Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Everyone Is Wrong About The Olivia Nuzzi RFK Scandal w/ Kat Tenbarge

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz      Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  Recently, journalist Olivia Nuzzi has been at the center of the biggest political media scandal in years. A star journalist for New York Magazine, it was revealed that Nuzzi had secretly had a torrid love affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after profiling him for the magazine.  She came out of hiding this month to announce a new job at Vanity Fair and release her book, American Canto, about the whole experience. But within days of re-emerging she was once again at the center of a full blown firestorm after her ex fiance, political journalist Ryan Lizza, began to release Nuzzi's intimate text messages on his Substack.  Now, she's been fired by Vanity Fair and all of the media has been excoriating her for her blatant violations of journalistic ethics. But what about the men in this story? Journalist Kat Tenbarge joins me to break down Olivia Nuzzi's journey from teenage pop star to top political reporter to her relationship with RFK Jr, the Ryan Lizza saga, what's actually going on, and why we both think MSM news reporters are missing the real story underneath the whole saga. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz             https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0             https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

If you went on Twitter and tried to say any of this and tried to defend her, every reporter in mainstream media would like call for your fucking head to be cut off. Over the past year, a scandal has unfolded across the internet and mainstream media and cable news and pretty much every kind of news media forum that I would say is the biggest political media scandal of our time, like since the Monica Lewinsky days. This is the Olivia Newsie, RFK, Ryan Lizza, controversy. You probably know who RFK is, but if the other two names don't ring a bell. Don't worry. We're going to get into it. Kat Ten Barge is a phenomenal

journalist and a friend of mine who writes Spitfire News, a newsletter covering internet culture and politics. She's joining me today to break down the Olivia Newsie scandal, what's happened, what went down, what it means, what it says about our current media ecosystem today, and why we think basically everyone on the internet is wrong about this controversy. Kat, welcome. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. I've really been waiting to talk about this. I have to do one very quickly disclaimer because people are so insane in the comments. So before you get going, yes, Kat and I have vocal fry.

Kat might have it a little more than me, okay? It's true. But we don't want to hear it. We don't care. Today is about women and women's voices. So you're going to hear them. Well, with that out of the way, let's get into what we want to talk about today. Because I feel like I've been texting you about this.

Like we've been texting about this for weeks, almost even a year since it all started. And finally, I was like, we should just get on the podcast and talk about it because I feel like there's so much to say about this topic, which we're going to talk about today, which is Olivia Newsie, RFK, the drama around kind of everything that happened. That's really hard to sort of say on Twitter. So I guess, like, do you want to start off by explaining to people who don't know? Because I feel like this is a big story in media Twitter world, but I don't know that, like, a lot of normie people know what's going on. Can you explain what is this scandal and give us like the 101? Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're right.

I think that outside of this bubble of people who are either in New York media or really care about it, it's not like the core figures besides RFK have a lot of name value. But for people who are interested in New York media who follow political reporting, who follow like Twitter drama, Olivia Nutsi has been such a pivotal figure for years, like going back a decade. And she's still pretty young. She's still 32 years old. But her career really skyrocketed in, like, her early 20s. She's been the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine for the better part of that

decade, which is a role that was created for her. Yeah. I first heard of Olivia Newsey back in 2013. She was, like, beginning to get traction on Twitter. She was this person who had become known because she was only 20 years old back then. But she entered for Anthony Wiener. New York City mayoral campaign. Obviously, Anthony Weiner himself was like scandal plague.

This whole thing was a disaster. And after the campaign, after her internship, she wrote this tell-all post about her experience where she talked about sort of like the sexist stuff that Anthony Weiner had done, where he had sort of like, I think, degraded her and other female interns. That triggered backlash from the campaign. One of Weiner's top aides, like, launched this like profanity-laced

attacked on her publicly. There was an apology. but she ended up on the front of the New York Post. And it sort of skyrocketed her into fame when it came to like the New York City political media establishment. And this was also right when like Twitter was ascendant and like journalism Twitter was ascended. And I feel like she very quickly just developed this very like

acerbic like voice on Twitter, which was very funny. She would comment on politics. And within a year of appearing on the front of the New York Post, she was hired as a journalist for The Daily Beast. Actually, while she was to, attending college in 2014. And that sort of entered her into political media.

As you mentioned, she ended up kind of rising the ranks super quickly, becoming the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine, writing some of the most sort of like memorable features in the in the 2010s about like Trump and the MAGA movement. I met Olivia, I think I met her actually before 2016, like back in that early era. She was just in New York media. Everybody knows each other. And then we both were on the campaign trail in the 2016 election almost 10 years ago, crazy. Like her star rose very quickly and also she's this like blonde, beautiful, very funny,

very sarcastic kind of person that always had this like fandom kind of on the internet. Totally. And like I first became aware of her when I was in college between like 2015 and 2019 and I became really obsessed with like media Twitter in college and me and all my friends were studying to be journalists. And she was one of those people who we viewed her as someone who had set this example of becoming so successful at such a young age. And like, we really enjoyed reading her pieces. And I think she wasn't like a scoop getter necessarily. She wasn't like covering the breaking news or the ins and outs of the day to day.

She was writing like really personality driven features on these like political characters and she would often use first person. And that was like a really cool style of journalism that a lot of us wanted to emulate. It's ironic because it's like she's sort of when you think of her, you think of a lot of these like famous male feature writers. Like she is very much like a magazine writer, almost from like the 90s, you know? Like she would write these like features that really took you in.

I think she's a phenomenal writer, like her stories when you go back. And obviously she had an editor back then, but like, we're really good. I just say that because it's so many people, and we'll get into this, have been like slandering her writing. And, you know, I was recently going back and read some of her stuff from original sort of Trump 1.0 and like, I'm sorry, it's really good. There's a reason she was where she was. Absolutely. And I think like, and we'll get into this more, but I think it speaks to a lot that like people are taking the writing that she's released most recently and holding this up as like the test of whether or not she's a good writer. I think that she did prove herself to be a writer, especially throughout like her career in her 20s.

So let's break down what happened because a year ago she became famous for a different reason. And that was this scandal involving RFK Jr. Yes. I remember where I will. was. Where were you? I was on my way to a friend's wedding in Indiana, and I was in a car with my best friends from college who we all grew up talking about media figures, including Olivia. And we were all just like captivated by this story as the entire media world was because Oliver Darcy broke for his newsletter status, which is a media newsletter, that basically Olivia was having some sort of affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and she had been covering him

for New York Magazine and had written a really high profile profile of him where she really harped on like disgusting aspects of his lifestyle. So it was just really shocking and just like one of the most wild news media gossip stories to break probably ever. I remember where I was too. So I decided last June to go independent from The Washington Post because my editor left. I think everyone is seeing what's going on with the Washington Post. I was like, all right, but I had been planning for, I'm not kidding, you two years, this three-week trip to Italy in September.

So I was like talking people all last summer. I spent like the whole summer sort of quiet quitting my job. This is also when I famously called Biden a war criminal. I was like, I don't give a fuck about this job. I'm about to quit. But I was like, I cannot go independent. Like I want to like take this three weeks and then go independent because I don't want to go independent in July and then like have to take like almost a month off in September, whatever, whatever. But of course, like, I'm a fucking.

loudmouth and I had spent all summer telling everyone that I was going to like leave my job. Also just like increasingly kind of like being out like again calling Biden a workman on Maine which I had actually done like many times throughout that summer and just like being doing other things where like I relaunched my newsletter without like telling anyone it was all this stuff and so all these media reporters for whatever reason finally in like September on like the second week of my trip all these media reporters are like oh okay she's going to quit and they like wanted to write articles about it which like who gives a shit like 20 people in media that's like Because I posted on my Instagram that I quit Washington Post and the main response I got an Instagram was you work for the Washington Post.

