The NYT Olivia Nuzzi Profile About Her RFK Jr. Affair Is Good Writing and Bad Editing

By Jacob Weindling  |  November 14, 2025 | 3:23pm
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
Media New York Times
The NYT Olivia Nuzzi Profile About Her RFK Jr. Affair Is Good Writing and Bad Editing

The New York Times profiled Olivia Nuzzi today, an alleged journalist famous for being RFK Jr.’s boo while she was writing profiles about RFK Jr. for New York Magazine, who subsequently fired her over this grave violation of basic journalistic ethics. Nuzzi’s whole career is a story about power and privilege, so it would make sense for a power and privilege reporter like the NYT’s Jacob Bernstein to write about it. This piece has the internet in uproar for good reason, but I’m going to defend Bernstein here. I think he wrote a good profile that didn’t make Nuzzi look better than she made herself look.

But what does make her look far better than the article presents her are the glamorous photos of her that the Times accompanied the story with, as well as the gag-inducing title for anybody with a shred of journalistic decency that does make this look like a PR-driven effort to sell books. I cannot stress this enough to whomever chose these photos and wrote that title as well as this buzzy social media copy: fuck you.

Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir is a combustive portrait of America, President Trump and the scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that upended her career.

In an exclusive interview with The New York Times, she recalls the infatuation that consumed her, Kennedy’s use of psychedelics and much more.

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) November 14, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Readers everywhere need to know that writers do not have the final say on the titles on their stories. They are encouraged to submit them and as editor I don’t often push back on our writers, but if I want to change a title, that’s my job as an editor. Never ever blame writers for the titles above their stories, and that goes double for anything some social media editor writes about it on Bluesky or the MechaHitler site or the pedophile chatbot site. If you only looked at this Nuzzi article through its title that romanticizes the antithesis of journalism, you would think this whole piece is dedicated to making Nuzzi look like a brave truth-teller driving through Malibu with her hair beautifully flowing in the wind (another choice that an editor either did make with an edict to shoot this preposterous PR scene that feels out of place in the article, or did not by bypassing the delete button over something that looks designed to sell books).

But if you actually read the rest of it, she does not exactly cover herself in glory here.

I don’t know how you read this intro and think the writer is doing anything other than introducing you to a couple of subjects through their conflict of interest and then hanging them with their own words.

“Maybe it was the vaccines,” joked Nuzzi as she tried to “explain the unexplainable and reached for a joke for the people who simply could not fathom what came over her.” Bernstein makes that joke the kicker to his opening section where he introduces Nuzzi and her RFK Jr. affair to the audience. You really think he’s setting up to make her look sympathetic?

In the second paragraph of the subsequent section, Bernstein writes “Drones fly overhead; she wonders if it’s merely a coincidence.” If you can read between the lines a bit, he sets the scene of this love story around RFK Jr. by telling the audience that she, uh, kinda sounds like RFK Jr.

As an editor, this story fills me with rage because Nuzzi is a very tricky subject to write about and I think Bernstein did a good job of threading the needle and was betrayed by his editors who put a superficial sheen on it specifically designed to enrage an internet incapable of decoding nuance. Congrats to NYT‘s leadership on the rage clicks that your writer is going to have to pay for. History will definitely remember you Epstein-adjacent shlubs for how brave you were during this era of collapse (fun fact: the name of the Times‘ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, shows up in this recent batch of Epstein documents, and former NYT board member Joi Ito resigned in 2019 over ties to Epstein).

I suspect this story was pitched to the Times, as the article is centered around Nuzzi’s upcoming book American Canto, which is “described here for the first time.” My inbox is overflowing with pitches to interview book authors I will never respond to, and at a much higher level with a larger audience, there is a more surgical nature to these pitches than the pray and spray e-mails to “[NAME]” that I receive.

