Olivia Nuzzi

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images and Paul Morigi/Getty Images for HBO. Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Late Thursday night, news broke that New York magazine had placed Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi on leave after learning that she’d allegedly had a relationship with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign,” read a statement from the magazine . The statement identified the other party only as “a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign.” Oliver Darcy at Status reported that that person was RFK Jr., “according to people familiar with the matter,” reporting that has now been matched by other outlets . