Part 5: Loyalty Test

If you are new to this series, please read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.

Kara Swisher was blunt: now that she knew about Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with Bobby Kennedy, she had an obligation to tell David Haskell, the editor of New York magazine.

I asked Kara to hold off for a few days while I tried to convince Olivia to disclose the relationship with Bobby on her own. “She deserves the chance to do the right thing,” I told Kara, and she agreed.

By this point, Bobby was reportedly bragging about the affair to some people, and Olivia had told at least four friends about it. It was no longer a secret, and it was going to spread.

On September 7, I drove to New York on a mission with two goals: to get Olivia to come clean to her editor and to cut her out of my life. I asked her to take a walk on the High Line the next day, when I planned to make my case. I expected to be in and out of Manhattan in 24 hours. Instead, she pulled that jealous, possessive routine I described in Part 4 while I was at dinner, showed up at my hotel, and remained with me at The Standard on the West Side for five nights.

I had been telling our friends that I believed she was suffering from a mental health crisis and needed help. Seeing her in person was startling. It seemed to me that she had had some kind of breakdown. She appeared overwhelmed, erratic, and disconnected from what was happening around her. I needed Olivia to remove her belongings from my apartment, drop herself from my health insurance, come up with a plan to pay back our book advance, and address a host of other issues necessary to untangle our lives. I told her I could pack all her stuff and put it in storage.

“I thought we were going to discuss getting back together?” she asked.

I told Olivia clearly and firmly that her editor would soon learn of her affair with Bobby and that she needed to disclose it to him immediately. I could not tell her why I knew this, but I assured her it would happen and that it would happen very soon. Olivia shut down the conversation. She insisted that nobody would ever find out. She insisted that there was no conflict anymore because Bobby wouldn’t be an important political figure going forward, which was, of course, absurd. She screamed at me to never bring it up again.

My mission to New York failed.

I texted Kara on the morning of 9/11. “I’ve made no progress,” I wrote. She went to Haskell with the news that night.

As I left my hotel room the following morning, Olivia repeated what she had said back on August 17 when this all started: “If anyone ever finds out, I’m afraid Bobby will kill me.” I never saw her again.

The following day, Friday the 13th, Haskell called Olivia into his office and confronted her. She denied everything at first. He lost his patience and allowed her one last chance to come clean. Olivia finally told him the truth.

The news ping-ponged around the offices of New York magazine, and Oliver Darcy heard the story within days. Oliver and Olivia were friends, two years apart, and had come up together in journalism. He had just left CNN to launch the media newsletter Status in August, and he was hungry for a big scoop to establish it as a major news brand.

Oliver didn’t have the whole story, but he reached out to Olivia about what he’d heard—that she’d been placed on leave at New York magazine while the editors investigated some kind of inappropriate relationship with RFK Jr.

Olivia pulled together a small group that would serve as a sort of crisis communications war room for her as the scandal widened in the coming days. Rachel Adler, Olivia’s agent at Creative Artists Agency, would serve as her main representative to the media. Matt Dornic, then unemployed but formerly CNN’s corporate spokesman and best known for managing a magazine profile that led to the head of CNN losing his job, would help manage the press.

According to several people involved in the discussions, Olivia’s team initially batted around a few ideas to make Oliver go away. Status was tiny and just getting off the ground. They doubted Oliver had libel insurance and thought they could scare him into backing down with legal threats. “They decided to deny it because he’s small and can’t afford a lawsuit,” said a participant in these early discussions.

As Oliver persisted, Olivia’s team developed a new lie. Rachel told Oliver I had made everything up and was spreading a false rumor about Bobby and Olivia. There was no relationship. It was all a lie concocted by her crazy ex. Strike two. Oliver knew this was false because he had already talked to me. I refused to confirm the story and did everything I could to nudge him away from pursuing it. Why would I want to be sucked into a tabloid scandal as the third wheel in Olivia’s nauseating adventures with an odious sex addict?