This was also when like so many people were quitting the Washington Post that like it was this like big thing for anyone to leave the Washington Post at that era. And it was really stressing me out. And I was in Milan and I was trying to have fun. It was fashion week. I was trying to go out. I was trying to get drunk. And like these fucking media reporters kept calling me. And then I see Oliver Darcy has published this story about Olivia Nezzi.

And I was like, oh, no one is going to bother me. Like, no one is going to bother me for the rest of my trip because this story is so much creature. And it was totally true. Like, they just like, they were like, oh, Taylor, like, who cares? But I think it was like one of those stories where even like I, like, met up with a friend abroad in Italy and like, she asked me about it. She was like, do you know, like this girl, Olivia Newsie?

Like, this is crazy. And so I just like, I think like people that aren't in the media world, like, this story really really. broke through. And I think it's the first time a lot of people learned who Olivia Newsie was. But it was especially relevant to, I think, political media people and just media people generally because Olivia was also engaged to this guy, Ryan Liza. Yes. So Ryan Liza is also someone who was known as a political journalist. And for a long time, he was at The New Yorker. But during at sort of like the height of the Me Too movement in 2017,

2018, he, you know, was ousted from the New Yorker over reports of sexual misconduct, which he has always denied. But so he is now independent. And he and Olivia had been in a relationship for many, many years. They were engaged at the time. They were working on a book together. I remember they would do like the political, like news circuit, like the talk shows. And they would be together because they live together, obviously. So like they would sit side by side and like zoom in to talk about like,

political coverage. And this was a relationship that had also already, I feel like, been gossiped about to a degree, at least in the circles that I ran in because there was a huge age gap between them. And so that was something that people had kind of like put under a microscope already. And so the fact that, you know, Ryan Lizza was involved and also that she's going from Ryan Lizza to RFK, who is RFK. Like this was an undercurrent of a lot of what people's reaction was. Yeah, I feel like they were. very much this like DC it couple. Like you said, they had gotten this book deal together. They were so, and they had, I think this was actually even their second book deal together. They were previously going to deliver a book, I think, back in 2020 and didn't. But it kind of blew up because it was one of those ones, like you said, everyone knew. And also, yeah, the age gap. Like, it was scandalous, even from the jump.

There was sort of like this era of scandal around it. So the scandal breaks. And very immediately, there's this reaction from the, media, I would say, to paint her as this, like, slut, for lack of a better word. Like, it was vicious. And I think there was so much like anger and resentment and, like, mocking from journalists themselves. And I just want to state, too, before we get further, obviously what she did is wrong.

Okay. Obviously, that was not journalistically ethical. Obviously, I can understand why she'd be fired. Duh. If you sleep with your person you're covering, like, yeah, you're not going to keep your job in political journalism theoretically, although I would argue the standard is different for men. But, you know, like, as soon as that story broke, it was like, I feel like it was sort of this like carte blanche for everybody to hate on this woman that had been so revered for so long. And I think like you really do see gendered reactions in this case so clearly because it's like there was no shock that RFK Jr. engaged in a relationship with a younger female reporter.

That itself was never scandalous. And like Ryan Liza pursuing a much younger woman in his field, that was never scandalous. It's only really scandalous through the lens of like, why is Olivia choosing to do this? So all of the sort of scrutiny and expectation and disappointment and outrage is directed toward her. The men are not affected in any way. If anything, the men sort of benefit from this. We've seen that very clearly, as we'll continue to get into. But it's like, all of the scrutiny is laser focused on Olivia.

And it's also interesting to me, like the way that this affair and the way that that shaped her journalistic bias, which it obviously did. that was treated in a just like every single person was on the same side about Olivia's journalistic ethical transgressions. You will be hard pressed to find anyone who says like what she did was okay or like we can make excuses for her. But when male journalists sort of like do things unethical when they abuse women in their newsrooms, when they sexualize and exploit their female sources, their female profile subjects, you never sort of get this unanimous condemnation. of that type of behavior. The reaction that Olivia Nuzi got was, like, restricted to Olivia Nusie.

I mean, there's always this thing with women reporters. And I've talked about this a lot because I think it's actually really good for people to hate on you frequently. Because I think if you don't get sort of, like, hated on or canceled or, like, if you don't fuck up publicly frequently enough, people do sort of put you on this pedestal

or people feel like you're beyond criticism. Like, they don't want to be the only one criticizing someone that's allegedly so beloved online. So, like, they'll never, go out of their way to criticize you, so you sort of had this, like, spotless record. Honestly, the David Dobrick thing is kind of, like, reminds me of this. And he was, like, very friendly. It was different.

But I do think, like, Olivia, like, her rise was so stratospheric, if that's a word. And, like, she was so beloved by these bosses, by people in power. She had ascended so quickly above other people that were, like, peers, especially because she was always, like, younger. Like, she and I are both millennials, but, like, she was always, like, the youngest one out of like all of our groups and stuff. And I think there was a lot of professional jealousy there, but I think people weren't really hating on her ever publicly

because she was so like revered and considered this like phenomenal generational talent. And so when there was this massive fuck up where it was like finally like the floodgates can open, we can tear this woman down that we've actually always been professionally jealous up and da-da-da-da. So it's like I felt like the like cancellation wave was like extra. hard. And this is when I fuck up online, I always tell myself, like, okay, this is good. You know, it's like relieving the pressure valve. It like lets everyone hate on you for a while. And then,

you know, you maybe don't get the big cancellation later. And one other thing, too, I think that was like just an added detail that's kind of not that relevant to it. But like, Kara Swisher, it turned out was the one that outed her to New York Magazine. Oliver broke the story. But people could very quickly be like, oh, you know, Kara Swisher is this like paragon of journalistic excellence, you know, and Olivia's so bad. And like, comparing, you know, these two big women against each other was like this thing. Never mind that Karras Swisher, you know, co-hosts a podcast with a raging misogynist that we can get it to later. That's what I was going to say is like, it's ironic that a lot of these journalists themselves have very clear, like, biases that protect people in power.

But yeah. We'll get into it. And what Olivia did was access journalism in the sense that like she required access to write these profiles. Like you said, she wasn't doing this like antagonistic, like, leftist, like, shoe leather, like, reporting. She was doing access profiles, like, phenomenally. And I do think, like, there's value to that journalism. But I also understand why also in the age of Trump, like, so many people hate that type of

journalism. So I'm not saying that, like, all of the hate towards her was misogynistic, jealous reporters. Like, I understand the critiques of the type of journalism that she did, too. Yeah. To me, it almost, like, straddles this place in between sometimes. And I do think a lot of her work had, like, journalistic value and brought reporting to the surface. But I think sometimes this type of journalism, like, at its most excessive, can border on just entertainment versus, like, traditional, like, what we think of as journalism. So I can see also,

but, but the reason why it exists is that there's such a demand for it because people also love reading this type of stuff. And there's a lot of value in that. And, like, the whole internet is entertainment. Like, media is about entertainment. And like, I think it's funny for people to like, I mean, I get that like access journalism sort of reveres people in power and like, you know, I get the criticism, but I also worked in tabloid news. So it's like, I don't have any errors that like a lot of the stories that I've written were some, you know, paragon of journalism either, I guess. So totally. And people love to highlight one journalist's transgressions.

