Keith Olbermann shot down Ryan Lizza’s critique of choices he made while in a relationship with Olivia Nuzzi, who Lizza also had a relationship with at a later date.
After Lizza detailed the gifts Olbermann gave Nuzzi in Monday’s Substack post, the political commentator fired back on X. “Olivia and I lived together for 4+ years (4 b’days 4 Xmases 4 anniversaries),” he wrote. “That’s like $1250 of jewelry per celebration. And her apartment was a studio. And I made an f-ton then.”
He added: “What was I supposed to do? Get her Gift Certificates from Kmart?”
Olbermann’s response comes after Lizza wrote in Monday’s edition of Telos News, “Not that long ago, I had helped her untangle herself from an unusual relationship with Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host. She had messaged him out of the blue. They started talking, and soon after, she fled her unhappy home in suburban New Jersey and started living with Keith in Manhattan.”
He continued: “He paid for her to attend college, outfitted her in Tom Ford and Hervé Léger dresses and some $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry. Later, he covered her rent and furnished her apartment in a doorman building in the West Village.”
As Lizza continued, he highlighted the 34-year age gap between the couple, and accused Olbermann of gifting Nuzzi presents with “strings attached.”
“Olivia had concealed the relationship from me and other friends, but one day she told me everything—too much, actually—and together we hatched a plan for her escape,” Lizza added. “When friends asked why I never responded to Keith’s public attacks on me and Olivia, I explained that she had felt stalked by Keith after she left him, and we had a strict policy of never engaging with him.”
Nuzzi’s romantic history has been a major source of conversation in the last year, given the journalist exited her job at New York magazine after disclosing she had an unethical sexting relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while covering his 2024 presidential campaign.
Nuzzi later filed a legal complaint against her ex-fiancé Lizza, in which she accused him of organizing a campaign of blackmail and harassment against her after learning of the RFK relationship.
She further accused Lizza of having “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”
However, Lizza painted a different picture in Monday’s Substack post. “I was not a perfect partner, but the scale of Olivia’s betrayal was devastating,” he wrote. “She had an affair with someone who would provide the maximum level of humiliation and personal and professional ruin, perhaps for both of us.”
Following the affair controversy, Nuzzi was tapped as the new West Coast editor for Vanity Fair, penned a memoir, titled “American Canto,” and featured in The New York Times — which was notably ripped apart by critics online.