As the crisis over Oliver’s inquiries deepened, Olivia developed a plan to turn me into a stock character that she would use, right up until this month, to deflect attention away from her and Bobby—and their recklessness—and onto me.

I would be cast as “the scorned ex.” It was a familiar gendered script—the “scorned ex” trope that tabloids rely on to simplify complicated women and vilify men. She leaned on it because she knew it was a story people would instantly recognize.

Olivia was good at this. She grew up in a house where the soap operas of the WWE were debated the way some families debate politics. She read the Daily Mail so obsessively that she could name individual commenters. She carefully studied the PR strategies behind high-profile tabloid breakups, such as those of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and dissected them with friends and political strategists. And for nearly a decade, she had been covering Donald Trump, who turned everything in his life into an easily digestible story in which he was a hero or victim under attack by vindictive heels. Olivia was also working on a screenplay, a corny political potboiler, which taught her to sharply define characters for a mass audience. If there was one thing she knew, it was how to manufacture a simple and compelling plotline.

The problem was that Oliver didn’t buy it, and the more Olivia and Rachel lied to him, the more determined he became to break the news of her affair. He came back to them after a second source confirmed the story.

Olivia’s team went back to the drawing board. One of Olivia’s friends suggested that Oliver should be told that Olivia is depressed over the failure of her engagement and the potential loss of her job, and that if Oliver published his article, it might cause her to harm herself. Olivia as the victim was the right idea, but it still needed something more, something that would really elevate the stakes.

And this is when things took a much darker turn. Olivia and her colleagues in the war room workshopped the idea and came up with a more menacing version that they gave to Oliver: he could not publish the story because if he did, it would send Olivia’s lunatic ex-fiance into a fit of rage and endanger Olivia.

One of the people involved with these discussions called me and told me about the plan the same day it was hatched. “She’s desperate, Ryan,” this person said, “and she’s trying everything to save her career and not have this come out.” I called Oliver the night he published the article, and he confirmed that Olivia had indeed made this argument to him in an effort to kill the story. He blamed Olivia’s CAA agent, who was his main contact on the piece.

“Rachel is running the whole thing,” Oliver said.

“Nuzzi’s RFK Relationship” was one of the biggest stories of Oliver’s career, and, in a very competitive space, it cemented Status as the reigning media newsletter. The story was a global tabloid sensation, with pictures of Olivia and Bobby plastered everywhere.

And the next day, Olivia was … elated. According to three people who either spent time with her or talked to her, Olivia was in the best mood they’d seen in weeks. The explanation for the high was that, behind the scenes, she and Bobby were working together again. They had actually coordinated their statements to Oliver. Up until then, Bobby had been ghosting her, so Olivia, according to her friends, was ecstatic to be back in touch, even if it was for the narrow purpose of protecting him and humiliating her.

When I told a friend about this sequence of events, he reminded me of a macabre joke: A Kennedy is forced to choose between throwing his wife or his mistress off a moving train. “My mistress,” he says, “because she will understand.”

What Olivia understood is that Bobby needed her to protect him from any damaging information coming out about him before November 5.

“I just need until the election,” Bobby told Olivia, according to a passage in her book that unintentionally reveals how she worked to ensure that the Trump campaign would not be damaged by Bobby’s scandal.

The chance to once again collaborate as Bobby’s secret political operative, this time to help Trump get elected, so he could make Bobby a cabinet secretary, was exhilarating to Olivia.

“She seemed weirdly thrilled by it,” one of Olivia’s close friends told me. “She bonded with Bobby over handling the crisis.”

---

The Bobby high was short-lived, and she, Matt, and Rachel turned their attention to two problems: how do they simultaneously protect Bobby and rehabilitate Olivia? I was the answer to both questions.

She blamed everything on me. She blamed me for New York mag finding out and eventually firing her, even though the editor who fired her told her that wasn’t true. She blamed me for Oliver Darcy finding out and breaking the news of the affair, even though Oliver told her that wasn’t true.