So to have to avoid taking any like self-accountability or think about how it fits into the larger ecosystem of what media is. Yeah. And just like also the complicity of all of mainstream media with power. Like if you work at the New York Times and you are doing work the challenges power, but you're still, you know, boosting the New York Times and funneling people into the New York Times, which exists to uphold power. Like, I don't know. There's just a lot of, like, interesting media debates to be had. I don't think a lot of the conversation online even went that way was mostly, like, destroy this woman. So Olivia very quickly, like, goes into hiding, I would say.

Like, she moves to California and kind of just dropped off the face of the earth. Like, there was reports that she moved to Malibu, and she stopped posting online. She was not pictured anywhere. I think the New York Post was like chasing her around and tried to catch her at like some brand event once or twice. But she kind of didn't really like post through it, which I was so amazed by because I don't have that restraint. And like, you know, there were so many people too that were like, Olivia, launch and only fans. Like that was like a big thing. Like launch and only fans.

Put all your raunchy texts with RFK on only fans and monetize like monetize it you horror. It was like that energy. You know, not to say that it took restraint not to do that. But also like she didn't try to defend herself. Like she really, I would say took it on the chin and just kind of disappeared for essentially a full year. When the scandal initially broke, there was also back and forth between Ryan Liza and Olivia Newsy that like was threatening to blow into a lawsuit. So there was talk of like her suing him and then both of them essentially like fell off the face

of the earth for the following year. Olivia, you don't hear from her. There are rumors like six months or so into her hiatus that she's working on a book. she doesn't confirm or deny them. And Vian Liza, like, he also has gotten pretty quiet about the whole thing. So things have been, like, very stable for a while. Yeah. I mean, I was at the White House Correspondence dinner this year.

And I saw Ryan Liza actually at a party. He quit his job at Politico. He launched his own substack. Nobody was bringing it up. Like, I feel like it's sort of like when you don't give oxygen to a story and there's not really new information, like nothing really happens. And I think a lot of media people felt like, well, Olivia's been successfully sort of excommunicated from journalism. We're never going to hear from her again.

Blah, blah, blah. And there had been these, like, rumors around. Like, I had heard that, like, some glossy women's magazine tried to hire her. I had heard that interview magazine tried to hire her. I don't know how true any of that is. It's literally just like rumors. But, you know, she had never taken those jobs. Like, she, no one ever heard from her.

She wasn't posting again. And even, you know, my book was with Simon & Schuster. And, you know, I talked. to people at Simon and Schuster, and even they were like, we heard that there's a book potentially, but also, like, she had had that book deal previously with Ryan, so people weren't even sure, like, what it would be. So then, finally,

this September, just a couple months ago, after a year of silence, suddenly the news breaks that Olivia has been hired as the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair magazine. And within a weeks of that announcement, her book is also confirmed. And we learned the name, American Canto. And

it seems like she's back. And, And this triggers a lot of reactions. Yeah. So mid-September, Olivia announces that she's going to be West Coast editor at Vanity Fair. This is, again, a position that was seemingly created for her. And the reaction was a little bit split at this point. Like, a lot of people in the media congratulated her. And at the same time, you saw this resentment starting to bubble up, which was like, she got fired,

rightfully so. So why is she getting a job back in the media again? And so this starts to bubble up, but it doesn't yet like crest because we're getting these little like drops of news about what she's been up to. And it wasn't even like dominating the timeline or anything at this point. Well, she also didn't. I think she posted an announcement that she was joining Vanity Fair, but she wasn't like back to posting on the internet. She wasn't heavily engaging. And it wasn't clear what like West Coast editor meant.

Like this was certainly not another writing job because editor at a big magazine kind of. means like anything. It's like sometimes it's even just like a fake job title that they give like famous people. You'll be like, oh, like, Kiera Knightley was our editor at large for the September issue or whatever, you know? So it's like, I remember even when this news came out too, I was like, you know what? Like at this point, she's basically a political influencer. And like, Vanny Fair had had this well-known woman editor who left was kind of pushed out. And they replaced her with this guy, Mark Judushi, who was this new editor. And he had already sort of like, shaking up the magazine and done a lot of stuff that pissed people off. So, like, he fired Richard Lawson,

who's like the best known film critic who everyone's obsessed with. And I would argue was like the best film writer of our time. And then like a bunch of other people, they also did like multiple, multiple rounds of layoffs. So like Vanity Fair is kind of a hollowed out shell of what it was. It's not that relevant anymore in a, you know, compared to how it was 10 years ago. And there's this new editor that's already pissed everyone off. So like when they hired her, a lot of people are like, all right, of course. You know, he's doing a publicity stunt, whatever. Like, who knows what her job will even be, you know, at the magazine if she'll even have much of a say, like, editorially? 100%.

So, like, you did start to see this, like, anger, but it was not at all, like, an overpowering topic. And then when her book was officially announced, you know, not that long after, again, like, people were, there was some criticism and there was some, like, snark. But I don't think people were really, really, really upset yet. But it was just like she was starting to come back into the spotlight and alongside that there were a bunch of mixed reactions. Yeah. The book also was it was sort of unclear what it would be. It was like stories about her life, but like I think it took the wind out of the sales a little bit because it came out pretty quickly that she wasn't going to name anyone in the book. So she calls like RFK like the politician.

She calls Ryan Lizza like the man I did not marry. So it wasn't going to be some like raunchy tell all. So a lot of people that wanted that were like, ugh. So everything chugs along. Her book's coming out in December. And in November, a couple weeks before, normal book press cycle, she's going to have to obviously be out there a little bit more because you're forced to promote your book. If you do a book, you have to promote it to a certain extent. This New York Times profile drops big print profile. Yes. So this big New York Times profile of Olivia and her year in exile and what her book is going to be debuts. And it's a really visually arresting set of photos. that accompany it. They did this whole black and white photo shoot. She's really channeling like Lana Del Rey in like the car on the Pacific Coast Highway vibes. And the kicker of this piece is it was written by Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein's son.

So like this journalism Nephobababy tackling this like super scandalous person in journalism. I thought this profile was so weird. And I know Jacob Bernstein like we used to sit back to back at the New York Times back in the day in like 2019. He's really nice. I thought it was very funny, too. There was so much conversation. My only, like, way in that I've done on any of this since it broke is that, like, people were like, Jacob wants to fuck Olivia.

Like, this is a puff piece. And it was such a positive profile of her that people were like, this man is in love with her. And I was like, he is the gayest man on the planet. This man is gay, you guys. Like, and somebody replied, like, to that tweet. And they were like, gay men love evil women. Like, this just construed. But I thought it was kind of weird.

I mean, I thought the piece was fun. I don't want to like hate on Jacob, but it was a styles profile. Okay, so like, let's be real. New York Times styles, you're not going to get a critical, you know, take down in that section. I say that as having written for that section. I thought the photos were so weird because it's like this woman is coming out of silence for the first time and actually speaking out for the first time after being in hiding for a year. And all of the photos are like black and white and you can hardly see her.

