Haskell, of course, of New York Magazine. Oh, and Mark Guiducci of Vanity Fair. Guys, please let us know what you think.

Ben Smith:
And if you like Mixed Signals, follow us wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe on YouTube.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.