The truth did not matter. It somehow had to be my fault that she was suffering any consequences for her recklessness—carrying on with a presidential candidate she was covering and using as a source, defrauding me as a business partner and co-author in a $1 million joint book project she had detonated, vaporizing my privacy, and jeopardizing my career as a journalist.

It had to be me. After all, just days before he confronted her, I had confidently told her that Haskell would find out. How did I know that?

One of Olivia’s friends phoned me after the news of the affair broke. She had just spoken to Olivia and wanted to warn me about something.

“Olivia is extremely paranoid,” the friend said. “And she wants to come after you.”

Over the next 12 days, from September 20 to October 1, Olivia unleashed a sophisticated and largely covert campaign of revenge to destroy my reputation and my livelihood. I experienced this plot as a series of defamatory leaks to the press pushed by Olivia, Rachel, and Matt. What Olivia didn’t know was that several of her friends involved in these rolling conversations with her were so appalled by what she was doing that they felt obligated to tell me to help me protect myself.

“She’s gonna make you the psycho-killer-could-snap-at-any-moment boyfriend,” said one of her friends, who spent hours talking to Olivia after the affair became public. Olivia, this person said, was starting to tell people that I might kill her.

I tried to explain that Olivia watched a lot of Law and Order growing up and has an active imagination, especially when it comes to being killed. She feared that her mother would kill her. She had told me that she thought Keith might kill her, and now I have to assume she told Keith the same thing about me. Of course, she repeatedly told me that she feared Bobby would kill her, and now she was saying that I might kill her. (I never heard her say one way or the other about Mark Sanford’s level of interest in killing her.)

So many people were out to kill her, and yet here she was at 31, somehow very much alive and orchestrating an impressively complicated revenge plot to help bring back measles, whooping cough, and polio.

I didn’t take any of this seriously at first. But another friend called with more specific details that she found disturbing. The story Olivia was peddling kept gathering more baroque details. Olivia’s friend said that Olivia is going to tell people that she is “in danger,” and “is in hiding” and “paint you as a stalker.”

Olivia screamed at her when she pushed back against this scheme.

“I said, ‘You are not in danger! Has he tried to go to Gabby’s place [where she was staying]? He doesn’t even know where you are! Has he tried to contact you? You have not shown that you feel you are in danger other than telling people this.’” Olivia hung up on her.

In her book, Olivia casually reports that her brother, Jonathan Nuzzi, raised the possibility of murdering me. (I always liked the guy, so this was sad to learn.)

Instead, she tried to murder my reputation. Over the next week and a half, I would start most mornings taking calls from Olivia’s concerned friends, who would tell me about the stories she was planning to leak to the press. I would then spend the rest of the day fielding calls from reporters asking about those very stories I had been warned about.

One day, it was a story about being a stalker. The next it was about having an affair. But it all started with a coordinated campaign to blame me for the public disclosure of her relationship with Bobby. A battalion of reporters blew up my phone after Oliver’s piece was published, when Olivia wanted to quickly shift the narrative by introducing me as a new villain in the drama.

“She is telling reporters that there are text messages that say you destroyed Olivia’s career and bragged about it,” one of her friends told me.

I thought the phony detail about the text messages was a nice touch. It allowed the reporter to whom it was fed to imagine a piece of documentary evidence that could be attained. And once Olivia, Rachel, and Matt started circulating the rumor, it might take on a life of its own.

I heard there were text messages.

Me too!

Have you seen them?

Hours later, a reporter from the New York Post called me and asked me about these alleged text messages, using almost the same language as Olivia’s friend. (I knew from that moment I could trust the friend, an unexpected guardian angel who continued to provide me with accurate information about Olivia’s machinations.)