My guess is that Nuzzi’s PR people pitched the Times specifically on this exclusive, and maybe another outlet or two. It’s always hard to tell how guarded people are with exclusives, but the Times clearly jumped on it, and then that story likely got assigned to Bernstein. I am not privy to how the NYT works and am just extrapolating my own experience as an editor, so it’s possible this pitch came direct to Bernstein, but that is not how some of our coverage here at Splinter has worked, as I have assigned pitches to writers based on my e-mail correspondence. And if Nuzzi’s people did pitch Bernstein thinking he’d write a sympathetic profile of her, they fucked up because he didn’t.

This is all a long-winded way of saying do not place this article’s ills upon its writer. I have some problems with how it is written, like how the mention of her recently being announced as Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor doesn’t come until the end of the profile, as that’s the major Nuzzi news peg in my book, but that is largely due to the article being a chronological story of a reporter venturing out to profile their subject. Again, the main critiques I see of this piece all return to jobs that editors have of shaping coverage. The story of the modern mainstream media is that there are countless reporters and people sitting lower on the org chart who do good to great work, and they are all being betrayed by a bunch of airheaded dinosaurs sitting in major positions of power who prove time and time again that they fundamentally do not understand a lot of how journalism operates in the internet age (or even before then). If that’s what happened with this article, it’s one of the better examples this year that I’ve seen of this dismaying mainstream media dynamic that will not go away until its leadership sitting on Epstein stories does.

Just a suggestion to the Times, one friendly editor to another: you probably shouldn’t put a romantic title and a glossy photo on top of a profile that begins by quoting a disgraced journalist joking about vaccine conspiracies and being spied on by drones. I know if I wrote this profile and saw that title above it, I’d be pissed. The piece is very open about Nuzzi’s betrayal of journalism through her love for a man who stores bear carcasses in his trunk (and even discloses that a so-called journalist “provid[ed] him with advice” over the incident). Past the title and the photos, it’s difficult to find much apologia in it that could be construed as Nuzzi propaganda, and quoting her self-serving explanations for why she did what she did ain’t it.

It’s good work by Bernstein. I’d publish it at Splinter with a far different title and photo, with an added section up front emphasizing how absurd it is that this person is being trusted with an editing job in 2025 given the shitshow this profile is about to detail (with quotes from Vanity Fair if possible). One charge against this article is that this is going to help Nuzzi sell books, which it is, but I have bad news for you about every single profile about a book or an interview with a journalist about an article they wrote. The game is the game, and that is far from the most heinous crime in this story.

Like it or not, Nuzzi is an important journalistic character worth profiling because she threw it all away for the current HHS Secretary while still getting hired afterwards by a major magazine. Just so long as you make her betrayal of journalism central to her RFK Jr. story, it’s not a crime to tell her story. This article doesn’t shy away from that, and those demanding a more political angle on it are misreading who was assigned to write this story. Bernstein writes for the Times’ Style section, that’s not his job. Again, if you have a problem with how it was framed, blame the NYT leadership for funneling this to its Style section and not its Politics section.

But as a longtime critic of the NYT’s decrepit Politics section, I think funneling this story in that direction would be a great way to make this profile look as bad as the people not reading it think it is. The NYT does actually do yeoman’s work writing about power and politics and grand stories about the human condition and how it all comes together—those just all largely take place outside the Politics section that is a safe space for America’s most braindead Very Serious anti-thinkers like Peter Baker. If the Times really wanted the PR-driven profile many are assuming this is by only looking at the PR-style headlines and photos, they would give it to one of the brainstems in their Politics section who excels at that style like Jeremy W. Peters. Keeping this away from the NYT Politics section no doubt enhanced the journalistic integrity of the piece.

This article is a story about how good writers are betrayed by failing people in power these days, and how a lot of folks don’t read the things they get angry about. I also guffawed seeing the title and photo array that looked right at home in a Vanity Fair celebrity profile, but yet again, the Times’ style section put in good work here. Blame the editor who lobotomized its shorthand presentation, as well as the Politics’ section for their inability to do this kind of work without turning it into an array of bothsides pablum and training everyone to think this Nuzzi profile is as bad as they would have written it.

 
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