Nearly every woman in RFK Jr.’s life will, eventually, become roadkill.
Take Olivia Nuzzi, the star political reporter whose sexting relationship with Kennedy has led to him smearing her as a nut and a slut — much as Bill and Hillary Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky and numerous other women.
‘She went after him aggressively,’ an RFK Jr. source said of Nuzzi this weekend. ‘She targeted him pretty hard… It was a little scary. She was obsessed with him. I think she still is.’
Subtle.
Yes, this lifelong serial womanizer and adulterer — who was caught by his second wife, Mary Richardson, with the contact information of at least 43 rumored mistresses in his cellphone, not to mention the voluminous lists of other women in his infamous ‘sex diaries’ — somehow passively fell victim to this deranged, sex-crazed stalker.
Nuzzi is 31 years old. She is, for now, a respected, award-winning journalist at New York magazine, where she has worked since 2017.
One doesn’t rise that far that fast — in an incredibly cutthroat industry, no less — without being talented, smart, socially adept, and decidedly sane.
Nuzzi has admitted to a personal, ‘non-physical’ relationship with Kennedy that began after she profiled him for the magazine last November. ‘Demure’ nude pictures were also reportedly sent. She has since been placed on leave, pending an investigation.
Was such a relationship a conflict of interest? Yes, without a doubt.
But was Nuzzi’s online affair really any worse than our mainstream media, metaphorically in bed with Kamala Harris?
As the magazine’s Washington correspondent, Nuzzi hasn’t covered RFK Jr. since that initial profile. Nor has she used him as a source.
Yet we have a media that pitches Harris softballs, tilts a presidential debate in her favor, tosses her word salad and insists that her nonsense makes sense.
Here was Harris to Oprah Winfrey, during that embarrassing online event last Thursday: ‘Let’s come together with the character that we are so proud of about who we are.’
Julia Roberts cheered. Meryl Streep practically wept. And Oprah held up Harris as presidential material, despite offering zero policy proposals or explaining what she’s running on, what she believes in, or what she’ll do in office.
But let’s hang Olivia Nuzzi in the public square!
Where is the left in all this? They love nothing more than defending a scapegoated woman.
Then again, Nuzzi betrayed the cause by writing a scathing, and truthful, piece this summer acknowledging that the entire White House press corps knew about Biden’s cognitive decline all along.
She’s also recently published a profile of Trump that took him and the July assassination attempt against him seriously. The horror.
And so RFK Jr., who was public enemy number one as long as he was in the presidential race and harming the Dems’ chances, is now the victim here.
Recall how RKF Jr.’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, lost any hope of becoming president — not for leaving campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne to die in three feet of water after flipping his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick — but because he fumbled this question, posed by journalist Roger Mudd in 1979: ‘Why do you want to be president?’
Ted was verbose and meandering.
‘It’s imperative for this country to either move forward,’ he said, ‘but it can’t stand still, otherwise it moves backward.’
Ted Kennedy walked so Kamala Harris could run — literally.
Uncle Ted was also paterfamilias for RFK Jr. and all the young, fatherless Kennedy boys, setting indelible examples in how to treat women: Kopechne, who could have been saved; his wife, Joan, who he drove to alcoholism with his relentless lying and cheating; and the young waitress he sexually assaulted in a D.C. restaurant, to name just a few.
As is Kennedy tradition, RFK Jr. is working straight from the family playbook: Once a woman becomes inconvenient, call her crazy.
If she refuses to go away, tell the media she’s a slut, a groupie, a liar, a gold digger, a drug addict. Threaten her.
Nuzzi declined my request for comment and has largely remained silent – even as she is losing everything: Her engagement to fiancé Ryan Lizza has ended. New York magazine will surely fire her.
But rather than let this story die, rather than leave his virtual affair partner with a shred of dignity, RFK Jr. has become even more vengeful, threatening Nuzzi with lawsuits, potentially civil and criminal.
Criminal!
Poor Bobby. He was, according to a mutual friend of the pair, ‘bombarded’ by Nuzzi with ‘increasingly pornographic photos and videos’.
‘Chased by porn,’ says Gavin de Becker, a major donor to his campaign.
Bobby Kennedy Jr., whose response to a published allegation of sexual assault by Vanity Fair this summer was, ‘I am not a church boy’, chased by porn.
Sounds just like the ‘muggings’ he recounted in his sex diaries exposed by the New York Post after Mary’s suicide in 2012, all these lascivious women unable to control themselves around the irresistible RFK Jr., what with the worm in his brain and his penchant for dismembering dead animals.
Roadkill is the ultimate metaphor for any woman in this guy’s orbit.
His camp also claims that Nuzzi kept ‘tricking’ him into unblocking her. This makes no sense. If he blocked her, how would he have seen her messages asking him to unblock her?
And if he was that afraid — if Nuzzi had gone full ‘Fatal Attraction’, as he would have us believe — why engage in any contact with her at all?
Much more credible, to my mind, are the reports that RFK Jr. was bragging so openly and often about Nuzzi’s nudes that word got back to her boss.
His version? He barely knows her.
‘Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested,’ his spokesperson said, ‘which yielded a hit piece.’
Again — poor Bobby!
Kennedy men have done this to countless girlfriends, aides, wives, mistresses: Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Carolyn Bessette, Ted’s wife Joan, Bobby’s wife Mary.
When Bobby was divorcing Mary in 2012, he was also dating his current wife Cheryl Hines, who took to Twitter to brag about all the fun she was having with Bobby and Mary’s kids.
He then defied a court order to pay Mary, mother to four of his children, $20,000 a month. He cut off Mary’s credit cards. She was reduced to begging other mothers at the school run for $20 for gas or groceries.
After she committed suicide in their barn, he buried her with great fanfare in the Kennedy family plot — then, one week later, had her secretly exhumed in the middle of the night, re-buried far away and alone.
Just one day after her suicide, he went to the New York Times and said Mary had been deeply troubled. Wonder why.
‘A lot of times I don’t know how she made it through the day,’ he said. ‘She was in a lot of agony for a lot of her life.’
And this self-serving statement, in his eulogy: ‘I know I did everything I could to help her.’
Hines, despite reports that Bobby was cheating one week before their wedding, married him anyway in 2014.
Hey — at least she’s now getting the full Kennedy wife experience.
As for Nuzzi, she’s nobody’s victim. But she’s also nearly 40 years younger than one of our most famous and charismatic politicians who has arguably, once again, abused his power.
By the way — Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé and fellow journalist Ryan Lizza was fired by The New Yorker for alleged sexual misconduct, which he denied. He has since landed at Politico.
Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and writer for the same magazine, was fired in 2020 for masturbating during a Zoom meeting. He’s since kept his happy perch at CNN.
If there is any justice, Olivia Nuzzi will get her second chance.