Drugs, sexting and Trump’s tantrums: RFK’s alleged ‘digital lover’ Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir lands

MEMOIR
American Canto
Olivia Nuzzi
Simon & Schuster, $49.99

Journalists must abide by a few select rules, perhaps none more important than to never blur the line between reporter and source. Olivia Nuzzi, a wunderkind journalist previously at New York Magazine, broke this prohibition when she engaged in a “digital affair” with one of her subjects: Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr.

Another tenet, perhaps less appreciated, is that writing a tell-all book about the saga will invariably redeem your public image. Her former editor even wonders, after the news breaks of her affair with Kennedy, whether “[she] could write [her] way out of it”. After finishing her confected new memoir American Canto, it’s clear the journalist can’t parlay this misstep into a loftier project.

The memoir gives a kaleidoscopic chronicle of her years reporting on Donald Trump, first his initial presidential run and then his time in office. Brief interludes then cover her questionable relationship with former subject RFK Jr, whom she profiled for New York Magazine as he launched his own 2024 presidential run.

It proves hard to trust this journalist-as-subject retelling her side, especially given the 32-year-old’s fondness for opacity describing the “affair” and dishonestly to others (she repeatedly lied to an editor about her relationship). Stilted metaphors about fires, flags and brain worms – paired with impressionistic vignettes about Trump – attempt to elevate the book into a trenchant and clear-eyed portrait of America today. But American Canto isn’t this.

First some background. After first profiling the 71-year-old Kennedy for a story, then – and only then – did she begin a “digital” relationship with the Camelot scion. More recently, her ex-fiance, fellow journalist Ryan Lizza, has gone scorched earth on his Substack, claiming past impropriety between Nuzzi and others profiled, including presidential candidate Mark Sanford. Lizza has also claimed Nuzzi became a “political operative” for RFK Jr, allegedly feeding information back to the politician himself.

Tabloids, meanwhile, have dug into Nuzzi’s history and uncovered Jailbait, a song she reportedly recorded as a teenager: “Sixteen will get you 20, I’ve got you locked for life/ Jailbait, I’m jailbait.”

RFK Jr, as lover and confidant, may have only appeared after the piece was filed, but Nuzzi elides explaining this further. With eyes that were “blue as the flame”, the often “shirtless” Kennedy fed her endless paeans: from professing to “tak[ing] a bullet” to telling the journalist that “he wanted [her] to have his baby”. The politician also apparently had a habit of regularly showing Nuzzi photos of his younger – and more virile – self.

Beyond her rhapsodising, Nuzzi does make one startling claim about RFK Jr: the current Health and Human Services Secretary, who claims to be completely sober, often smokes the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT). For a politician sceptical of vaccines, Nuzzi writes that his toiletry bag is “full of so many prescription pill bottles it seemed to barely zip close”.

Trump repeatedly appears in Nuzzi’s narrative, as she recounts her years following the US president on the campaign trail and during his first chaotic administration. Not unlike RFK Jr, Nuzzi paints Trump as a contradictory and combustive figure, prone to histrionics and desperate whims.

Then, there are her contrived attempts to read metaphor and meaning into MAGA. For example, when Trump shows Nuzzi his maimed ear after his assassination attempt, she writes: “[a]n ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternative timeline”. These moments don’t seemingly hold any portent but suggest these political figures have an alluring, even corrupting, hold over the reporter.

As Nuzzi recounts these many impressionistic tales, she keeps one slightly remote and out of frame: the implosion of her career. After discovering the improper relationship with RFK Jr, Nuzzi leaves New York Magazine and moves to Los Angeles, later starting as an editor at Vanity Fair. (However, recent reports suggest this new job may not come to fruition.)

Nowhere in American Canto is there any overt acknowledgement of anguish this scandal has caused or atonement for her error of judgement. Endless abstracted digressions of wildfires assailing California and cryptic quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche fill out this absence.

Our attention economy has demanded nowadays that members of the media ecosystem often position themselves to be celebrities. Many journalists are now the subject of worship, envy and public intrigue, sometimes as much as the people they write about – in all, a cruel combination that Nuzzi seems victimised by here.

Is American Canto a political account of reporting from the coalface of Trump’s America? Or is it a tell-all memoir about suffering under the weight of a public scandal? In the end, neither seems true: Nuzzi’s account is a disingenuous history of one journalist orbiting many powerful political figures, refusing to see the blurring of journalism’s rule of objectivity affect her perspective.

It seems ironic then that Nuzzi conjures the image of Trump enraptured when rewatching his favourite film: Sunset Boulevard. The parallels may not be obvious between the movie and Nuzzi, but its message on the noxiousness of fame and exploitation of others for personal gain, echo by the end of American Canto.

Nuzzi may not be an ageing movie star undone by delusion. But she emerges in her self-portrait much like Norma Desmond, a narcissist whose vain attempts at a comeback – without any attempt at self-examination – are doomed to fail.

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