Disgraced New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi contacted the FBI after she was suspended by her employer over an intimate, non-physical relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and met with agents while hiding in Texas, according to a former friend of Ms. Nuzzi who is close to Mr. Kennedy.  

Ms. Nuzzi is believed to have contacted the FBI over what she claims is the hacking of her personal devices, which she’s blamed in court documents on her former fiance, Ryan Lizza, the co-author of Politico Playbook and Politico’s chief Washington correspondent. 

Ms. Nuzzi’s dalliance with the FBI was reported this week in House Inhabit, the popular newsletter on the Substack platform. The author, Jessica Reed Kraus, was close with Ms. Nuzzi and traveled extensively on the campaign trail with Mr. Kennedy. Ms. Kraus reports that Ms. Nuzzi met with the feds late last week after driving cross country to lie low and clear her head.

“With no other options, Olivia turned to the FBI,” Ms. Kraus writes. “Early Thursday morning, as she drove alone through the Ozarks to a hideout, she filed a formal complaint. By Thursday afternoon, in Texas, she was interviewed by the FBI.”

It was not immediately clear exactly what was discussed when she met with FBI officials in the Lone Star State, but it involved her ugly separation from Mr. Lizza. In a recent statement to The Daily Beast, Ms. Nuzzi declined to comment saying that she “will not comment on an active criminal investigation.”

Ms. Nuzzi recently also secured a restraining order against Mr. Lizza, who is now on leave from his prestigious job at Politico while his employer reviews if Ms. Nuzzi’s affair with Mr. Kennedy improperly colored Politico’s coverage. 

“Fearful of what might happen when her ex was informed, he was the target of an FBI investigation, Olivia obtained a restraining order against him in Washington, D.C.,” Ms. Kraus reported. “The judge ordered him to stay away from her and her workplace and to stop circulating any hacked, stolen, or doctored materials to the press.”

In her request for the restraining order, Ms. Nuzzi claimed that Mr. Lizza had threatened to destroy her career if she would not get back together with him. When she declined his entreaties, she wrote, he carried through with his threat and reported her affair to New York Magazine. She also claims Mr. Lizza threatened her with violence. Mr. Lizza, who was fired by the New Yorker over allegations of sexual misconduct in 2017, strenuously denies Ms. Nuzzi’s allegations, just as he denied the misconduct allegations which ended his tenure at Conde Nast (Mr. Lizza was investigated and cleared of the misconduct allegations by CNN, which also employed him as an on-air contributor).

Those in Ms. Nuzzi’s camp have said that Mr. Lizza is a vengeful ex seeking to accelerate her downfall and that he allegedly placed a “heated phone call” to RFK Jr directly after the info was first leaked.

“These two have a history of this kind of thing,” a D.C. source said to Ms. Krause about the fallen media power couple. “They’ve broken up and gotten back together more times than anyone can count.”

“But this time, they’re dragging the entire country through their mess.”

In her lengthy post regarding the scandal, Ms. Kraus writes that when the reports of the alleged affair first surfaced on media reporter Oliver Darcy’s new Status newsletter, Ms. Nuzzi faced a crisis of conscience.

“What haunted Olivia most was the pain she felt she had caused others and the betrayals by people she had trusted,” Ms. Kraus wrote. “A longtime friend broke the story, and her magazine legitimized it, making it sound far worse than it was. Then there was the matter of who had engineered the scandal in the first place.”

Originally, she was hiding out at a friend’s place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan only leaving late at night to take walks down Park Avenue and along the East River.

“She believed that whoever brought the information to her employer had also tipped off the press,” Ms. Kraus wrote. “Olivia feared that whoever had engineered this scandal wouldn’t stop until she was entirely destroyed. Speculation about the source added to her anxiety as she followed the few clues made public: an IP address in Iowa, a VPN in New York, and a fake name.”

Semafor reported that an anonymous person was shopping the Nuzzi-RFK story around to media reporters via email, and that the emails came from an Iowa I.P. address.

“The simple truth was that it was nothing more than a flirtation,” Ms. Kraus wrote. “Sometimes they talked; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they flirted; sometimes they didn’t. It wasn’t an affair, it wasn’t a relationship, and it was absolutely never physical.”