A media scandal remains in the dark

Olivia Nuzzi doesn't reveal much about her alleged affair with RFK Jr. in new book.

- LEIGH HABER

"You cannot outrun your life on fire," writes political journalist — and recent tabloid darling — Olivia Nuzzi in the opening pages of her much-anticipated memoir, "American Canto.

The release of “American Canto” will no doubt stoke that fire — not extinguish it — if the latter was Nuzzi’s wish when her reputation went up in flames about a year ago.

As the result of revelations of an alleged affair with her interview subject, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who has denied it) during his run for president, Nuzzi was fired from her job as Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. Her fiancé — political reporter Ryan Lizza — broke off their engagement. A frenzied media storm has since ensued, in which Nuzzi is either victim or perpetrator, depending on your point of view.

With “the debris of her life” littering the planet, Nuzzi fled the East Coast for a secluded bungalow in the Southern California hills, where she vowed to no longer “see myself, the character of myself imagined by oth-

[See Nuzzi, E3]

ers, viral allegory of hubris, female avatar of Icarus, stripped and left for dead in a pool of wax.” She recounts pledging “a vow of silence,” and “to fall silent in myself, too.” Further, she writes that “I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.”

In writing “American Canto,” while Nuzzi has broken her vow of silence — smashing it into smithereens and setting off a wave of public retribution by Lizza — she has succeeded brilliantly in her wish not to be understood. Nuzzi emerges less as someone who, in the words of her publisher, “walked through hell and she took notes,” but as a woman whose version of the events that laid her low remain stubbornly unprocessed — as blurry and borderless as the book itself.