Brad Dayspring, Politico’s head of communications, called me with urgent news. He said that the New York Times was working on a story about how I had engineered Olivia’s downfall by leaking her affair to New York and to Oliver. “Yeah, Brad, so are ten other news organizations,” I said. “I’ve been dealing with this all day.” The New York Times reporter told me that Rachel was her source.

I asked Brad to call Rachel and tell her to cease and desist unless she and CAA wanted to face a defamation lawsuit. CAA is a multibillion-dollar corporate behemoth, and Rachel was using the company’s reputation and resources to defame me on behalf of Olivia, Bobby Kennedy, and the Trump campaign. It is shocking that she still has a job there.

Olivia’s initial plan, I was told contemporaneously by one of her closest advisers during this period, was to leak the false story of my role in her downfall to a “sleazy reporter” who would print it without much vetting.

Eleven reporters from eleven different publications called me with some version of this allegation. I felt like I was in a game of Frogger, dodging through heavy traffic as I desperately sought the safety of the opposite sidewalk.

Ten publications declined to print Olivia’s lies: The New York Times, The New York Post, Semafor, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, People, Business Insider, and The U.S. Sun.

But Olivia’s plot to find a “sleazy reporter” who would print her claims without vetting was successful with one person at one outlet: Dylan Byers at Puck.

Halfway through the day on Friday, September 20, after fending off the initial wave of reporters who came to me with lurid stories generated by Olivia’s war room, I sent her a text.

“Please stop doing what you are doing and tell Rachel [Adler of CAA] to stop,” I wrote. “If you continue to lie about me, I will be forced to correct the record and tell the truth about what happened. I don’t want to be part of this game and I don’t want [my children] and my parents to have to read any more about this. I am always here to talk to you, reset, turn down the temperature, and get us back to a place where we are civil and respectful with each other. Please, Olivia. I am not your enemy, and I will never be your enemy no matter what you think.”

Ninety minutes later, my phone lit up with a call from Bobby. Our last conversation ended on a friendly note, but a lot had happened since then, and under the circumstances, it seemed wise to let the call go to voicemail.

Bobby texted me a minute later: “Butt dial. Apologies.”

In our last text exchange, he had threatened me, so I appreciated the lighter mood.

That mood soured when I realized what had happened. Bobby had apparently been forwarding my contact info to his security adviser, a terrifying individual with a terrifyingly appropriate name, Gavin de Becker, who was a mysterious, alleged billionaire with a bio akin to a Bond villain. Bobby had apparently accidentally called me while grabbing my number for de Becker (no worries, Bobby, we’ve all done that.)

De Becker texted me two minutes after Bobby’s butt dial: “From Gavin de Becker. Hi Ryan, please excuse A text from someone you don’t know, though obviously you can learn more about me from Wikipedia or other online sources. Give me a call when practical.”

I looked up his Wikipedia page and read the “Early Life” section:

“De Becker describes his childhood as mired in violence. His parents divorced when he was three. His mother was a heroin addict who physically abused him and his sister and once shot his stepfather while de Becker was present in the home. She committed suicide when he was sixteen, and de Becker subsequently moved in with a friend from school, Miguel Ferrer, the son of actors José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney. He lived with the family for two years and would go on to work with Clooney as her road manager. He then worked as Elizabeth Taylor’s assistant.”

What kind of person points someone to this as a means of introduction? Someone who wants to intimidate you, of course.

The Wikipedia page went on to note that de Becker also worked for Bill Cosby, the Secret Service, and Jeff Bezos, and that his “friend” George Harrison reportedly died at de Becker’s home.

I did not call him back.

For the next few months, de Becker would hover in the shadows, working on Bobby’s behalf to keep the public from knowing any of this story. He would occasionally check in on Olivia, according to her friends, just to make sure she remained loyal and was protecting Bobby’s secrets. At one point, Olivia told Tucker Carlson about the details of one of de Becker’s calls to her. Tucker told her she should fear for her life and offered to send her a shotgun.

