Emily Jashinsky joins The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM's The Wrap-Up Show to discuss the latest in the scandal-plagued story of Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizzo, and the fallout from the release of the Epstein files.
00:01:44.620RFKJ, of course, has been on this show many times.
00:01:48.580He's now our Health and Human Services Secretary.
00:01:50.720Olivia's been on this show, too, and is a friend.
00:01:54.120Ryan Lizzo of Politico, never on this show, but man, is he fighting back in this love triangle in which they allegedly find themselves with the reveal about another politician.
00:02:03.340I mean, what this has to do with your life, I know not.
00:05:26.880And that basically her career wound up taking a massive hit because Kara Swisher, as the reports have it, went to the head of New York Magazine and said,
00:05:38.080Olivia, one of your reporters, is having an affair with RFKJ, whom she profiled, which is what makes it professionally very dicey.
00:05:46.940And she got turfed from New York Magazine.
00:06:04.060And he did not go quietly into the night when all of this happened.
00:06:09.380She wound up filing for a restraining order against him in court, accusing him of taping her and, you know, stalker-esque behavior.
00:06:19.520He denied all of it and said, she's the only one who's done anything wrong here, not me.
00:06:24.160And she wound up withdrawing her motion for a restraining order.
00:06:26.800However, he points out without any proof of her allegations against him.
00:06:32.180So he feels, and to use his word, that he's been defamed by her without evidence and that people are still walking around with this idea that he somehow did anything wrong.
00:06:42.180Whereas he says, you know, I'm the victim.
00:07:03.280I did not ask Cheryl Hines about this when she came by my set to promote her book because it just felt very rude and untoward.
00:07:10.600And if this is true, how is it Cheryl's fault?
00:07:14.000Maureen, my pal Maureen, our fellow star on the MK Media Network, Callahan, she would beg me right now to make the point that her reporting is that Cheryl and RFKJ got together when he was still married to his previous wife, Mary, I think her name was, who was having severe, you know, mental issues.
00:07:35.580And she was basically being driven crazy, I think, in part, according to Maureen, by some of Bobby's actions.
00:07:41.800And so Maureen is very unforgiving of Cheryl, too, because, look, there is that old saying, you lose them how you get them.
00:08:41.300And she was in New York for a time, too.
00:08:43.320And this book sort of juxtaposes between her life as a political reporter on the trail covering Trump, covering, you know, these big presidential races,
00:08:52.940and her obvious allegations that she had an affair with Bobby Kennedy, which, by the way, I've got to just be honest, I buy entirely.
00:09:19.920If you're a health and human services secretary, you're a married man, and somebody's coming out, reporter, saying all these things with you, and not a word of this is true, you would absolutely sue her.
00:09:29.600But you wouldn't if it were true and you knew she had your text messages and so on.
00:10:15.620Okay, but I'm getting, we'll get to the end on what Ryan Lizard just did, which adds a brand new wrinkle to the story in one minute.
00:10:23.840But what does this say to you, this whole saga?
00:10:27.100Because it's, like, so many topics that we all, and people that we all cover and know of, and an industry that we cover and we know of and we're in intimately.
00:10:39.100And it's just, like, it's all anybody can discuss.
00:10:43.360Well, this is obviously a sort of an amplified example of the kind of thing that happens behind closed doors and sometimes not even behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., in New York, Los Angeles, among very powerful, wealthy people.
00:10:58.340But I think everybody understood that this was a messy relationship.
00:11:01.920Certainly everybody in D.C. seemed to understand that this was a messy relationship as it was happening.
00:11:08.360And it all just seemed, like, tornadic the way that they got together and carried out their relationship.
00:11:15.540But, listen, like, where I'm from, this would be, these would be people you wouldn't want to babysit your children.
00:11:21.840These would be people that you wouldn't want, you know, around your family or your kids because the behavior here is just grotesque and sad.
00:11:29.360And I think, you know, Olivia is talented enough to seem interesting and to sometimes mistake self-indulgence for talent.
00:11:41.620But there's this, I think, permission structure people who want to be great writers sometimes give themselves, which is if you are self-deprecating enough, that's license to also be very self-indulgent.
