New York Magazine’s Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi first gained notoriety as a 20-year-old intern for disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s misbegotten 2013 mayoral campaign.
She’s now at the center of a scandal with former independent presidential Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who she has an alleged ‘non-physical’ affair.
Nuzzi first got a taste of front page headlines when she wrote a story for the New York Daily News about her experience interning for Weiner, whose sexting scandal forced him to resign from Congress in 2011.
Two years later, the loud-mouthed Democrat, who was married to Hillary Clinton‘s top aide, Huma Abedin, launched a bid to become New York City mayor, which was also derailed by a sexting scandal.
Nuzzi spent a month working for Weiner and wrote about her experience for the New York Daily News.
Olivia Nuzzi’s first brush with fame came when she wrote a front page story for the New York Daily News about her experience interning for disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign
The newspaper’s editors decided to put her takedown on the front page.
Nuzzi wrote that many of the interns were just working for Weiner to make a connection with Abedin – and then to Clinton – to work for the inevitable 2016 presidential campaign.
She also revealed that Weiner had an odd habit of calling his interns by the wrong name, which he often thought was ‘Monica.’
Recalling the experience to Washingtonian in December 2020, Nuzzi recalled how she was ‘hiding in my dorm room’ the whole day the article came out.
‘It looked like I’d sold my story and done an interview with them—it didn’t look like I’d written it. I remember pacing around the Upper West Side with my head down, freaking out,’ she recalled.
But then she received a call from journalist Hunter Walker, who was from Talking Points Memo at the time.
Walker informed Nuzzi that he had reached out to Weiner’s spokesperson Barbara Morgan and she went on a tirade about the intern.
She ‘call[ed] me a ‘slutbag,’ which I had never heard before, a ‘f***ing t***,’ and a ‘little c***’ who ‘sucked’ at my job,’ Nuzzi recalled. ‘Which was true – I did suck at my job.’
Nuzzi said Walker wanted to publish Morgan’s comments and she gave the journalist the go-ahead.
‘I was thrilled the campaign had attacked me on the record,’ Nuzzi said. ‘I was so relieved. I thought (A) that’s the story now and (B) what she did is so obviously worse than what I did.’
She said the experience ‘desensitized’ her early on.
‘If there are 300 comments about your boobs or saying your face is weird, it doesn’t have to ruin your day,’ Nuzzi said.
From there, Nuzzi left Fordham University, where she was studying, ahead of earning her degree to take a job with the Daily Beast and then got scooped up by New York Magazine.