Part 9: Cover-up
Combat Journalism
Given all the twists and turns of this long, multi-part story and the often bizarre and sensationalistic details, I realize that some readers may have lost sight of something: the biggest and most newsworthy revelation of this series is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conspired with a reporter to abuse a D.C. court so he could save his relationship with Trump and become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.
We are living in a new era of combat journalism in which any high-profile political reporter will encounter ferocious bad-faith attacks from those in power. And during the Trump era, the attacks have intensified from harsh language—“enemy of the people”—to using the machinery of government to target reporters.
It started with civil lawsuits, usually defamation, to harass reporters with time-consuming litigation, intrusive discovery requests, and the depletion of bank accounts. Last year, it grew to encompass the unprecedented use of state power to shape the editorial policies of newsrooms within large companies subject to government regulation.
This week, the legal harassment escalated to the next step: the use of the criminal justice system to seize a Washington Post reporter’s laptops and phone, potentially giving the Trump administration access to all her confidential sources and other highly sensitive information.
Like most political journalists, I have witnessed plenty of hostile rhetoric, both from activists on the margins of politics and from high-level government officials. I’ve also been the target of a frivolous defamation lawsuit from one of the most powerful officeholders in Washington. And unfortunately, I have also seen up close how political actors can weaponize criminal charges against a reporter to prevent him from reporting unwelcome information.
In my case, a future cabinet secretary and one of Trump’s most important campaign allies persuaded his paramour, my ex-fiancé Olivia Nuzzi, to file a false complaint against me to stop me from writing about him in the weeks before the 2024 election.
The longtime legal and political writer Scott Lemieux, who correctly noted that the “heart” of this story is “that Nuzzi’s goal was to suppress damaging information about RFK Jr. both to help Trump and to protect RFK Jr.’s chances of becoming” HHS Secretary, has described these revelations as “almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism.”
Bigger, he argues, than Judith Miller, whose pre-Iraq war reporting for the New York Times was part of “one of the worst systemic failures in the history of American journalism,” according to New York magazine.
Bigger than Stephen Glass, who committed “the most sustained fraud in modern journalism,” according to Vanity Fair.
Bigger than Jayson Blair, whose fabrications and plagiarism at the Times were “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” according to the Times itself.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Given the scale of the Kennedy-Nuzzi scandal, the question I’ve been asked most frequently is, “Why didn’t you tell anyone about all of this when it could have mattered?”
Maybe it could have changed the election.
Maybe it could have affected Kennedy’s confirmation.
Maybe it could have prevented several major media companies from hiring, publishing, and promoting the work of a journalist who crossed such serious ethical lines.
I’ve already explained, in excruciating detail, what happened to prevent the story from being told before the 2024 election.
But what about after that? Many of you have asked me what happened after Nuzzi was forced to withdraw her false claims in D.C. Superior Court on November 8, and I returned to Politico as its Chief Washington Correspondent.
Politico never ran an article about any of this. Why didn’t I tell Politico’s editors about what I knew, which would have been a sensational story for Politico to investigate and publish?
The answer is that I told Politico’s top editor everything.
After its investigation of Nuzzi, New York magazine issued a statement absolving her of wrongdoing. Why, given what I knew, didn’t I tell New York about Nuzzi’s journalistic fraud?
The answer is that I told a senior editorial staffer at New York everything.
Simon & Schuster allowed American Canto out into the world without basic vetting. I had a working relationship with the editor and publisher of Avid Reader, the imprint that published the book. Why didn’t I tell one of them what I knew?
The answer is that I told the publisher everything.
To help promote her book and her return to journalism, The New York Times published a puff piece on Nuzzi, accompanied by a glamorous video and photo essay. Political reporters at the Times, several of whom knew the real story, told me they were appalled by the article, which was eviscerated by Times readers as “hagiography,” “a toothless examination,” and “a fashion shoot” serving as “clickbait.” But I was quoted in the article, so why didn’t I tell the reporter what I knew, which could have saved him and the newspaper from embarrassment?
The answer is that I told the Times reporter who wrote the article everything.
Mark Guiducci, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and his superiors at Condé Nast, hired Nuzzi as an editor and published a widely panned excerpt from her book without conducting basic due diligence about this scandal. The magazine claimed it was “taken by surprise” by the revelations of Nuzzi’s journalistic malfeasance. Shouldn’t they have known better?
The answer is, yes, they should have.
“Why didn’t they care?”
These media companies either knew about, or, in the case of Vanity Fair, should have known most of what I reported in this series, including:
Kennedy’s role in weaponizing a domestic violence court against a journalist to prevent the publication of damaging reporting about him
Kennedy’s alleged use of psychedelics and ketamine
Kennedy’s toxic manipulation of a female reporter 39 years younger than him (I recommend this TNR piece by Nina Burleigh if you think this doesn’t matter.)
Kennedy’s knowledge of the illegal recording of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, from which he may have gained valuable information to aid him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump
Kennedy’s extreme recklessness and poor judgment in regularly masturbating on camera for a reporter and soliciting and sending the reporter explicit pictures and graphic poetry both before and after his security adviser told him that his phone had been hacked (again, read the Burleigh piece if you recoil at the thought of this being part of the public discourse)
Nuzzi’s year-long effort working as a political operative for Kennedy while covering the presidential campaign, including catching and killing negative stories and betraying confidential sources to Kennedy
The real question isn’t, “Why didn’t I tell anyone?” The real question is, “When I did, why did no one seem to care?”
I think I know the answer.
So I’m going to take you behind the scenes at each of these five institutions—Politico, New York magazine, Simon & Schuster, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair/Condé Nast—to explain how these pillars of the American media not only ignored this story, but tried to bury it, favoring instead the fictitious counternarrative spun up by Nuzzi and Kennedy to evade accountability.