Ryan Lizza, the 51-year-old ex-fiancé of former New York Magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi, released erotic poetry allegedly written by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his former partner.
Kennedy was alleged to have written the poetry with references to oral sex to Nuzzi, despite having a wife, according to international media reports.
“I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth... I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My love,” the US official is alleged to have written.
Lizza claimed that he had seen other poems written by Kennedy, though they were too explicit to share, according to the Telegraph. He said he believed the affair first began during RFK Jr.’s abandoned 2023 presidential campaign, which Nuzzi was covering.
Nuzzi was reported to have acknowledged having an “emotional affair” with the official and was subsequently placed on leave by the Magazine - and she left of her own accord in October last year.
“I can’t say there weren’t any signs. I did find it odd that Olivia was simultaneously reading Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction and Maureen Callahan’s Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed,” Lizza shared.
Lizza claimed to have shared the poetry in an effort to respond to the “campaign of misinformation” being spread by Nuzzi.
“I wish I hadn’t been put in this position, that I didn’t have to write about any of this, that I didn’t have to subject myself or my loved ones to embarrassment and further loss of privacy,” he said.
“Unfortunately, I’m the only other person who knows everything. And while sometimes I wish I could un-know it, the least I can do is share the parts I believe you should know too,” he continued.
Kennedy, who has been married to actress Cheryl Hines for more than a decade, denied the affair.
Kennedy’s spokesman told the Telegraph that he “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
Adultery accusations against New York Magazine writer and presidential candidates
Lizza previously accused his former partner of having an affair with former presidential candidate and Republican politician from South Carolina Mark Sanford.
“The scale of Olivia’s betrayal was devastating. She had an affair with someone who would provide the maximum level of humiliation and personal and professional ruin, perhaps for both of us,” he wrote in an essay titled How I Found Out. “She later explained to me that she became ‘infatuated’ with him after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts.”