New York magazine political reporter on leave over relationship with former campaign subject

Star political reporter Olivia Nuzzi is on leave from New York magazine after she acknowledged that she had a “personal” relationship with a former 2024 campaign subject while she was reporting on the campaign, the magazine said Thursday night.

Oliver Darcy, who broke the news in his Status media newsletter Thursday, and CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the campaign subject is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his independent presidential campaign in August and endorsed Donald Trump.

The revelation about Nuzzi, 31, sent phones quaking in Washington media and ignited X, where Nuzzi’s name trended alongside that of actress Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s wife.

Nuzzi did not confirm the identity of the subject. A representative for Kennedy said he met Nuzzi only once, for professional reasons.

“Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece,” the statement read, referring to the November 2023 story in New York headlined “The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign.”

In a statement Thursday to Stelter, Nuzzi said her communications with “a former reporting subject turned personal” earlier this year.

“The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict,” Nuzzi said in the statement. “I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”

The magazine said in its own statement: “Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.”

As Washington correspondent, Nuzzi has written some of the magazine’s splashiest candidate profiles of the 2024 race. In its statement, New York said that Nuzzi would not have been allowed to cover the race if management knew about the relationship. Still, the publication said a review of her work has found no issues with her articles.

“An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias,” the magazine said. “She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.”

Darcy cited a “person close to Nuzzi” who said the relationship began after the November 2023 profile of Kennedy, with a second anonymous person telling Darcy that it started at the beginning of 2024.

This year, Nuzzi spoke about Kennedy’s campaign in two conversations with the New York Times, saying in June that Kennedy should have been allowed on the debate stage with Trump and Joe Biden. In March, Nuzzi criticized the media for failing “to cover Kennedy like a serious contender.”

Her November 2023 cover story painted a vivid portrait of Kennedy as a controversial outsider with the ultimate insider name. Nuzzi went hiking with Kennedy, who ferried her in a decrepit Toyota minivan “dog car” that “smells so bad I thought I might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun.”

Nuzzi has also written critically and robustly about Kennedy’s former presidential rivals. In July, she skewered Biden’s mental state in a lengthy profile, arguing that the state of the president’s health had been covered up in a “conspiracy of silence.” For years Nuzzi has had access to Trump, with the former president inviting her to inspect the wound on his ear from his assassination attempt for a piece reported at Mar-a-Lago that ran earlier this month in New York magazine.

Trump’s ear “had never appeared to have gone through less,” Nuzzi wrote. “Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.”

Nuzzi’s meteoric career began when she wrote for the New York Daily News about her own stint as an intern inside former Democratic representative Anthony Weiner’s failed New York City mayoral campaign. She became a leading chronicler of Trump’s rise while working for the Daily Beast. She joined New York magazine in 2017.

Nuzzi is known for her incisive, provocative writing and for occasionally making herself the center of a story. In 2018 she briefly entered Trump associate Corey Lewandowski’s home uninvited; Lewandowski considered legal action but didn’t pursue.

In 2021, her publisher paused a book on the 2020 campaign that Nuzzi was writing with Politico reporter Ryan Lizza, her then-boyfriend. This year, Bloomberg canceled a PR campaign for an interview series hosted by Nuzzi after Biden fans - incensed by her story about the president’s health - complained to the company about old tweets they considered distasteful.