Journalists Behaving Badly
By Ciro Scotti
A lot of people like to say they’re journalists when they’re not.
Take Laura Loomer, the one-woman scalp hunter for Donald Trump. She bills herself as “an investigative journalist.” That’s a joke. She’s a MAGA bomb-thrower, and maybe a part-time shill, even if she did go to J-school.
Working journalists are supposed to have integrity, hew to the truth as they know it, report with clarity and conscience, come clean with readers about possible conflicts of interest, and, as members of the quasi-privileged Fourth Estate, behave with baseline good sense in their public lives.
Commentators, columnists and opinion writers are journalists if they back up what they have to say with facts and don’t slide into screed.
And what they all do in their private lives is their business—unless it intersects with their public lives.
In the case of Olivia Nuzzi, the hotshot political writer, there has apparently been a lot of intersecting—both real and supposedly Platonic—over the past half-dozen years.
Apropos of the publication of her memoir American Canto next month, Nuzzi—West Coast editor for Vanity Fair, at least for now—hung out with power and privilege reporter Jacob Bernstein for a profile that ran on November 14 in The New York Times.
Bernstein, son of the late journalist and acclaimed screenwriter Nora Ephron and Watergate cracker Carl Bernstein—whose tempestuous pairing was immortalized by Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ephron’s book-made-movie Heartburn—certainly has the genes for the job.
That job was talking with Nuzzi about the subject of her book, namely being fired by New York magazine after it was revealed during the 2024 presidential campaign that she had been having an allegedly-digital tryst with third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she was supposed to be covering (not mentally uncovering).
The book does not explicitly identify RFK Jr. It calls him “the Politician,” as in “‘I would take a bullet for you,’ the Politician said”—according to an excerpt in Vanity Fair that could be charitably described as derivative Didion on acid. That wouldn’t be such a disturbing profession of affection if the Politician’s father, another politician, had not taken a bullet and died.
I found the Bernstein piece, complete with video and fashion-mag photos of Nuzzi, delicious. Others didn’t.
One was Ryan Lizza, also a buzzy political writer, who happened to be engaged to Nuzzi when the RFK Jr. scandal broke.
Lizza, now proprietor of the Substack Telos News, weighed in with his own multi-part heartburn about how he found out Nuzzi was doing him dirty.
The kicker to Part 1: During the 2020 presidential campaign, Nuzzi was having an in-the-flesh fling with Republican candidate Mark Sanford, another pol she was assigned to write about.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t remember Sanford. He dropped out quickly as a primary challenger to Trump and is probably best remembered for when in 2009, as the upstanding conservative Christian governor of South Carolina, he was found to have been south of the border schtuping his Argentinian tail when he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Lizza also gratuitously reveals that early in her career, Nuzzi had a sugar daddy/boyfriend, the bombastic and entertaining journalist Keith Olbermann, 34 years her senior. But that doesn’t make them the worst people in the world. In fact, whatever their relationship was, it’s nobody’s business but Nuzzi’s and Olbermann’s.
Part 2 dropped yesterday. It’s sort of a letdown since Lizza is unable to blast the requisite hole in Nuzzi’s repeated denial that she and RFK Jr. ever consummated their mad passion. But he does make Nuzzi’s protestations of physical purity particularly hard to swallow when he quotes a poem The Politician allegedly penned that Lizza snidely calls “American Canyon.”
“‘Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,’ Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had written to my then-fiancé. ‘Drink from me Love.’” But perhaps more reveals are on the way. Hell apparently has no fury like a middle-aged man shunted aside for a grandpa.
(Lizza, it should be noted, was canned by The New Yorker in 2017 for “improper sexual conduct,” a charge he has disputed.)
If the Nuzzi-Sanford-Lizza-Kennedy quad-wrangle is an example of a journalist behaving badly and doing what she probably always wanted to do—make herself the story—at least it’s racy and human, not unconscionable and odious.
Which brings us to Michael Wolff.
Among the eye-openers in the Jeffrey Epstein files that have been released are a tranche of emails between Wolff and the most alive dead man in the world. In them, journalist and bombastic-book author Wolff advises the purveyor of young girls to the wealthy and powerful how to leverage what he knows about his former bosom (pun intended) buddy Donny Trump.
Wolff has long had a reputation for playing fast and loose with the facts. In August, The Daily Beast retracted a story based on a podcast in which Wolff suggested that Trump was introduced to Melania by Epstein. (Melania and her lawyers took issue with the story’s veracity and reportedly made threats of the pecuniary variety; Wolff sued the First Lady for defaming him.)
Wolff has defended using his advice to Epstein as a means to ingratiate himself with the ped, who was in the author’s words “a very significant source” for his work, including his 2018 Times best-seller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Ben Smith gave Wolff, who bears a passing resemblance to the Mike Myers character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, a largely sympathetic hearing in an interview published in Semafor last Sunday.
Included in the story by Smith, Semafor’s editor-in-chief, was a link to a 2014 proposed profile of Epstein. The unsigned profile found among Epstein’s emails was by Wolff, who had shared the rough draft with his subject, which is in itself bad form.
