Vanity Fair said Friday it’s reviewing the past conduct of its West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, who’s once again in hot water for allegations she had an inappropriate relationship with a politician she covered while at New York Magazine.
In a statement to The New York Times, a Vanity Fair spokesperson said: “We were taken by surprise, and we are looking at all the facts” ― suggesting that Nuzzi’s tenure at the magazine, which just hired her in September, could be on shaky ground.
Neither Condé Nast, Vanity Fair’s publisher, nor Nuzzi immediately returned a request for further comment on her job status.
The “surprise” at hand was an explosive allegation from her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, another well-known journalist, who publicly accused her in an essay this week of having an affair with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, a onetime Republican presidential candidate, shortly after she profiled him for New York Magazine in 2019.
Lizza published his essay shortly after Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Nuzzi’s soon-to-be-published book, “American Canto,” in which she described falling in love with a presidential candidate she was covering. She referred to him only as “the politician,” but the unnamed figure is widely understood to be married Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Nuzzi also covered for New York Magazine.
The magazine said in September of last year that it had put Nuzzi on leave after she acknowledged to editors she’d had a personal relationship with a “former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign.” By October, the magazine announced it had parted ways with its one-time star reporter.
Staffers at Vanity Fair ― which, in an eyebrow-raising move, hired Nuzzi about a year after she left New York Magazine — were “shocked” by Lizza’s bombshell, with one calling it a “crazy week” and another adding that “Leadership seems stressed,” Status reported.
NewsNation also reported Thursday that Vanity Fair staff were in an “uproar” over the incident.
“With her past predilections for presidential nominees coming to light — how will she be able to cover people like Gavin Newsom appropriately? Or other powerful older men for that matter?” one insider at the magazine told the outlet.