US Politics
The View’s Sunny Hostin slams ‘self-serving’ Olivia Nuzzi memoir
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The View co-host Sunny Hostin has ripped into Vanity Fair editor Olivia Nuzzi’s debut memoir, which details her alleged digital affair with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Published Tuesday, American Canto includes bombshell accounts of the 32-year-old journalist’s alleged sexting scandal with Kennedy during his 2024 presidential campaign.
“I’ve only read excerpts of her book. It’s poorly written in my opinion,” Hostin, 57, said on Friday’s episode of The View.
“I see journalists as public servants in a sense, and I don’t think that she is,” she added. “I think that she sort of took this payday, wrote a memoir that didn’t disclose everything; it’s very self-serving.
“And when you know something about someone like RFK. Jr., who has a hearing to become the Secretary of Health, and you don’t provide that information even in writing or to the committee, I think that you have disgraced yourself.”
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Hostin noted that the situation reminded her of disgraced former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has been accused of mishandling classified documents.
“He got a $2 million book deal, and he knew all of these things about President Trump, during the impeachment hearing,” the co-host said. “And rather than testify, he wrote a book and made $2 million. I think he failed the American people in much the same way that [Nuzzi] has.”
In 2020, Bolton released The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, an account of his time working under the first Trump administration.
Nuzzi joined Vanity Fair as a West Coast editor in September, nearly a year after she left her post as New York Magazine’s Washington D.C. correspondent, following internal and external investigations into her alleged undisclosed affair with the much older Kennedy, 71.
The controversial health secretary has denied claims that he engaged in an extramarital affair with Nuzzi. “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested,” a spokesperson for Kennedy told Vanity Fair in September 2024.
While New York Magazine assured readers that their investigation found no evidence that her supposed relationship with Kennedy led to any bias or inaccuracies in her coverage, they announced that they had reached an agreement with Nuzzi that “the best course forward is to part ways.”
“Nuzzi is a uniquely talented writer and we have been proud to publish her work over her nearly eight years as our Washington Correspondent. We wish her the best,” it said in a statement at the time.
Ahead of the release of her memoir, Nuzzi’s scorned ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, published a series of Substack posts for his independent publication Telos News, claiming that his former partner cheated on him with RFK Jr.
Lizza detailed erotic poetry Kennedy had supposedly written to Nuzzi in 2024 in another part of his series.
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Kennedy wrote to Nuzzi, according to Lizza. “Drink from me Love.”
Nuzzi has trashed Lizza’s allegations, calling them “revenge porn” and “another attempt to harass, humiliate, and harm me until I am as destroyed as he seems to be. It is abuse that I am all too familiar with now relocated to the public square and dressed up as some sort of noble crusade.
“To that point: If he possessed any explosive information in the public interest, the only responsible way to handle that information would be to quietly pass it off to an outlet free of his conflicts; there is no glory in that, though, and no subscribers,” she wrote in a post on Emily Sundberg’s Substack newsletter Feed Me.
“This obsessive and violating fan fiction-slash-revenge porn he has written would never meet standards for publication at any legitimate outlet.”
Lizza has since responded to Nuzzi’s remarks, telling The Independent: “Telling the truth is not harassment.”