Exploring the provenance of the proposed profile, Smith writes that Epstein was looking for someone to “rehabilitate his damaged reputation.” He had recently returned to New York following a cushy 13-month stay in a Florida hoosegow (work release 12 hours a day, six days a week) where he was jailed after a plea deal involving sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl.
Who better than Wolff to be his apologist? In 2003 the author was part of a group that included Epstein and Mort Zuckerman, former owner of the Daily News, that tried to buy New York magazine).
Here’s an except in from the unpublished profile, which in the magazine world of yore would have been called a “hum job.” In it, Wolff portrayed Epstein’s seven-story Manhattan townhouse as sort of an eccentric Playboy Mansion that attracted the rich and powerful like bees to honeys.
“…The Hefnerian prurience can also be quite businesslike: poised young women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office responsibilities are really not that different from any of the art galleries in the surrounding neighborhood. They mingle freely with his powerful guests, not so much as hostesses-or, in tabloid language, harem-like “sex slaves”-but as attentive students (which, of course, might be regarded as having its own fetish-like attraction). Epstein explicitly denies that there is an [sic] sexual quid pro quo. ('If you’re screwing someone you work with they can come in late-that’s what Jimmy Goldsmith used to say.') Still, the constant attendance of so many comely young women, seems so outside of conventional living or staffing or social or romantic relationships that it is hard to describe in a straightforward or straight-faced way. And while it may be part of the appeal for the men who come to visit Epstein, it is as well a peculiarity they put up with in order to spend time with him."When Smith showed the profile to Wolff to refresh his memory, Wolff declared, “Jesus, it’s pretty good!”
That’s partially true. It is gossipy good. But it’s also fawning and reliably rehabilitative, as Epstein would have wanted.
On the November 12 edition of Wolff’s Daily Beast podcast, “Inside Trump’s Head”, his co-host and boss, Beast Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles, pressed Wolff about the barrage of criticism he has been getting from other journalists for paling around with Epstein. Wolff opined that he finds out what other journalists can’t because of his extraordinary access, and that is a service to the public.
Wolff would have us believe that he is the last of a dying breed—an old-school magazine writer who is allowed liberties not permissible for journo grunts who will never get the inside scoops he delivers.
It’s a dog-eared hall pass he sold to Smith, too. When Smith was a media columnist for the Times in 2021, he wrote a mostly admiring piece entitled “Why Our Monsters Talk to Michael Wolff.”
But what exactly has Wolff delivered about Epstein?
Did he help pull back the curtains on a creepy cabal of A-listers who gravitated to Epstein and the “attentive students” mentioned in the proposed profile?
It’s true that the profile names Big Names sitting at the feet of Epstein supposedly to absorb his sage wisdom about hyper-wealth.
The disgraced former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers, who has had the shocking good sense to offer mea culpas and step back from public life, bloviates through. Former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barack shows up. So does '“frequent guest” Bill Gates.
Also among the Epstein guests whom Wolff said in the profile that he saw coming to call were Lloyd Blankfein, former chief of Goldman Sachs; Ron Baron, the mutual fund billionaire who threw his annual investor get-together at Lincoln Center last week (featuring Elon Musk among others); Peter Thiel, the budding tech billionaire and political godfather to JD Vance; and Josh Harris, co-founder of private-equity behemoth Apollo Global Management and current owner of the NFL’s Washington Commanders.
Harris’s former partner Leon Black, one of Epstein’s two primary patrons, was forced to step away from Apollo after the extent of that relationship (more than $150 million in beneficence) became public, along with other lurid allegations. But a Harris-Epstein connection has only come to light since the trove of Epstein emails was released.
Wouldn’t the public have been served if Wolff had reported what he saw at Epstein’s townhouse more than a decade ago?
And for all his hobnobbing, has Wolff ever gotten anything solid on Trump? Not yet.
Did Wolff ever figure out why the apparel billionaire Leslie Wexner, the ped’s other major patron, entrusted his fortune to Epstein, sold him the East Side townhouse, and enriched him? No.
Did Wolff ever probe Epstein’s alleged Israel intelligence connection? No.
(Epstein for a time sat on the board of the Wexner Foundation, a major supporter of programs Israel loves like Birthright Israel; British media mogul Robert Maxwell, father of Epstein girl groomer Ghislaine Maxwell, was identified as a Mossad asset.)
Did Wolff ever plumb the depths of Epstein’s deep ties to JPMorgan’s Private Bank? No.
This is the overarching question about Wolff: Do journalists have to put their integrity aside to get revelatory access?
The answer to that is also a resounding No.
Just ask Bob Woodward. Or read Antonia Hitchens’ profile of Laura Loomer in last week’s New Yorker.
Nuzzi, whose future at Vanity Fair is said by the Times to now be under scrutiny by her employer, may have such serial bad judgment that she should find a line of work other than journalism.
But failings of the heart and young ambition do not make a blot on the business the way that suborning sleaze does.
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