Like she's obscured in half of them. And that felt really weird. And I wonder if the visual imagery was something. different as well, like, if it would have been positioned differently. But I feel like it was, like, the story itself kind of like almost glamorized her and positioned her as this like, yeah, like almost aspirational figure. You mentioned like the Mustang convertible on the highway, like kind of leaned into like more like the aesthetics of her life rather than talking about like the actual like sort of bad stuff that she had done, I guess. Yeah. And I think like Olivia kind of

has done this too, both in like the book and in like what she's put out. out about the controversy this week, like leaning into sort of just like her surroundings and describing it versus like really getting to the heart of the issue. And this profile, like people in media were so upset about it. It left like, I think one of the initial reactions that I've constantly seen about Olivia in addition to like tons of just like misogynistic hate is I've also seen a lot of journalists basically say like, this leaves such a bad taste in my mouth because like journalists are constantly getting laid off.

like they are like frustrated by sort of the framing of her as aspirational, which I understand. I think like part of the reason why this is the direction that it took is because it's such a massive spectacle that is driving so much attention. And so that is like the framing that it's getting. And people are both feeding into that and criticizing it at the same time. I saw a lot of conversation, which I totally agree with in here as well, like from women of color or people of color like in the media industry. Like if this happened.

and Olivia wasn't blonde and young and stunningly gorgeous. Like they describe her, I think, in the piece as like a Hitchcock blonde. I actually know for a fact she would not be getting the treatment that she was getting, you know, like if she was black or Latina or, you know, anything like that. So I completely understand the like rage, especially given the media climate over the past year, which is like sort of decelerated so much, like why there's this anger. because this profile dropped right before the holidays when so many journalists have been laid off recently

or about to get laid off. Like all of these places are cutting back. Journalists that have like won Pulitzer's that have worked their whole career, that have like barely scraped by on like $45,000 a year, you know, doing these like in-depth government investigations. You've had this massive attack on journalism too under the Trump administration.

Like since this scandal broke too, like Trump is back in power. Like there's a very different energy around like the press. And then here is this one. that like committed this cardinal sin of journalism that frankly women journalists are constantly accused of, which is like sleeping with our sources, sort of like revered and welcomed so quickly back into like elite society. It like unlocked something. People were so pissed. Like people were vicious. And I think it's a really good point too that when the scandal originally broke and the fact that she had had this affair with RFK Jr. first got out there, the election had not even happened yet. And now that like she's getting this treatment in the New York Times, like RFK Jr. is in his position as the head of health and human services. And he's like demolishing people's lives and like is set to demolish and destroy so many more lives.

So it's like it leaves a really ugly taste in people's mouths, especially because and this is what shook me when this all came out. Like I was kind of appalled at the framing of the headline is she did all for love. And the framing was like, she did it because she genuinely loved R of K Jr. And I was like, this is not what I want to be hearing right now. Like I was again, like with the same group of people who we've been talking about Olivia for many, many years. And I was just like, yeah, this is rough. This is rough to see and rough to read. Yeah, because RFK is such a monster, you know, and he's responsible for so much death.

Same with Joe Biden, by the way. I just want to say not to do whatever. I know people have been in false equivalencies, whatever. I'm sorry. Joe Biden manufactured consent for a genocide and, you know, lifted COVID restrictions, mainstreaming, you know, mass eugenics. So like, I don't think we even have RFK without Biden. But, but you're right, it's a completely different political climate. And the havoc that RFK has wrought on the American people is, is unconscionable. So as Olivia is gearing up to release this book, and also, this is the pre-publication press rollout. So it's like, we don't know yet if this is going to be a smash hit or what.

And the vibes were giving like, this is going to be a huge smash hit book. And into the fray comes Ryan Liza, himself sort of reemerging from this like exile. Like he's publishing on substack, but nobody's reading his posts. I went and checked like, was he making any noise? Was he bringing anything to the surface? No. He had essentially gone dark and no one really cared about him until all of a sudden he announces and publishes part one of a six part series, which we are currently in the middle of

of where he is going to rip back the curtain and explain everything in extreme detail of what really went down between him and Olivia and what he knows about the affair with RFK. This was another one where it's like you kind of remember where you were in the sense of like, I just remember like all of my group chats at once blowing up texting this link to Tilos News, which is Ryan was a substack. And it was called Part 1, How I Found Out. And, you know, he details essentially how he had found out about an affair.

And you read this thinking he's going to be talking about the RFK affair. That's the only affair that we know of, whatever. Very quickly, you find out that's not the case. Yeah, he's accusing her of an affair with another presidential candidate who she covered Mark Sanford during the 2020 election. So the whole thing is written as if you think it's about RFK, but then at the end it's like this big twist. Yeah, this was like such a plot twist at the end.

And so this Ryan Lizza piece dropped the exact same day as Olivia Newsie's excerpt from her book, American Canto, on Vanity Fair. So in the excerpt in Vanity Fair, she sort of uses this like comparison between the LA wildfires to like her, you know, affair, this toured affair with RFK. And again, she doesn't name him. She calls him the politician. But it was sort of the first peak that we'd had into the book. Again, this book that people wanted it to be a messy tell-all. And it wasn't really. it was like a lot of like flowery prose.

She said she wrote it on a hike, you know, and I do think it sort of has that energy to it where you kind of feel like she's just sort of like musing off the cuff about like the world and life, whatever. But it's certainly not some like journalistic like tell all about that's like scoopy about like what happened. So people are like itching for the real story. And of course into this Ryan Lizzie drops his sub-sac.

I think like what was so talking about it was people were like, oh, this is there's even more tea. And he's trying to kind of preempt her book and basically be like, this book doesn't have the real story. I have the real story. Yes. And like from the second that I read Ryan Liza's initial substack, I immediately picked up on the fact that the writing was inherently super manipulative and that people were just like falling for it, hook, line, and sinker. The way that he introduces the reason why he is doing this six part paywalled substack tell all is he's like, Olivia basically

forced my hand by releasing this book. And like, I had to, I had to drop this as if he had. He's not even mentioned in, by the way. Exactly. As if he hadn't been sitting on it clearly for forever, because he acted like her publishing the article that day is what preempted him. But it was all very clearly something that he had just been waiting to release at like the time when it would inflict maximum reputational damage. And that is exactly what happened. To me, when I read this, it was so manipulative because he talks about finding this like piece of stationary where Olivia's like jotted down something that I guess alludes to this affair between her and Mark Sanford. He's describing this note and he quotes from it.

He quotes from it directly. He says, you know, something on the Kempton stationary caught my eye. I started to read, quote, if I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house, I would still thirst for you. That set off alarms to me only in the sense that I'm like, why are you publishing her essentially like text message to him or like written letter to him? like it's tawdry right like you could have just said i found a note that alluded to having an affair or whatever whatever but he is from the jump publishing her most intimate sexual messages to another man that she did not consent to to me this has always been the political media equivalent

of like by sister which for those who don't know by sister is basically like one of the biggest YouTube dramas to ever happen. Dramageddon. Dramageddon. And it was between a bunch of YouTube beauty gurus. But the by sister video, the iconic video, is this woman, Tati Westbrook, who's in like her mid-30s at the time, making this expose about James Charles, who was a teenager at the time, and was kind of like her mentee.

And she clearly wanted to make this expose because she was mad at him because he was doing Instagram ads for someone else's gummy hair vitamins instead of hers. but to again inflict maximum reputational damage in a way that the entire internet could not resist. She like threw out these salacious allegations of him hitting on straight guys and just shared all of these super humiliating details about this teenager's sex life. And that to me is what is happening here with Ryan Liza. Like Ryan Liza, first of all, could and should have had have released this information if he was going to make it public years ago. He didn't. He sat on it. He didn't do the ethical, moral, right thing to do. do at all. Yeah, let's just be clear. Because we want to talk about journalistic ethics. As a journalist, if you find newsworthy information, especially about some presidential candidate, for instance,

say your spouse was involved with this political candidate and that could affect the campaign, whatever, whatever, like affect that person's presidential run. Okay, you can't report that story yourself because there's a conflict of interest. Obviously, he shouldn't even be reporting on any of this because of conflict of interest. He should have given that information to another journalist that doesn't have the conflict of interest to report it out. That would have been the most like ethical, journalistic thing to do. He didn't do any of that. No, he sat on it for five plus years.