00:11:54.340And the writing in the Vanity Fair excerpt of the book that was released yesterday, it is so overwrought.
00:11:59.740And you could just tell that she wants to be great.
00:12:04.020And I think that's good that somebody wants to be great.
00:12:07.180But I also think young women, younger women, I think Olivia and I are roughly the same age, have been taught that this pain is in some way, and the suffering is some way art in and of itself and is talent in and of itself.
00:12:23.020I hope Ryan and Liz's family gets better.
00:12:24.620But I also doubt that because the arc here seems to be going towards something even worse.
00:12:29.880And based on the allegations that Liz unfolded in the sub stack yesterday.
00:12:33.520I know, I mean, it's like, I don't know, very clearly, Olivia and Ryan, Liz, did not belong together, seemed very clear, this was not a good match.
00:12:46.640And, you know, lots of people handle that bad situation badly, rather than getting out of the relationship honorably.
00:12:54.780They make bad choices, which wind up hurting the other person.
00:12:58.420And I'm always hesitant to really, like, completely go scorched earth, again, unless they hold themselves up as a paragon of virtue, because you never know what the other side is.
00:13:08.520You know, it's like, in my experience, generally, somebody does not cheat unless the relationship has really gone bad.
00:13:16.900Sometimes, like, really sweet spouses who are very loving and caring and supportive do get cheated on because the other person has got some issue.
00:13:24.080But, you know, how do we know on the outside?
00:13:27.400In any event, look, I'm not excusing it.
00:13:28.800I'm just saying this is, it's complicated to try to analyze these things from the outside.
00:13:33.000Okay, so she decides, I mean, it's very interesting because she never gave an interview about this alleged affair.
00:13:40.320You know, it was all articles about her.
00:13:42.320But it was very clear, especially on someone like the Page Six reporting, the New York Post reporting, that she was cooperating behind the scenes.
00:14:59.660First of all, before we get to what's in here, let's go to the Emily Jashinsky dramatic reading from After Party.
00:15:05.860Last night, After Party with Emily Jashinsky airs live on YouTube, Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m.
00:15:10.520If you're missing it, you're missing the party.
00:15:12.860And then you can pick it up as a podcast or a YouTube show, so you can still check it out.
00:15:16.160But anyway, here's just a little clip of EJ giving her dramatic reading full with the black sunglasses that Olivia wears in her photo shoot on the Vanity Fair spread.
00:17:36.060And her favorite of his, or his favorite of hers, which was her lips.
00:17:44.500And then, hold on, this is the part that everybody kind of wants to hear about.
00:17:50.320So, she writes, okay, she did not care about their 39-year-old, 39-year-age difference.
00:18:00.700She said, okay, they both, they both, quote, moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert.
00:18:10.240She writes that, despite being sober for decades, Kennedy told her he still uses psychedelics and even smoked DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences.
00:18:28.940And she writes that she said, I love you only after he said it first.
00:18:36.660He called her Livy and wrote her poems.
00:18:39.040He said he wanted her to have his baby.
00:18:42.520He promised to take a bullet for her in the part I just read.
00:18:46.380She, as the excerpt reads in the New York Times profile that just dropped, profiling her in the book, she loved him.
00:18:56.160She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter.
00:18:59.280And he was then a presidential candidate she had written about.
00:19:02.240She loved his eyes, blue as the flame.
00:19:04.320She loved that the sight of something as trivial as a rose could move him to tears.
00:19:09.800She loved his insatiable appetites and his particular complications and particular darkness.
00:19:16.220They write about a digital affair with Kennedy that revolved around texts and phone calls.
00:19:20.160The revelation derailed her career, leading to her fire at New York Magazine and a very public explosion of her relationship with Chris Silliza.
00:19:27.460Kennedy tried to brush it off, brush her off, sending her into self-imposed exile in Los Angeles.
00:19:33.900The book paints a picture of a nation and a personal life for her on fire.
00:19:38.960She describes the mutual infatuation that consumed her, even if it was never consummated.
