Vanity Fair Reviewing Olivia Nuzzi’s Conduct After Ex-Fiancé’s Claims: ‘We Were Taken by Surprise’

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Vanity Fair revealed it is reviewing its relationship with newly hired West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi on Friday after claims about her conduct surfaced in a Substack essay by her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, in a development the magazine said has taken editors “by surprise.”

The review comes just months into editorial director Mark Guiducci’s tenure, during which he has already made pointed editorial shifts, one of which included bringing Nuzzi into a senior role.

This came despite her having been dismissed as Washington correspondent at New York magazine in 2024 after editors there discovered she had developed a close personal relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she’d profiled the previous year.

Vanity Fair’s review, however, was triggered by Lizza’s expansive Substack post, “Part I: How I Found Out,” which ignited social media on Monday. In it, he alleges that while he was in a relationship with Nuzzi, she had an additional affair, this time with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. Nuzzi wrote a profile of Sanford for New York in September 2019 and, according to Lizza, the pair began a relationship months afterward.

Asked whether Nuzzi would remain in her role, a Vanity Fair spokeswoman told the New York Times, “We were taken by surprise, and we are looking at all the facts.”

Lizza’s essay landed just as Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, in which she describes intense feelings for a Kennedy-like figure she calls the Politician.

In response to Lizza’s claims, her lawyer Ari Wilkenfeld pushed back, telling The Times: “In American Canto, Ms. Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.”