And he also like in this substack piece, which is we're not even done with it yet. There's more parts to come. He's spaced it out like it's like a telenovela. And he also was including all of this gratuitous detail, which he keeps insisting is necessary for the reader to know, but it's not. He never, there's no like payoff for us. knowing any of these like explicit details, they're clearly just there to add further humiliation, make sure that the story will travel farther, and like just inflict this ultimately really

misogynistic damage onto Olivia because he knows exactly what's going to happen with this information. It's the same thing that happens to any woman whose like intimate information is shared without her consent. And this was just part one. He has now published five pieces on this. And some of the other ones, like that message that he included in the first post was like, compared to what he included in the next few posts. Because while the first post focuses on this alleged affair with Mark Sanford back in like 2019 or 2020, then he gets into the RFK stuff. He releases Olivia's sexes to RFK in these posts.

And what I find so gross too is that like there's no attribution on any of this. Like the only way he got this is by like hacking her phone, getting access to her phone, or forcing her to turn all of their communication. over, probably through like bullying or, you know what I mean when she was trying to get back together with him? Who knows? And now he's releasing it publicly and paywalling it for profit right before her book is coming out to try to destroy her book and destroy her life and get her fired, of course, from her new job. It's also really interesting to me that for the most part, every single person who I've seen comment on this or who I've talked to about this takes everything Ryan Lizza says

as the gospel truth. Everyone believes everything he has to say, even though he has no corroboration. Olivia has vaguely denied some of it. And I don't trust him. Why would I trust him? Like, I'm supposed to believe that he can retain picture perfect memory of some of these conversations years ago. He's obviously amplifying them in the most dramatic way possible. And I don't necessarily trust him. This is a man who was ousted from the New Yorker for sexual misconduct.

Like, I do not view him as a trustworthy person. I think he is a very malicious person. I think he has a proven track record of exploiting women and being predatory. And so it drives me crazy that everyone is willing to give him the utmost credibility and authority in this situation. Never do you see this credibility and authority given to like people who actually women victims who actually deserve it. I think too what is so disgusting to me about all of this is as soon as all of this stuff is coming out about Olivia and Ryan's putting on the stuff, you see these old disgusting men that had previous interactions with Olivia coming out and also trying to clout chase and get a, you know, get there sort of say. And so you have Keith Oberman, who is a boomer.

Okay, this old man who was a former television host, starts talking about I dated Olivia. Well, when I dated Olivia back in the day, da-da-da-da-da. Turns out he started dating Olivia when she was a literal teenager. She was a literal teenager that he would allegedly pick up after school. And she, like, lived with him for part of college. He paid her rent. You know, he was like in his 40s at the time or whatever, double her age. again, a teenager.

And then, of course, it came out, like, that she had had potentially relationships with other older men, like, and people sort of start digging through, like, her entire internet history. And it paints, like, a dark picture. Yes. I mean, like, as this, like, Ryan Liza Exposé series is dropping, predominantly from what I've seen, male journalists are also, like, digging through everything Olivia Nuzzi has said and done, like, to try to further expose her and humiliate her in the public square. And this MySpace thing is leaked, like her old MySpace blog, where she's promoting this music that she made as a teenager, as a child.

It's like 20 years ago type stuff. Yes. So she had this like fledgling music career where like she had a MySpace page for herself as a musical act. She had recorded songs. She had a publicist. There was like early promotion happening around trying to make her a pop star in the fact. fashion of literally Britney Spears. And this is back in the mid-2000s. Okay, she is a teenager. She is a child. She went by Livy. Like, and it's just like so clearly too. This was the era of the like

Rebecca Black, like everybody, like if you had a little like money or you're in New York and you could get somebody to like record you or L.A. or something like, the barrier to like publishing on the internet was like had just been lowered for the first time. And so there's just a lot of teenagers like trying to emulate like pop star culture in the art. aughts, like trying to launch their own career. I only say that because, like, I think a lot of people, like, see this shows that she was, like, powerful and connected even back then. This is a joke.

This was a MySpace page. It's the equivalent of posting, like, lip sync videos on YouTube, okay? Which is, like, everyone else was doing. So basically, it's revealed that she made this song called Jail Bate. And first, like, the cover art comes out, then the lyrics are revealed. And then finally someone gets, like, an MP3 file that they find on, like, SoundCloud. And reporters, like, up and down the legacy. media pipeline are resharing this and commenting on it in kind of like a really like cruel way,

not taking into account the fact that she was literally a child at the time, but sort of just like lumping this in with this perception of her that's like Scarlet Letter, like she's such a whore. She's she's so fame hungry. And I found that like that was kind of a personal moment where I was like, this crosses so many lines that were like retroactively aiming this. this misogynistic like stereotype at this child and not clearly questioning like what was the environment that she grew up in that would have allowed her to do this in the first place. And she's talked about the like rough childhood that she had where like her mother was this alcoholic. I think her father died like she had so much trauma. And yeah, I mean a child singing a

song about being jail bait like that's something that honestly probably wouldn't even happen today because it would get so canceled on the internet, like, sort of immediately. But it was also just, like, very of the 2000s of this era of, like, sexualizing girls at such a young age. And you can tell that she was sexualized at such a young age, especially by older men. Yes. And you can tell from, like, the way that she wrote about herself on MySpace in these screenshots, the way that she even writes about herself in the lyrics of this song. What's disturbing to me about jailbate is the societal conditioning that this child believed that she derived worth in the fact that older men could be attracted to her and prey on her.

And like, people are giving her this idea of autonomy that does not actually exist for a teenage girl. It's like we're going back to square one of understanding like predatory dynamics and how you can't take advantage of teenagers just because they think they're older than they actually are. Exactly. And to have a man, Keith Olberman, a famous man openly talking about how he did take advantage of her as a teen, bragging about it. And then, you know, just knowing also that she was like,

interning for Anthony Wiener, like, and then, of course, got into this relationship with Ryan Liza, much older man, like, you realize, oh, since the time she was a literal child, or she has been, like, bait for older men, like older men have been praying on her. Well, I think that there's, like, clearly an ideological sort of grooming that's happening here at these years in her life because she has men and adults around her allowing her to release a song like jail bait, which goes immediately, like a year later, She is in these relationships with men in the media who are so much older, so powerful, and they are also giving her the tools through which she can pursue an adult career in the media in the same environment that these men are in. So she's being taught and she's being conditioned into seeing like her value in her youth and in her appearance and in sort of her sensuality and what that offers to the men around her.

It made me sad, honestly. And it also just made me like be like, and Lizah look in the fucking mirror. Like, how are you writing this? Like, you are writing this, like, sort of excruating her. That's the right word. Like, for, you know, this relationship with the RFK, which again, was unethical. Okay, no one's defending that.

No one would defend that. It's deeply unethical as a journalist to do what she did. But when you have this deeper context, you're like, God, like, this woman is also a victim in a lot of ways. And, you know, what Ryan is doing is essentially releasing revenge porn every week on substack and the entire media is just rabidly eating it up. Like you could not say any of this on Twitter. Like I mean, I feel like in our group chat, we were chatting.

