Part 1: How I Found Out

Olivia had just returned from a reporting trip—at least that’s what she told me it was—and her Herschel backpack, the one with the flap that never quite closed properly, was tossed beside our bed, its contents scattered on the floor.

That’s when I noticed the sheets of Kimpton Hotel stationery that would alter the course of our lives.

It is surreal now to think back to that room, the one overlooking the courtyard garden that became a metaphor for our decade-long entanglement. It was dazzling during spring’s full bloom and foreboding when winter stripped all signs of life. And lurking underground, way in the back, was the invasive bamboo, which grows like a cancer, and if not tamed, would march through the entire courtyard and kill everything.

I spent hours hacking at the sprouts to keep the bamboo at bay, just as I had with all the secrets that Olivia and I shared.

I tried to poison the roots, cut off the supply of water and nutrients, and repair the underground wall meant to halt their advance. I should have known that it was futile and that, at some point, the bamboo would take over the garden, and that’s all anyone would see.

I can still picture the hotel paper and reporting notepads spilling into the walk-in closet, where a year earlier I had spent an afternoon on my knees carefully arranging scores of her boots, high heels, sneakers, and slippers on an enormous shoe rack.

Olivia almost cried when she saw the results. “Nobody has ever done anything like that for me,” she said.

It is tempting now to forget those moments, to see it as a lost decade, and to cast her as a cartoon villain. After all, she deceived me for a year and smeared me with false allegations. And not just little lies but big fantastical falsehoods—blackmail! (A former child actor, Olivia always had a keen sense for the dramatic.) She orchestrated a plot with the help of a senior Trump official to try to have me imprisoned, and now she’s written what appears to be a largely fictitious and self-serving account about it all.

So, yes, I have reason to be annoyed, maybe even a little angry.

However, despite my many faults, I recognize the pitfalls of relying on anger as the fuel for accountability.

“Those who cling to thinking, ‘He abused me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me,’ never still their hatred,” the Buddha said. So, as I unspool this strange tale over the coming days, I’ll do my best not to let anger or pettiness guide me, and I hope you, dear readers, will hold me to that.

I’ve resisted writing about these events partly because the last year turned out to be one of the happiest of my life, both professionally and personally. As the media industry crumbled, I went independent with this modest endeavor, Telos News, which has been the most gratifying experience of my career. I also met the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known, someone whose beauty, inside and out, takes my breath away. Every day, I marvel at my impossible luck that she loves me back. We just celebrated our first year together.

So why revisit the ugly Olivia saga that seems like it’s from another lifetime? Why get dragged back into this tabloid mess? Why not just let this sordid history dissolve into the past and move on to covering far more important things?

Silence was my preference. And Olivia seemed to agree. Last year, she asked to negotiate a non-disclosure agreement. Earlier this year, she sent a message to me via a mutual friend: I will never talk about any of this again, and I hope you will do the same. I’m not sure if she delivered that before or after she had a publication date for her book, arranged a Vanity Fair excerpt, and secured a profile in The New York Times.

Either way, it wasn’t true, and, unfortunately, silence no longer seems advisable or even possible.

Amor fati, the Stoics advised—love your fate. I have admired that sentiment more than I have practiced it, but that’s the spirit that will guide this series of posts. You have one life, so find beauty and humor and wisdom even in the seemingly darkest and most embarrassing chapters.

Besides, like bamboo, the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open. And in this case, the true story is more bizarre, and ultimately more illuminating about politics and media and love, than anything I’ve ever covered, let alone experienced.

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I stooped to retrieve the papers from the floor and noticed her handwriting on the hotel stationery, which I stacked on her desk.

By this point, I was used to cleaning up Olivia’s messes.

Not that long ago, I had helped her untangle herself from an unusual relationship with Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host. She had messaged him out of the blue. They started talking, and soon after, she fled her unhappy home in suburban New Jersey and started living with Keith in Manhattan. He paid for her to attend college, outfitted her in Tom Ford and Hervé Léger dresses and some $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry. Later, he covered her rent and furnished her apartment in a doorman building in the West Village. While Keith, who was 34 years older, was generous, there were strings attached. Olivia had concealed the relationship from me and other friends, but one day she told me everything—too much, actually—and together we hatched a plan for her escape.

And she had done something similar for me when she helped me untangle myself from a messy situation at The New Yorker, where I worked for ten years.

Her enemies became my enemies and vice versa.

When friends asked why I never responded to Keith’s public attacks on me and Olivia, I explained that she had felt stalked by Keith after she left him, and we had a strict policy of never engaging with him.

Likewise, Olivia despised David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, on my behalf. She once chased after him at a magazine awards event, screaming, “You’re a coward!”

We had both been through a lot in a short period: the death of her father, sexual harassment from Trump aides, my divorce, the Keith situation, David firing me, and cycles of breaking up and getting back together again. It was a turbulent time.

Our relationship was improbable in so many ways, but every time it survived its own contradictions and weathered another storm, we took it as a sign of strength and a shared fate. As we exited that era, Olivia wrote me a note reflecting on “all that we’ve made it through together.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives, and when I look back, the only really sad ones, even if nothing particularly sad occurred, were the ones before I found you.”

Now, the dark clouds had passed, and we were enjoying a period of tranquil domesticity. We moved into a three-story townhouse in Georgetown, where we hosted intimate dinners and threw parties for our friends in media and politics. Olivia wanted to get married in the next few years—“Before I’m old,” she would say, meaning 30—and our Georgetown chapter was a test run for whether that might work. I politely demurred whenever the subject came up and spent my free time in the garden tinkering with fountains and battling the bamboo.

There were also new pressures on us. We were under contract to write a book about the presidential campaign. The primaries were in full swing, and it felt like we were falling behind on our project. But there was one bright spot. Olivia was spending more and more time in South Carolina, from where she had just returned, which was a good thing, I thought, considering how politically important the state was. In the fall, she had published, in New York magazine, a profile of a long-shot but intriguing presidential candidate, and he continued to be a helpful source. Maybe this book would come together, after all.

It was early March. I looked out the window at the garden and noticed the first flowers blooming. Then, squinting, I also thought I saw some new shoots of bamboo. I would have to get out the machete.

But one mess at a time. As I tidied up the desk, something on the Kimpton stationery caught my eye. I started to read.

“If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house,” Olivia had written, “I would still thirst for you.”

Unfortunately, the lack of a water tower on our Georgetown home’s roof ruled me out as the note’s intended recipient.

I flipped to another page and saw a name and the first line of an unfinished love letter to him that included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out.

My heart stopped when I realized who he was.

He was a famous politician, 32 years older than Olivia, and well-known for a sex scandal. But more importantly, he was a presidential candidate, a source, and the subject of Olivia’s recent profile for New York.

I started to build a mental map of the potential blast zone, ticking through the concentric circles of our lives that her recklessness could shatter: the privacy of my children, the wedding Olivia was pressuring me to plan, her journalism career, our book project.

I was not a perfect partner, but the scale of Olivia’s betrayal was devastating. She had an affair with someone who would provide the maximum level of humiliation and personal and professional ruin, perhaps for both of us.

She later explained to me that she became “infatuated” with him after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother.

I was sure our relationship was over. And certainly our book project was dead. She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates?

I looked at the date on her aborted letter to “Mark”: March 5, 2020—just a few days ago.

I called my agent.

“We have a big problem,” I said. “Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford.”