‘He Said He Wanted Her to Have His Baby’: Olivia Nuzzi Details Relationship With RFK Jr in Wild Interview

Olivia Nuzzi at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2023. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

A Friday New York Times interview with Vanity Fair’s Olivia Nuzzi details her intimate relationship with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

“He [Kennedy] said he wanted her [Nuzzi] to have his baby,” reported the Times‘ Jacob Bernstein

Bernstein writes that Nuzzi’s upcoming book, American Canto, chronicles a digital entanglement with “the politician” — whom readers will immediately recognize as Kennedy — while she was covering the 2024 presidential race. In the book, Nuzzi describes a man with eyes “blue as the flame,” someone moved to tears by “the sight of something as trivial as a rose,” and whose “particular complications and particular darkness” drew her in.

Notably, Nuzzi was engaged at the time, while Kennedy was married to actress Cheryl Hines. Nuzzi and her ex-fiancé, journalist Ryan Lizza, ultimately broke up amid the fallout. Kennedy and Hines, however, remain together.

The relationship, conducted through texts and calls, destabilized Nuzzi’s career, ultimately leading to an agreement to part ways with New York Magazine and what she calls a yearlong retreat to Los Angeles. She says she told Kennedy “I love you” only after he said it first, and that he called her “Livvy,” wrote her poems, and pledged that he would “take a bullet for her.”

Nuzzi maintains the relationship was never physical, telling Bernstein, “We were not sleeping together,” but acknowledges a mutual emotional intensity. She went on to recognize criticism from people who wondered “what came over her,” quipping, “Maybe it was the vaccines.”

She also recalls the fallout; that as the story unraveled, “the nation seemed to be up my skirt.” She fled to Malibu, where she wrote much of American Canto on her phone while hiking, describing a year in which she felt “hunted.” Today, she says she and Kennedy have not spoken in a year, telling the Times she has no interest in “offering punditry” about his tenure in President Donald Trump’s administration.