---

Soon after he convinced Olivia to take a bullet for him, Bobby ghosted her again. Then he engineered a media blitz that anonymously smeared her as a stalker, the same thing he had said about her in a text message to me back in early September.

Bobby’s campaign of leaks against Olivia—she “chased him with porn”—was an effort to downplay the seriousness of their relationship and recast it as something purely libidinous. He had told Olivia that his marriage to Cheryl could survive “if it was just sex,” and so he had to attack Olivia as, in her words, “a two-dimensional sex-crazed cartoon,” rather than someone to whom he once sent the following poem:

Did I fall first In love With her mind or

her body? Or was it her language or her boldness?

All long before i tasted her or inhaled her aromas.

I had to laugh when I recently read Olivia’s after-the-fact complaints about Bobby’s campaign against her. For one, at the same time Bobby was smearing her, she was engineering a far worse campaign of lies against me—and she was doing it at his direction. But more galling is that at the time, I was the only person actually defending Olivia from Bobby’s lies. I called Matt Dornic and screamed at him for letting Bobby get away with his sexist attacks against Olivia with no pushback from her side. He told me she wasn’t listening to his advice and wouldn’t let him say much in her defense. We now know she was allowing herself to be destroyed to help Bobby get past the election.

I went so far as to obtain permission from Politico to make an on-the-record statement to The New York Post, narrowly correcting the record about the true nature of their relationship. But then I realized how stupid it was for me to get involved, and I disengaged.

Olivia, Matt, and Rachel continued their campaign against me, apparently unaware how many people, disgusted by what they were doing, were calling me with contemporaneous accounts of their defamations. Just hours after I sent Olivia the warning via text, her friend called me and told me a detailed story about how Matt Dornic had asked her to lie to a reporter.

“Dornic told me everything he wanted me to say,” this person told me. “He said, ‘If you don’t feel comfortable lying, I’m not going to ask you to lie.’ I’m like, ‘That’s exactly what you’re asking me to do!”

On another day, I woke up to a report that Olivia’s new strategy was to spread a story that she had an affair with Bobby because I had slept with my kids’ nanny.

“My kids are teenagers,” I said. “They don’t have a nanny.”

I could imagine Olivia loving the nanny story, as she probably figured it would do well with the British tabloids.

But I told Olivia’s friend not to worry about it, as even Olivia and Rachel are smart enough not to destroy their credibility by spreading such a provably false story.

Minutes later, a reporter from The Daily Beast rang. By now, I had become used to our morning conversations in which he brought me the latest smears from Olivia’s camp.

“What fresh hell do we have this morning?” I asked.

He seemed unusually shy, and I told him to just spit it out, as I’d heard it all by now.

“I had heard that part of how all of this started,” he stammered, “was that you, um, had an affair with your nanny and that’s why Olivia had her affair with RFK.”

In her book, Olivia revived this defamatory allegation, turning the nanny into an operative on a presidential campaign. For the record, the only presidential campaign operative I slept with while I was engaged to Olivia was Olivia herself when she was secretly working for Bobby.

Nannygate brought me close to the breaking point during these twelve days. I thought to myself, How the fuck did this happen? Why am I even part of this story? Is my imaginary nanny running for president of the United States while I’m writing a profile of her for Politico? I lost my temper during one conversation with someone close to Olivia, hoping it would get back to her: “For her to wake up every day with a new fever dream about how to drag me into this and blame me for her ruining her fucking life is more than I can take.”

I had dealt with most of the drama with bemused detachment. But I was spending all my time on the phone with reporters, fending off made-up stories spread by Olivia and her two PR geniuses. Some of their dirt was, at the very least, making it into the background of the coverage and affecting the tone.

At Politico, I had recused myself from any coverage of Kennedy, but I was now planning on writing a first-person account of everything I knew. I didn’t have a sign-off on the piece yet, but the editor of Politico magazine loved the idea. I started making reporting calls, and the existence of the project inevitably got back to Olivia and Bobby.