But like if you went on Twitter and tried to say any of this and tried to defend her, like I think like every reporter in mainstream media would like call for your had to be cut off. Oh yeah. I mean, people are literally and have been doing this from the beginning have been like essentially threatening people into not defending Olivia. Because I've literally seen tweets that are like, can't wait for the feminist angle at Olivia Nuzzi, like someone's going to do it.

Someone's going to try to defend her. It doesn't surprise me, but this is what you always see whenever there's a hate campaign against a woman is like not finding any nuance in the situation and not identifying the times when she very clearly has been a victim in her life. Well, also like, even if you think Olivia is the most terrible, like she's secretly conservative, like I see that a lot. She said racist stuff on Twitter in 2014, you know, whatever, whatever. I don't doubt that she did.

Okay. I'm not saying like every tweet of hers was, I don't know what she was posting. I think she was posting ironically. Like I was on Twitter in 2014. If you were using the hashtag T-Cott, like, which was this like joke conservative hashtag, like she was making a lot of ironic jokes that I think ultimately were in bad taste, but like I can see why people are upset about them now. You know, it kind of reminds me of like the Megan Kelly stuff too where I think people, and I don't think Olivia is mega-conservative in that way. But like, I do think that like there are women for whom people are sympathetic and then there are women who for whom people are not sympathetic. And in some part, it's like, you're right. I don't know.

I think so much of it is anti-Trump brain, too, where they're like, she normalized Trump. I'm like, guys, Olivia could have never written about Trump in her life and he would still be president. Okay, let's be for real. But sure, did she cater to people in power? Sure, sure, sure. But like, women who end up in these situations or women that are victims like this, like, they're not always, they're not perfect, right? There is no perfect victim. And she has probably a deeply flawed, deeply like human person who's fucked up, who's said messed up things, who's maybe been terrible to other people, you know, many times over.

It doesn't excuse what happened to her. And it doesn't make this hate. campaign against her any less misogynistic. Yeah. And I think like what a lot of people don't understand and refuse to sort of see like the nuance and clarity in is the fact that a victims are imperfect. Victims are people which means that they are going to do bad things. And also being abused can like induce you into bad behavior. Being abused can condition your mind into like believing the logic of your abuser. A lot of abuse victims talk about this. They talk about how like that doesn't excuse.

their behavior during the time period when they were being abused, but they acted differently and they changed and their personality changed and they would like copy their abuser, they would internalize the logic of abuse. And I think like you, this is a very common thing and people never want to admit it because then it becomes too messy. So instead what you see over and over again is like Olivia and Ryan deserve each other or everyone in this situation equally sucks and like she's the worst out of all of them. Which is so like the mutual abuse like bullshit. Because That is essentially like what you hear again. It's very, I hate to bring up the Amber Heard.

I know everyone hates the Amber Heard comparisons, but like you heard a lot of this sort of similar rhetoric during the Amber Heard suffered towards people like Megan Markle or whatever, whatever, who again, Megan Markle hasn't done anything wildly unethical in that way. But like, it's like she, yeah, these everyone involved sucks. And it's like, okay, everyone involved sucks. But one party is perpetuating misogynistic abuse campaign. And the other party is not. The other party committed journalistic, you know, a malpractice to an insane degree.

That's very different from what Ryan is doing. And, you know, you mentioned, like, when you are, you know, an abuse victim, like, you act in certain ways. And often you are under control of your abuser. And when I was reading Ryan Lizas, one of his most recent pieces where he's describing in intimate detail, this relationship that Olivia had with RFK, he is describing abuse. He is describing a horrible abusive relationship where this man maintains complete and total control. over his victim and he would sort of like withhold affection and then give affection and like it was all very self-serving not to mention you can tell from these posts how controlling Ryan was and so it's like everyone involved you can see these like mechanisms of control where like RFK is clearly trying to control

Olivia but Ryan is also trying to control Olivia and I think that this entire series that he's launched in conjunction with the book is also an effort to sort of garner control over her life again. Yeah. Well, I'm sure Olivia knows so much dirt on Ryan. And this is part of an effort to silence her and ensure that like she will never reveal that. And yeah, what he's describing in her relationship with RFK, which he even points out himself, is coercive control. He doesn't use that vocabulary. And most people don't know or understand what coercive control is. But course of control is how abuse functions. And like people don't want to admit this. And you see this in like nearly every single high profile case of like domestic abuse and coercive control and sexual

violence. Like people always want to blame the victim. They always want to make the victim just as bad as the abuser. So that way they don't have to confront the power dynamic that is inherent to this situation. And like, I've been picking up on this since day one of the Olivia scandal because Keith Oberman has been tweeting this entire time. And it doesn't take an idiot to look at Keith Oberman's tweets about Olivia and see that this is an incredibly like controlling awful man who.

weaponized his power over her and humiliates her to this day. As a teenager, he started dating her as a fucking teenager when he was a grown adult. And you know, you can tell that he wants access to her because she clearly doesn't speak to him anymore. And so he's just like revealing like increasingly intimate details of their time together 20 years ago or whatever it was. Yeah. And Ryan Liza is positioning the Keith course of control and the RFK course of control throughout this series in a way to try to deflect from his own. controlling behaviors. And it's like people are just totally falling for what Ryan Lizzie is selling them. Well, also just like it's crazy.

And we should talk about this as well. Like the lack of effect this has had on RFK. First of all, RFK is accused of like killing his first wife. Like RFK is we know RFK's record of abusive behavior towards people around him. Like this is a man with actually a quite a well documented, you know, history of abuse. I think like people are missing the forest for the trees. I think like these men and their behavioral patterns are just as newsworthy, if not significantly more than what Olivia is the center of the news about. Because RFK also used coercive control in the circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife.

And as you said, like long recorded history, he's done this two dozens, if not hundreds of women. And that's not a story at all. It's just like let's find the least sympathetic woman who he's done it to. to and let's have like six weeks of media scandal about her that totally distracts and deflects from the fact that you have this like nightmare monster in this position. What's also like I feel like so many people were so quick to like shut all of you down where it was like, oh, she's this attempted comeback, you know, like we've got to destroy her attempted comeback, whatever.

And I understand, look, again, like is the attention economy fucked up? Is it fucked up that like a personality driven journalism, you know, all the problems that we have with personality driven journalism, the attention economy, influencer journalism, the fact that she is like young and beautiful. Like, yes, we're not like negating any of that. And obviously, like, I just have to say it again, like this would never happen for a woman of color, black women, like all of those systemic inequalities exist. All of those problems are very real in the media. But the fact that so many journalists are willing to participate and further a misogynistic abuse campaign is disgusting. And essentially a platform revenge porn. It's just gross. And the mainstream media is

complicit in all of it. The New York Times running these stories about like Olivia's, you know, like the relationship, like the men around her. All of it is centered around like her as this scandalized figure and the men and they're using the image. All of the images are of her in the like leopard print top and the red skirt from it's like guys, there are images of her looking very professional and actually recently since I saw some people calling this out like even the New York Post, even though they still have the slutty picture kind of like in the article lower on, like, started to use a picture of her wearing a actual, like, suit jacket in some of their photos. But, like, it's this, like, intentional, like, smear that's sort of

furthered by the mainstream media. And we see this with so many misogynistic harassment campaigns, you know, even from Gamergate days. It's like the abuse happens on the internet, but it is furthered and by the mainstream media, which validates these dynamics and is validating, you know, Ryan Liza right now and is sort of validating this, like, tear-down campaign of her. The similarities between dynamics on YouTube is really fascinating to me because you see this exact same thing play out when like female YouTubers in particular get into controversies because they did bad things. Like Tricia Paitis is a perfect example of this because Tricia Paitis is a super controversial influencer. She's having a career high right now. But like before this, she was one of the most controversial influencers for good reason. She has said and done like morally detestable things throughout her career.

