A judge on Tuesday granted a protective order to Olivia Nuzzi, the political writer sidelined due to her ties to fringe presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after she accused her ex-fiancé of harassing and blackmailing her.
New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent was put on leave last month after admitting to a “personal relationship” with Kennedy during his short-lived White House run. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict,” Nuzzi said in a statement at the time, while a Kennedy spokesperson wrote that he “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
Nuzzi accused former boyfriend Ryan Lizza, himself a prominent political journalist with Politico, of organizing a harassment and blackmail campaign against her, culminating with last month’s career-threatening disclosure.
Magistrate Judge Robert Hildum routinely granted Nuzzi’s request that Lizza not have contact with her and stay at least 100 yards away until an Oct. 15 hearing.
Nuzzi asked for the protective order on Monday, accusing Lizza of seeking to ruin her reputation following their broken relationship.
Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation — a threat he has since carried out,” Nuzzi alleged in her Monday filing in Washington, D.C. Superior Court.
Nuzzi claimed that Lizza hacked “my devices for the purposes of stalking and surveilling me and to collect materials to deploy as blackmail to intimidate me back into a relationship and to inflict public ridicule and humiliation as well as professional damage as punishment when I would not return to the relationship.”
While Kennedy’s name was not mentioned in her filing, Nuzzi appears to link that disclosure to Lizza. “Respondent contacted my boss to initiate a conversation about the matter,” she wrote.
The magazine writer also accused her former flame of making threats of “physical violence to coerce me to agree to assume his share of financial responsibility” in a joint book deal the two of them had with a publisher. Nuzzi did not go into further detail on this alleged contract with Lizza, a fellow Washington correspondent who was once fired by The New Yorker over allegations of sexual misconduct. (Lizza disputed the magazine’s decision at the time, calling it a “terrible mistake” to fire him over a “respectful relationship with a woman I was dating.”)
Lizza and Nuzzi could not be immediately reached for comment on Wednesday. Lizza wrote in a statement to CNN on Tuesday: “I am saddened that my ex-fiancée would resort to making a series of false accusations against me as a way to divert attention from her own personal and professional failings. I emphatically deny these allegations and I will defend myself against them vigorously and successfully.”
In November last year, Nuzzi wrote a lengthy piece on Kennedy’s long-shot White House bid, titled “The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign.” The subhead added: “He’s a conservative. He’s a liberal. And he could turn the presidential race upside down.”
Kennedy, the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is best known as an anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist.
He dropped out of the race in late August and endorsed Donald Trump, who also has a long history of spreading falsehoods and dangerous, baseless claims.
Donna Mendell contributed.
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