Part 3: Catch and Kill
If you are new to this series, read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
I know Part 2 was a lot—reliving that chapter was a lot for me, too. I asked you to hold me accountable for my tone in these dispatches, and I meant it. Some of you thought I included too much that was personal. I read every comment, and I take your feedback seriously. I’m grateful to have such a smart, engaged, and empathetic audience. For now, I will just say that you have to know those details, as salacious as they are, to truly understand this story, which, some of you might be disappointed to learn, is ultimately not about sex. So stick with me here. We haven’t reached the halfway point, and I haven’t yet described the most bizarre, consequential, and newsworthy events.
One night in early August 2024, before I knew anything, Olivia Nuzzi became obsessed with obtaining an advance copy of an article that The New Yorker was set to publish the following day. Olivia was desperate to get a preview of a profile of Bobby Kennedy Jr. by Clare Malone, a political reporter whom Olivia viewed as a competitor.
The piece included a killer anecdote, one of the most memorable of the presidential campaign, and which would come to define Bobby’s image for much of the public: A decade earlier, he had left the carcass of a black-bear cub in Central Park as some kind of twisted prank.
This was precisely the sort of story that Olivia relished, a Twin Peaks-like tale that illuminated the darker parts of a candidate’s mind. Olivia had written one of the earliest profiles of Bobby, so I figured her fixation on getting The New Yorker piece was also about professional jealousy. Bobby was her subject. Now she had missed a major scoop about the candidate whom, behind the scenes and without much explanation, she insisted would be the next president.
What I didn’t know at the time was that she was secretly working to help make Bobby the next president.