Political journalist Ryan Lizza has fired off a letter to publishing giant Simon & Schuster claiming that his ex, Olivia Nuzzi, lied in her hotly anticipated memoir by claiming that he confessed to an affair with a Democrat aide.
Page Six has seen an snippet from an advance copy of Olivia Nuzzi’s “American Canto” — which delves into her own scandalous alleged affair with then-presidential-candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — in which she says that after her own infidelity was exposed, Lizza told her that “he was sleeping with a woman who worked for the Democratic presidential campaign.”
“When he told me this, I was relieved; while still a betrayal, my behavior was not quite so egregious in light of this information,” she writes in the book to be published by Simon & Schuster imprint Avid Reader, “I had been her and so I did not blame her; I looked at her photo and remarked half in jest that she was the ideal person with whom to have committed such sins: She was pretty enough that I was not offended and not so pretty that I was offended.”
Nuzzi — who struck up the alleged romance while covering RFK Jr’s candidacy for New York Magazine — adds that her “calmness seemed to ignite further rage [in Lizza].”
“The disclosure was made to hurt me,” Nuzzi, 32, writes, “That it did not succeed was another injury. I pitied him.”
But we’re told that when he learned this week that Nuzzi made that claim in the book — due to be released on December 2 — Lizza, 51, wrote to Avid Reader’s publisher, Ben Loehnen, and the book’s editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, claiming that the allegations were untrue.
“According to excerpts I’ve reviewed, Olivia Nuzzi includes the following false and defamatory passage about me in her forthcoming book,” Lizza wrote in a letter to Loehnen and Ferrari-Adler seen by Page Six.
He goes on to claim that the “entire” confessional scene in the book “is made up.”
“It never happened… I was never contacted about this false and defamatory allegation,” he wrote.
“I have recordings of the conversations between me and Olivia during the relevant period in 2024… and this purported scene doesn’t exist on any recording,” he added, “It’s a lie.”
Nuzzi has previouly made stunning allegations about Lizza which he has staunchly denied. She applied for a protection order against him in October 2024, in the days after the scandal broke about her relationship with RFK Jr., claiming that Lizza had blackmailed, harassed and survielled her. When she withdrew the application the next month before going in front of a judge, Lizza — then a reporter with Politico — said that Nuzzi had “taken the only course available to her and withdrawn her fabricated claims.”
Since Nuzzi — who left New York Magazine amid the fallout from the affair, and has since signed on as Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor — began doing promo for the book, Lizza has claimed in his Telos newsletter that Nuzzi also had a relationship with former presidential candidate Mark Sanford.
Page Six reported last year that Nuzzi had a prolonged romance with the Camelot scion, thought they only had phone sex and we never physcially intimate in person. According to a story about the book in the New York Times, Nuzzi appears to confirm that account in the book, those she never mentions Kennedy by name.
Kennedy has denied the relationship, saying they only met once when she was working on a profile about him.
A rep for Nuzzi declined to comment. Loehnen and Ferrari-Adler didn’t immediately get back to our request for comment. Lizza declined to comment.
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