Maureen Callahan (39:38)
We are back. Now we are going to get in to the love quadrangle that continues expanding. It involves Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His third wife. We'll see for how long. We've got theories. Cheryl Hines, the actress most famous for Curb youb Enthusiasm. Olivia Nuzzi, the political journalist whose career blew up after it was revealed that she had conducted what she claims was a quote unquote digital affair, by which I believe she means online only affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Olivia's ex fiance, Ryan Lizza, who has launched a sub stack based on Olivia's disclosures, which he is pushing back against. And Olivia has a book out on Decept on December 2 called American Canto, which I've got some stuff to say about. And my own. My own. I've now become part of this story. I was. I'll tell you all about it. I'll tell you all about it now. Producer Marlena is going to be joining us in a few moments to talk about this story because she and I have just been talking on our own about how wild it is. And I was like, we just have to talk to the troublemakers on the nerve about it because Marlena has really great theories and insights as well. She's been in this world forever. And I'm going to begin with the latest news breaking just two days ago that Vanity Fair is going to publish, quote, an abstract nude portrait of Olivia next week as the scandal plagued journalist is already accused of shirking her job duties at her nude at her new job. I'm trying to keep everything together. This story is wild. Now staffers are privately griping, according to this report in the New York Post, that Olivia has failed to carry out core duties since joining the magazine. If those core duties involve sleeping with her subjects who may or may not be running for president, you gotta give a girl a little bit of time to catch up. Okay, now let's move on to how I became part of this chat. I was texted. So Friday night after. After finishing up at the Anaheim show at. At MK's Anaheim show, I was back at the hotel having a drink and I started getting text after text after text, which was basically like, oh my God, have you seen this? Have you seen this? You're in it, Ryan. Liz's substack, part two of the Olivia Chronicles. He's writing about their breakup, his discovery that she was having an affair first with a different male politician running for president. And we'll get to that. But now he's talking about then finding out about the RFK Jr. Affair. And I'm gonna put it in quotes, you know, who knows what the truth is? But Ryan's substack, part two. And I think I did have to subscribe to get behind the paywall. This is. I'm gonna quote from this directly. I can't say there weren't any signs meaning that Olivia was catting around behind Ryan's back. I resume. Ryan says, I did find it odd that Olivia was simultaneously reading Robert Greene's the Art of Seduction and Maureen Callahan's Ask not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed. I'll get to that in a moment. But the poem Ryan writes, the poem that Bobby wrote to her, let's call it Ryan Wright's American Canyon, and many others too explicit to print, changed everything. Thanks to Bobby, I am now aware of something called felching. Troublemakers, don't go ahead of the class, okay? Do not Google felching. Don't ruin the surprise. We're going to get to it now. This was preceded by a lengthy New York Times profile of Olivia by a journalist named Jacob Bernstein. If you do not know who Jacob is, he is the Nepo son of the late Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein. And Jacob is really sort of like a glorified gadfly who would never have gotten his job at the New York Times were it not for his parentage. Okay? Now, this story was a very gentle, loving portrait of Olivia. And it opens if you, if you go click on it online. It opens with Olivia driving down what looks to me like Pacific Coast Highway. I've learned from Keith Olbermann, okay, that you don't use the article before Pacific Coast Highway. You don't call it the Pacific coast highway, which as a lifelong East Coaster was news to me. But whatever it looks like, that's where she is. And she's in a convertible and her newly white blonde hair is whirling around her head and you can see her Chanel sunglasses affixed just so. And she's shot as though. And she seems to have lost a lot of weight. And I say this only because she is curating a particular image of herself. She looks like she is not a political journalist who is trying to get her credibility and her life back. But she is now a movie star and she is the star of her own movie and she has remade herself in such a way. You know, her hair is white blonde now. She has dropped a ton of weight. Her eyebrows have been tweezed into nothing. She's wearing these very tiny sunglasses and she suddenly has these razor sharp cheekbones and she looks like she is deliberately trying to look like none other, in my estimation. Just my opinion. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Now, I need to preface the rest of it by saying, like you'll be seeing and may have been hearing a lot of media coverage of Olivia's forthcoming book, because it's a big story, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, I believe, has always denied that he and Olivia ever had an affair. So it's a he said, she said, right? But as someone who has extensively reported upon Bobby Kennedy Jr. And wrote all about the abhorrent way he treated his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who eventually committed suicide, I don't believe a word that comes out of this guy's mouth. I don't. I think he did it. Okay, Now, Olivia, I'm going to say this. In the aftermath of the revelation that those two had something going on, alleged, allegedly something going on. Olivia and I had several phone calls, conversations. These were all off the record, per her request. But I do not think that I am the only person that Olivia has tried to cultivate as someone who might then, in hindsight, consider themselves friendly to her or in some way loyal to her or in some way beholden to her. And, you know, in the run up to her book coming out, you know, we hadn't spoken in months. Months. I was suddenly getting messages from Olivia. First of all, she cold called me, and we're not really friends, and I found that a little bit aggressive. You know, only real friends get to cold call you. Most people will text or email beforehand and say, hey, would you have time to talk this week when might be good for you? So I didn't pick up. You know, I couldn't do it. I didn't pick up. That was followed by texts that were like, hey, I have a little something to talk about. About to you if you want. You know, to which I, at this point, I'm like, you know, you know the deal. If you want to go on the record, I'm here, but off the record, I don't understand the point. And then thirdly, it was like, do you want my book now? I didn't respond to any of these because I know how it goes with her. I feel as. And she can correct me if she thinks I'm wrong. I feel as though even for someone in this lane, in this world, she is extremely transactional, and I'm not really interested in that. I don't operate that way. She then went to someone who knows me to say, hey, I can't reach Maureen, but I really want her to get my book. Would you ask her if I could send it to her? To which I said, sure, you know, that's fine. Here's where I'm going to be on the following dates. Have it show up there. And I was told it would be there. And guess what? It wasn't there. And it's still not There Olivia not following through on something she said. So if you want to hear Olivia's song that she recorded when she was 16 on her MySpace page called Jailbait, you can go. We don't have really time to get into it here. I think it's salient only in as much as I do think that this is somebody who from a very young age was looking for fame and notoriety. And it really may not matter how you get it, just that you get it. And my theory, we'll talk about it with Marlena, but it goes to even the publishing of this book and what it's unleashed because once you start telling stories like this, the horse is out of the barn and I don't know how she's gonna work as a journalist again. I really don't. We now know that she, before Bobby had, and she was with Ryan at the time, had been profiling the governor, Mark Sanford, an older white guy who was running for president. And Ryan discovered that Olivia, while covering Mark, had been having an affair with him. So now that's two. At the time, running presidential candidates Olivia was covering that she was also having an affair with. And now we've got conflicting stories to the narrative she's putting out in this book, in this New York Times piece, Keith Olbermann, her former live in boyfriend. Now, I find the age difference disturbing. And I say this as someone who at 19 I was dating. I was like with a guy who is 30 years old. Was that smart on my part? No. Was I working out some like, psychological shit? Yes. Was I pursuing this guy? Yes. Was he a little bit really resistant because of the age difference? Yes. But Keith Olbermann was like in his 50s at the time and like Nicole, sorry. Olivia was like 19. And that's a, that's a big gap. And it makes me wonder, you know, I think there's some really, really. There's some real stuff going on in, in Olivia's psyche. But anyway, so Keith Olbermann has entered the chat he took to his podcast last week, and he's got some issues with the version of the story that Olivia is telling. Here we go.
