Dear Gossips,   

The media loves a media scandal, and the big media scandal right now, at least over the last few days, is about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “digital” affair with political reporter Olivia Nuzzi. The story broke on Friday – that after Olivia profiled RFK Jr last year, they had an inappropriate relationship over text and she’s now been suspended from her job at New York Magazine. 

 

Maria mentioned this in Celebrity Social Media on Friday and, at the time, the information that was being shared was that Olivia told on herself last week. More details, however, emerged over the weekend and it would seem that it was actually RFK Jr who told first. According to the Daily Beast he was bragging to his associates about getting nudes from Olivia and eventually it got back to David Haskell, the editor-in-chief of New York who then confronted Olivia. RFK Jr is 70 years old, Olivia is 31, of course he was bragging, I totally buy this. 

But now he’s also trying to claim that they only met once in person and that she’d actually been harassing him for months. His team is pushing the narrative that she was “obsessed” with him and “went after him aggressively”; that he blocked her but she would contact him through different accounts and, I dunno, eventually wore him down and then, when he unblocked her, she’d bomb him with her self-porn. 

 

So, wait, he went from bragging about how a much-younger woman was sending him nudes but now we’re supposed to believe he was afraid of her? Well, this tracks. As Lily Mae Lazarus reports in another piece at the Daily Beast, Robert F Kennedy Jr often plays the victim when it comes to sex, physical or digital:

“Kennedy’s seeming inability to resist seduction mirrors his self-victimizing rhetoric described in diaries from 2001 obtained by the Post that meticulously detailed his serial philandering while married to his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy.

 

The then-environmental lawyer used the term “mugged” as if he was an unwilling participant when being unfaithful, and “victory” when he did not succumb to a woman’s temptations. In Kennedy’s version, he was entirely innocent. More than two decades later, [his] tune has seemingly not changed.”

In this regard, and in so many others, RFK Jr is not an original. “She just fell onto my dick” is an excuse men have been trying forever, like the pussy has the power to overpower a man’s faculties. Is that why they keep taking away our rights to make decisions over our own bodies? 

 

Olivia Nuzzi is not innocent here, and I’m not trying to say that she is. She betrayed the standards of her profession, there should be consequences and there will be consequences. If you’re out for her blood, don’t worry, she’ll be hit harder over this scandal than he’ll be. After all, this is a man who has been able to build an ever-growing platform on the influence of his name, even after he’s advanced many extremely harmful positions over the years – much to the chagrin and, possible, horror of many members of his family. As a Canadian, I understand the draw of that family and its legacy…to a point. TO A POINT. This, I think, is my own biggest WTF with the story. Because, like, I’m older than Olivia Nuzzi, but still 20 years younger than RFK Jr. And the thought of it, no, I can’t even think of it. There is no f-cking way, ever ever ever. Doesn’t matter what his last name is. So on that note, I’ll just leave you with this tweet. 

 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey 

Photo credits: Instar Images

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