But the reaction to her, because. so violent and so misogynistic and so like malicious that it begins to even rival the things that Trisha herself has done. And I've written about this, this sort of like dynamic before, which is like when a target is viewed as justifiable, people no longer care about any sort of like ethical norms regarding their own behavior. So like, is it ethical to like bring up something that a 17 year old girl did that like clearly like is positioned to be sexually humiliating to her and was clearly

exploitative from the get-go. That's not particularly ethical either, but tons of journalists are doing it right now and getting away with it. And like, is it ethical to like support anything that Ryan Liza or Keith Olberman are doing? No. But like people are doing it right now with absolutely like no damage or consequence to their reputations. I think it's so interesting too is like these people bemoaning, like all of these reporters who are like, I'm the paragon of journalism, whatever. And some of them are. Some of them are phenomenal journalists. And I understand the resentment that they have towards Olivia for breaching these journalistic rules. You know, because, again, women journalists suffer because of stuff like this happening.

We're like, then it's like, oh, you know, women journalists do sleep with sources, whatever. But ironically, I mean, I think your comparison to YouTube drama is so spot on because I think ironically, they're participating in the same attention economy, internet influencer culture that they claim to detest. And they claim to detest. And it's like you are no better than a Dramageddon poster fan. You know, you are no better than a Tati Westbrook fan in 2018 when you are participating in this smear campaign. You might as well just be on a snark subreddit. But instead, you're a journalist at the New York Times. And you have sort of a platform and authority.

And you can pretend like you're above all that. But you're not. You're participating in influencer drama and a misogynistic hate campaign, which is so just like the norm, you know, in sort of like the attention economy. Because like you said, it just like, it plays. so well. And like, I've seen a few people like start to reexamine this, but I can literally count them on my fingers and they're not journalists. Like random people on like blue sky, I've seen start to realize the actual like stakes at play here with regards to how these men have abused this woman throughout her life. And I've seen people make that recognition and

be like, oh, I'm not going to shit talk her anymore because now I see that like she's been a victim throughout parts of this. But I don't see that kind of recognition or willingness to recognize it among a lot of like Olivia's professional peers. And I think that in itself is is so frustrating because it's like, you do not have to be a perfect or even a good person to be victimized. And the idea that like we can't talk about it when it's like uncomfortable or inconvenient to other narratives that are happening is like one of the core reasons why this behavior is tolerated and why it persists.

And in fact, like Olivia's peers have rewarded. her abuse and engaged in it and monetized it and ensured that like there is a market for it to continue. And like mind you, now the original figures like the opening figures for her book sales are starting to come out. And like it's not going to do well. I would not be surprised if Ryan Liza has walked away with a ton of profit from this and Olivia maybe will not. And she also is probably not going to get her contract at Vanity Fair renewed. So like she's not really going to profit that handsomely from this in the end. And in fact, like, she's going to, to lose the ability to have this career in the future. So, like, she received consequences. Ryan Lizza and Keith Oberman

have seemingly received no consequences and have, in fact, been, like, rewarded. Yeah. I mean, in any just world, there would be such a massive tsunami of outrage for what Ryan Liza is doing or for the type of stuff that Keith Oberman is doing to the point that he, both of them would be, like, excommunicated, right? And that would be the center of discussion. Because I think people are like, well, what are we supposed to say? You know, and I get it. It's gossip. Like, it's whatever.

I'm not saying, like, nobody can comment on it. Nobody can criticize Olivia. Like, that's not what we're saying. We're saying is, like, there is this, like, asymmetry and this complete refusal to acknowledge the abusive nature of what he's doing. And the fact that this is revenge porn. You and I were talking, there's really only one person who has had a good take consistently throughout all of this.

And it's this, like, random boomer guy named Colby Hall. We love him now. We stand Colby Hall, okay, who was like the founding editor of Mediaite.com, which is just like honestly like a pretty like random website that like they have this like right winger on staff that like writes like the most misogynistic slop about me. So like I was so surprised to see like a feminist take on like mediaite. I think he's just had really good sort of like take throughout this thing. And he wrote this piece actually just a couple days ago that was an opinion piece on the website where he said Ryan Liza turned Olivia Newsy, breakup series into revenge porn disguised as journalism. And I thought it was so good.

Let's just see. Like, I just want to do a quick Twitter search. How many, like, mainstream media people have shared this? None. It's been shared one, two, three, four by a PR person, Colby Hall himself. And that's it. No New York Times journalist. I'm just saying like the comparison, right?

Like, here's the one man in all of media that's willing to call this what it is. And he's an older man himself. It's really interesting to me. Like, there have been a few men. in media who have kind of like tried to pierce the veil. And like they've gotten so much hate for it because like there have been a few times when someone has tried to say, you know a lot of Washington journalists are sleeping with their sources. Right? And then people are like, no, no, no. Like you're just trying to defend her. And let me tell you something too, as somebody that worked in DC media

myself for a couple years. Okay. This is a whole other thing. But DC media is so small. When I worked at the Washington Post, the head of like the politics section or the national section or something was like married to someone in the government. And also on the election when you're covering these campaigns, you're there late night with everyone. You're like, you know, not me personally, but like everyone was hooking up with everyone. And it's often also everyone's in their 20s and like and then there's these older people. I mean, I remember when I got into the Trump like Christmas event, this was like years ago. Some Trump aide, you know, they blocked all the press from getting in. and then he grabbed me by the hand, and he was like, you can come in or whatever.

And I was like, all right. But if I was a different woman, I don't know. Like you can just, there's a lot of opportunities and co-mingling in the DC political world, which by the way is disgusting and immoral and bad. But like, let's talk about the, you know, all of the men that have done this or all of the men that still work in the mainstream media too that have sexually assaulted their sources. These male journalists that have committed sexual assault against people that came out during me too. I don't know if I don't want to get sued to name them, but people at the New York

Times, men, men at CNN that still have their jobs. Well, I remember when the Olivia story first broke, this woman who I follow on Twitter, who is not a journalist, tweeted about how, like, there was a newsworthy thing that had happened to her at one point, and a bunch of male journalist, she was like, they were hitting on me, totally. And there's no consequences for that behavior. It's totally normalized. I also, like, find it so frustrating that there are well-paid, employed men in media today who wrote the most disgusting profiles in like the early 2000s and the 90s about child actresses where they would sexualize them in like the opening three lines. And that's obviously like a misogynistic bias that is very clearly determining the way you cover

someone, but it's not taken seriously, hardly ever. And there are no consequences for that behavior. Again, it more often than not gets rewarded. And so it just goes to show that like misogyny is never viewed is like a crime or an offense. Misogyny is like tolerated and normalized and encouraged. And in fact, like, going back to that tweet that was like, no one better have a feminist angle on Olivia Nuzzi. It's like, again, you're basically threatened into like, you're not allowed to like feel sympathy for this woman.

And if you do show sympathy for this woman, you will be punished like she is. And that's how this works. That's like how these campaigns function is through this like social pressuring and social shaming. And like, ironically, I similarly have always been so disgusted. by the incestuousness between like the media and politicians. And like I've written about this before, it turned me away from like covering politics as a journalist. And I also like for what it's worth, the excerpts that I've read from Olivia's book, like there's a lot in there that I really don't love.