00:19:43.240She's ambiguous in the book, but said in one of many interviews, we were not sleeping together.
00:19:48.200But American Canto is far more than bearing witness to Trump world and about how she believes that warped her just as it warped the country.
00:19:58.460Okay, that's basically the highlights before we get to Ryan Lizza's response.
00:20:25.760If you're going to marry somebody who's cheated on other spouses and you're cheating with him when you fall in love and then you marry, what do you think is going to happen?
00:20:36.520You know, it's like some people have these deals.
00:20:40.200This is not what I want, you know, for my relationship, my children's relationships.
00:20:44.420But some people do have these deals where it's either implicit or explicit that they're going to look the other way.
00:20:50.420And again, to the point that you were making, without knowing what's really happening, I mean, even the book refers to him as just the politician.
00:21:00.220And so it's very intimate, but also sort of detached in a way.
00:21:09.360We can't go back and, you know, be in their social circles and know exactly what was going on behind the scenes.
00:21:14.900But I will say I do think it's interesting that Olivia told the New York Times she kind of demurred when asked whether she had the text messages because RFKJ says this was basically unrequited.
00:21:30.340That she was sending him, as you mentioned, Megan, text messages, sexual types of text messages.
00:21:36.620It is hard for me to believe she would do that without it being requited because what an insanely risky thing to do to a man who is as high profile and powerful and married.
00:21:47.600But she also told the New York Times she seemed to say she wasn't going to be releasing any of these text messages and that she kind of said maybe she doesn't even have the text messages.
00:21:57.040And then Liz's story sounds a lot like RF Kennedy Jr.'s story, which is that she was texting him all of the time.
00:22:27.180And that's part of what bothers me about this story.
00:22:29.040I remember the time she held up her phone playing crying migrant children during a White House briefing in Trump 1.0.
00:22:35.600And the entire media hailed her as like this brave hero.
00:22:38.780I think as the administration went on, she kind of like learned to have more like detached bemusement and a little bit of fun with it.
00:22:46.940But her and Ryan Liz both are sort of like anti-right people who have held themselves up as responsible journalists and criticized a lot of people on the right for a long time.
00:22:57.760So I also do feel a bit irked by the revelations of their very, very, very messy and sordid personal lives.
00:32:40.420He writes about how early on in their relationship, he helped her out of a jam with Keith Olbermann, whom she had dated.
00:32:50.940The way he words it in his piece is a little weird.
00:32:54.000It almost makes it sound like she cheated on him with Keith Olbermann, but that's not it.
00:32:59.040She dated Keith Olbermann when she was very young, like 20, 21, and like new to New York, and lived with Keith Olbermann, or at least he paid for her studio apartment.
00:33:10.500And points out like he spent lavished thousands of dollars upon her.
00:33:15.640Keith Olbermann is now gleefully confirming all of this, saying, oh, I was making tons of money at the time.
00:33:21.760We were together four years, that's four birthdays, four Christmases, four anniversaries.
00:33:26.900Like a, you know, plus a Kmart gift card?
00:33:31.460You know, like, okay, you're super important, Keith Olbermann.
00:33:34.580But I'm not going to lie, him actually being Olivia Nuzzi's boyfriend for four years does make him slightly cooler than I thought he was.
00:33:41.140Um, so he's out there, he's enjoying every second of this.
00:33:46.320And, uh, Ryan Lizza writes about how she came to him, Olivia did, and is like, please help me, you know, clean up this mess that I made with Keith Olbermann.
00:34:19.960This is, this is the part where it just gets good for Keith Olbermann.
00:34:22.820All right, we're going to get her back on, but she knows the story.
00:34:24.740So I'm going to continue reading for the listening audience.
00:34:26.600Um, okay, and then Ryan Lizza writes as follows, that there was a period in their relationship where he uncovered a secret love letter on hotel stationery after she returned from covering what he thought was just the presidential race in 2020.
00:34:49.800She was on the road, he thought she was just doing, like, presidential politics coverage, and he finds a secret love letter she began to pen but did not yet complete on hotel stationery.