Ryan Lizza responded to Olivia Nuzzi’s blackmail allegations in federal court following the revelations of Nuzzi’s undisclosed “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which Lizza said lasted almost a year.
He denied Nuzzi’s claims (filed September 30 in D.C. Superior Court) on every count, providing new alleged details about the breakdown of their relationship and raising his own accusations.
In mid-August, Lizza wrote in a complaint filed in court on October 14: “I discovered that Ms. Nuzzi had been cheating on me with a married man (RFK Jr.) for almost a year. She admitted to the affair and, over the course of weeks of conversation, revealed how she had fallen into what she called a “toxic”, “unhealthy”, “stupid”, “psychotic”, “crazy” “indefensible” relationship with a 70-year-old “addict”. from sex” who told her he wanted to “possess” her, “control” her and “impregnate” her.
“She told me that there was a huge power imbalance between them and that he was manipulating her.”
“None of Ms. Nuzzi’s devices were ever hacked to obtain this information,” Lizza wrote, refuting one of the main allegations made by Nuzzi in a lawsuit filed with the court on September 30. “Almost everything I know about her came directly from Mrs. Nuzzi herself.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza in 2023.
Thasos Katopodis
Lizza claims he discovered the affair on Aug. 17, two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, when he asked Nuzzi to move out of their home. She says that after her affair with RFK Jr. was revealed. Nuzzi spent weeks trying to convince him to stay with her.
Lizza says that three days after learning about the affair, Nuzzi “begged me to consider getting back into the relationship, telling me that her affair ‘wasn’t real’ and that I ‘didn’t want to give up’ on our relationship.” relationship.” Lizza claims Nuzzi also asked him to tell friends they were still together.
Lizza cites a series of alleged text messages from Nuzzi in which she allegedly described herself as “heartbroken” over the possible end of their relationship. He says they started talking about the possibility of moving to Manhattan. Then, in the second week of September, Nuzzi visited him in New York.
“Throughout this period,” Lizza testified in court, “including on our last day together, I told Ms. Nuzzi that I would help her free herself from her disturbing relationship with her lover (Kennedy), but I seriously doubted whether it was possible for her to our common future, (and) that she had to make preparations to move her things from our apartment.
The Other Hidden Secret of Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.’s Romance
This completely contradicts the narrative Nuzzi told: that Lizza was trying to blackmail her into staying with him.
“SM. Nuzzi opposed all attempts to formally end our relationship and repeatedly asked me for more time to consider our future,” claims Lizza. “She did not change this position until the last conversation on this topic, i.e. on September 15.” from the apparent text, in which he told Nuzzi that he would always be there for her if she needed him.
“Her allegation that (I) am trying to blackmail her into re-entering our relationship is a shameful lie that is contradicted by the most basic facts,” Lizza writes. “Ms. Nuzzi’s recklessness is solely responsible for the public ridicule, humiliation and professional damage she claims she has suffered.”
Lizza then denies ever stealing Nuzzi’s personal device, as she claimed, or recovering “deleted material” from it. “These, too, are defamatory lies designed to generate sensational headlines, damage my reputation and divert press attention from Ms. Nuzzi’s disastrously reckless behavior.”
He also denies Nuzzi’s claim that he “threatened her with physical violence,” which Nuzzi says Lizza made when she refused to share financial responsibility for their failed book project that he co-wrote.
“I told Ms. Nuzzi,” Lizza writes, “that I thought she should be responsible for repaying the book advance because this is the second consecutive presidential term in which Ms. Nuzzi’s personal indiscretions have sabotaged our publishing project.”
Lizza also addressed the question of who leaked information about the affair or alerted Nuzzi’s employer: New York warehouse, about its existence. He says that “as Ms. Nuzzi knows, I did not inform her employer of her affair.”
“At every step,” Lizza claims, “I advised Ms. Nuzzi to make decisions that would help her and that would limit the damage and embarrassment for her, for me, for our families, for our respective journalistic institutions and for the family of the person with whom she had romance. I begged her to break off all contact with her lover. I strongly urged her to remove his reporting materials, which she included in the draft of her latest article. (She removed the material and later admitted to a mutual friend that the decision could have saved her job.) When we were in New York together, I begged her to go to her editors and reveal her affair before they found out about it. (She refused.)”
“I was also not a source of information for the reporter who first broke the news of Ms. Nuzzi’s affair,” writes Lizza, referring to Oliver Darcy. “SM. Nuzzi knows this because a reporter told her so.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and wife Cheryl Hines in 2018.
John Sciulli
Lizza ends by emphasizing her shock at what has transpired since he and Nuzzi ended their relationship for good on September 15, four days before news of her affair with RFK Jr. broke.
“For weeks, Ms. Nuzzi has been harassing me with a coordinated defamation campaign, spreading these false accusations to the press. No responsible reporter would print Ms. Nuzzi’s lies. She then repackaged it into a CPO (court protective order) application and released it to the media long before I was served.”
“SM. Nuzzi is wasting the Court’s time and abusing protections intended for survivors of domestic violence to ruin my reputation in a last-ditch attempt to save his own.”
Read more at the Daily Beast.
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