But my takeaway from it is not like that she all of a sudden doesn't know how to write anymore. I just feel like her brain, her writing is so muddled. It implies that there's not like a lot of clarity of thought, which implies that there's not like a lot of clarity of thought, which implies to me that she probably needs a lot more time to process everything that has happened to her. And I think writing this book and getting this position and having all this happened so soon like was probably not like healthy for her. But again, it's like the media is exploiting her trauma. And that's not beneficial to her.

It's not really beneficial to anyone. And it's also not even going to work. So to me, the whole thing is not like something to point and laugh at or like be so scandalized by. I find the whole thing really like disturbed. and upsetting and, like, sickening. And the fact that, like, so many of my peers are, like, looking at it as the best entertainment this year is really depressing and, like,

angering to me. Yeah. And I think, like, I mean, you're just talking about, like, the exploiting of the trauma. I think the fact that, like, David, whatever his name is, but the editor-in-chief of New York Magh allegedly said that for Olivia to keep her job back, like, a year ago when the affair came out, that she would have to write, like, a tell-all about the affair. That's what Olivia has claimed.

Like, it just shows that, like, that's what people want, right? They want to just exploit. and use and use it, whatever. And it is depressing and it is sad. And I agree with you. I mean, I loved the writing of her profiles. Like I, listen, I'm a terrible writer. I am a terrible writer. So God bless to all my editors because I'm an awful writer. And so I think I've always like looked at people like her that clearly she has a gift for writing. And maybe like some of her book is not like you said, it is a little muddled. It's not maybe her best writing ever because maybe it wasn't edited strongly enough. Maybe it's very different writing about yourself

versus doing journalism as well. Like writing a personal essay is a radically different skill than writing a journalistic piece. And I think she's phenomenal at the latter and might not have as much experience with the former. But like this rewriting of history as if she's not talented is also just very disingenuous because she is talented. And the reason that she got where she was

is because of her talent and because she has this ability to get these people, especially powerful men, to open up. And so I just think, too, like, yes, her book probably won't sell that well. It won't be the expose. that people wanted. But I don't know. I don't know what her future entails, you know? I, it's kind of like, I don't know what does lie ahead from her.

I feel kind of bad for her in the sense that also, like, I should say, and I should have said this in the beginning of the episode, like, as somebody that's dealt with so much misogynistic media coverage has been in the center and like the subject of a lot of like really evil mainstream media coverage that's complete lies NPR, go fuck yourself. Knowingly printing lies about me. like old men lying about me on the internet. Like, it's infuriating.

And even from the minute all this happened, like, no matter how evil the person is, like, I just have this like reflexive, like, feeling towards someone where I'm like, fuck, you know, I feel really bad for them. Even if I hate them, even if they are the worst, you know, power hungry, access journalists of our time, whatever you want to say. Like, it sucks. Like, no one should have to go through that. And this is misogyny.

And the media is like just still deeply misogynistic. And just like almost everyone. for the most part feels like if a woman crosses enough boundaries in their mind, then they have license to be misogynistic toward her. And the reality is like even the most vile women you can think of still don't deserve misogyny because like no one deserves misogyny. It shouldn't exist. It should be like rooted out and like thwarted in all scenarios, regardless of who it is

targeting or affecting. And yeah, I just, I find it so disappointing that people continue to engage in these tropes and never reflect on their behavior, even as we have this conversation over and over and over again. I personally hope for Olivia, I mean, I know there's the other thing. She doesn't come from money at all, which is sad, you know, because I think if she was like a Nepo baby, like she wouldn't have to worry about any of this. She wouldn't have to worry about paying, you know, I'm glad that she lives in California because

I think it's really good to get like when you're getting canceled by New York and D.C. Media, like, it's good to take a break. But I don't know. Part of me is like, I do hope she kind of like goes off on her own and gets out of this like mainstream media world. Like in some sense, she is such from another time. Like, she is this kind of like 90s style like magazine writer. But it's just such a terrible world, the institutional media.

And I just, I don't know, she said that Monica Lewinsky, like in this Q&A that she did with the newsletter, Phoebe had been reaching out to her. And I'm like, okay, that's good. Like that makes me happy. And maybe like, you know, maybe she can like reflect on all this stuff and reflect on, you know, these interactions that she's had with all these powerful men over these years and eventually kind of like take some time and really look back on it in a way where she can, kind of speak about it with with some distance. I feel the same way.

Like my hope for her is that she's able to have the resources to like truly process and heal from what she has experienced because like it's been back to back to back her whole life. She never had a break from like these men and this behavior and this type of course of control up until now. And I hope I think that like because she doesn't come from money, there is no guarantee that like, like she will necessarily be able to get those resources for as long as she needs them. But I hope that she can. And one thing that comes to mind thinking about Olivia is another woman journalist who was

like exiled from the field who I was a huge fan of before everything that happened. So there's this journalist named Sabrina Eardley. And if you know who she is, you're thinking of the reason why she was exiled from journalism, which is she wrote the infamous Rolling Stone article about rape on campus that was ultimately disproven. And before that, she was also a magazine feature reporter who wrote a lot of pieces that I really loved. Like she did reporting on MySpace before anyone was reporting on MySpace and like seen Queens and like violence in that arena. And she fully was exiled from journalism and she never came back. And I often like think about her and I wonder what she's up to.

But my hope for her and I guess my hope for Olivia as well is that they could just have like a normal life after going through these like really misogynistic terms. trials. The good news for her, Olivia, is like, she does have this adjacency to wealth and power. And, like, even in this, like, thing that she released, this, like, sort of self-deprecating jokey thing of, like, this list of signs your book release is going badly or something. It was like, I'm at a group chat and people were talking about kind of like, it is kind of like a who's who of like famous people reaching out to her. So ultimately, she just, she does have friends in high places and I hope that they can sort of take care of her so that she can get some help

and get some therapy and relax, you know, for a while. I can only imagine, like, how much therapy I would have to go through if I had even an ounce of the exposure that she's had over the past two years. And I don't think also reporters, I will say, like, last thing, you never know what it's like to be, like, smeared in the media until you yourself have been smeared in the media. You don't know what it's like. Like, it is so much worse than you could imagine. I think, like, I mean, I just think back to, like, a couple years ago when, like, Tucker

Carlson was doing, like, almost nightly segments on me and then, like, also. So just all of mainstream media was like writing these crazy articles about me. And like also I don't know if you remember in 2022. This was around the same time when like I said journalists have to have brands. I think about that all the time. I was like fully canceled. People might not remember this. Like I was fully canceled.

And then like the LA Times wrote about like all these people wrote about it like big journalists that I worked with the New York Times like came out against me. Like it was crazy for saying something that now of course male journalists get paid to like say on on stage at you know conferences. But like it's just so overwhelming and it can feel so isolating and it can can feel like you're never going to get out of it. And so I just hope that like she realizes that she will get out of it and life is long. And everyone has a memory of a goldfish.

I think that's 100% true. And she definitely does have some fans, particularly in the gay male contingency. Yeah. So yeah. Well, Kat, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you so much for having me. All right. That's it for this week's episode of Power User.

Please don't forget to support me on Patreon via the link or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com on substack, where I do biweekly roundups of everything I'm reading and seeing on the internet. It's the best way to keep up with online culture news. You can also get my newsletter via my Patreon, where I do monthly live streams and an extra bonus episode of power user every month. That's Patreon via the link below. I currently don't have any ad deals or long-term brand partnerships. So every single dollar of your support makes such a difference.

Thank you so much for listening. and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User.