Did the RFK Jr affair cost Olivia Nuzzi her job? Inside Vanity Fair’s Breakup

Vanity Fair and West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi have “mutually agreed” to part ways after her contract with the Condé Nast-owned magazine expired. The decision came after controversy over Nuzzi’s alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other past behavior.In a joint statement Friday, Vanity Fair and West Coast editor-in-chief Olivia Nuzzi said they “mutually agreed, in the best interests of the magazine, to let his contract expire at the end of the year.” Nuzzi joined the magazine in September as West Coast editor, the AP news agency reported.The move followed controversy over Nuzzi’s personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was a Washington correspondent for New York magazine. The relationship emerged in the fall of 2024, when it was revealed that Kennedy, then a presidential candidate and now head of the Department of Health and Human Services, had been intimately involved with Nuzzi.New York magazine fired Nuzzi for failing to disclose his relationship. She later reflected on the affair and its aftermath in her memoir American Canto, which referred to Kennedy as “the politician” and her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza as “the man I didn’t marry.” Excerpts appeared in Vanity Fair but competed for attention with a series of Substack posts from Lizza containing embarrassing allegations.The feud between Nuzzi and Lizza gripped media insiders after he alleged that she had an affair with another high-profile subject and that she gave political advice to Kennedy — both considered off-limits to journalists. Lizza also published salacious and newsworthy text messages from Kennedy to Nuzzi that he had intercepted.Following this revelation, the magazine placed Nuzzi on leave, and then they separated. But Nuzzi had recently returned to a newsroom after Mark Guiducci, recently named Vanity Fair’s global editorial director, named her West Coast editor in September.In a Substack interview with Emily Sundberg, Nuzzi denounced her ex-fiance’s posts as “fiction-slash-revenge porn.”Friday’s announcement comes just days after the publication of American Canto, which critics disdained and readers largely ignored. The book was ranked just 6,094 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list as of Friday afternoon.During the eventful week, Nuzzi published a humorous column on Substack titled “Signs Your Book Launch Has Gone Wrong,” including the entry “Monica Lewinsky Reaches Out to Check on Your Sanity.”