In the wake of Nannygate, I also started talking to someone at the Wall Street Journal, and she persuaded me that I had a responsibility to correct the record about a few things.

In hindsight, I may have over-corrected.

Isabella Simonetti brought Olivia some information she had learned from “a source familiar” with the situation. Olivia recorded their conversation in which Olivia denied everything, even though it was all true. Just as she had been doing for a year, with stories about bears and campaign leakers, Olivia saw the Journal article as an opportunity to reconnect with Bobby. Since he had blocked her old addresses, Olivia created a new email account to alert him to the Journal article, according to one of Olivia’s friends. Then, Olivia sent the recording of her conversation with Isabella to Tucker Carlson, and asked Tucker to send it to Bobby. Olivia wanted Bobby to have proof that she remained loyal and that she continued to lie for him.

Bobby and Tucker, I was reliably told, had dinner during this period, and they debated how high up the plot to destroy Bobby went. Tucker, by then, was telling people, including Olivia, that Bobby was being blackmailed by Israel. And in terms of conspiracy theorists, he was like the Alex Jones to Bobby’s Oliver Stone. Bobby just thought it was me, possibly working with Olivia. But Tucker thought it was a much grander deep-state plot to destroy Trump by destroying Bobby. He assumed I was just the tip of the spear.

The presidential election was 40 days away, and everything was coming to a head. Olivia was juggling three interconnected personal crises. New York magazine was conducting an investigation of her relationship and how it affected her coverage. Bobby was wondering about her loyalties as she desperately continued to get his attention. And I was following through on my promise to “correct the record” and “tell the truth about what happened” via the Journal and my own account.

Then Olivia came up with a grandiose, galaxy-brain idea—one she believed would solve all three of her crises at once. She got in a rental car and drove west, so she could tell everyone she was fleeing for her life—from me. When her friend, who rolled her eyes at every one of Olivia’s schemes, reported this new plot to me, she described it with a different tone. For the first time, we discussed the possibility that maybe Olivia doesn’t think she’s lying.

“Sometimes I worry that maybe she takes so much Adderall and gets manic and really believes this stuff,” her friend said. “People who take and abuse Adderall start developing paranoia. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Does she really believe this?’ I don’t know.” I’m not qualified to diagnose her, and I won’t try. What I can say is that several people close to her expressed concern that her behavior had changed dramatically.

There was more to the new plan than a simple cross-country trek. On September 27, I received an ominous call from someone who had been texting and talking to Olivia that day. She read a message Olivia had sent her: “Everything is about to get really bad.”

“You’re scaring me,” I said.

“You should be scared.”

“What the fuck is going on?”

“Olivia went to the FBI.”

“To turn herself in for taping Trump?”

“No, she told them you hacked her phone—and Bobby’s phone. And she told me she thinks you hacked my phone.”

(Olivia told people that the reason she believed that I was such an accomplished hacker is that I worked as a salesman at a computer store for a summer in college, in 1995.)

Filing a false report to a federal agency is a felony. Doing so as a public figure, in the middle of a political scandal, is rather extraordinary. And she wasn’t even close to finished.

Olivia had finally gotten Bobby on the phone. She told him about her FBI report, and he approved of it, according to a source familiar with the conversation. But Bobby was angry. Isabella’s impending story apparently did not go over well in the Kennedy household. The Journal article could cost him his relationship with Trump and Cheryl.

I just need until the election.

Bobby accused Olivia of betraying him and being in cahoots with me. She denied it, and so he demanded that she prove her loyalty to him with a test.

In his poetry to her, Bobby had told Olivia she would have to show “fearlessness” and, “at times, total submission.”

Now was such a time.

“You need to be prepared,” Olivia’s friend warned me after hearing Olivia’s readout of the call. “Olivia talked to Bobby, and he’s making her do something really, really crazy.”