A star New York Magazine political reporter has been placed on leave after admitting a personal relationship with a subject, whom reports have identified as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The magazine said in a statement Thursday that Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi had violated its standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures by engaging in a relationship with a “former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign” while reporting on the election.
“Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign,” it wrote.
New York Magazine editor in chief David Haskell said in a note to staff Friday morning that editors learned of the relationship "a few days ago" and immediately "took her off the 2024 campaign."
He said an internal review of Nuzzi’s published work since December found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias" that require corrections. The magazine is engaging an unnamed independent third party to more thoroughly review her 2024 stories, which Haskell said will "influence our final disciplinary decision."
"As I made clear to Olivia, she had created at the very least the appearance of a conflict, and, by choosing not to disclose this to her editors, had violated our policies and potentially damaged our readers' trust," Haskell wrote.
Nuzzi, 31, has profiled political figures and chronicled presidential campaigns since joining the magazine’s staff in 2017.
She is known for her deeply reported features, in which she herself has at times become part of the story — like a 2019 story about texting with Rudy Giuliani and a 2018 incident in which she entered the office of former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski without permission.
Her recent stories include a July piece about a Democratic “conspiracy of silence to protect” then-candidate President Biden and a conversation with former President Donald Trump that was one of the magazine’s cover stories last week. Those have now been updated with a link to the magazine’s Thursday note at the top of the page.
Nuzzi also wrote a lengthy profile of Kennedy in November 2023 — when he was running for president as an Independent — in which she recounts accompanying him on a hike with his dogs, driving together with his dogs in a beat-up minivan (“the death machine smells so bad I thought I might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun”).
Oliver Darcy’s media newsletter Status, which first reported the Nuzzi news on Thursday, cites an unnamed source as saying the alleged relationship didn’t begin until after that profile was published. Nuzzi told the magazine that the relationship began in December 2023 — "after we had published her November profile" — and ended toward the end of August, Haskell wrote in his internal email.
Nuzzi said in a statement shared with several outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, that “earlier this year, the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal.”
She said she did not directly report on the subject or use them as a source during that time.
“The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict,” Nuzzi added. “I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”
She did not identify the source, but several outlets, including Status, named Kennedy.
Kennedy, 70, has not commented directly on the reports. But a spokesperson for the politician, who is married to actor Cheryl Hines, told CNN and NBC News that he “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and threw his support behind Trump in August. Shortly afterward, Trump named Kennedy to his presidential transition team.
Kennedy, who rose to prominence as an environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist, ran a third-party campaign dominated by a series of stunning personal revelations: A worm ate part of his brain; he was the person who dumped a dead bear in Central Park 10 years ago; he didn’t eat a dog as reports suggested, but rather a goat.
Most recently, Kennedy said onstage while campaigning for Trump in Arizona last week that a federal law enforcement agency is investigating him for allegedly taking home the head of a dead whale two decades ago. Kennedy’s daughter Kick recounted the incident in a 2012 Town & Country interview that resurfaced in recent weeks.
The AP reports that Kennedy declined to elaborate when reporters at the event asked about the investigation, saying the mainstream media only wants to talk to him about “gossipy nonsense.”
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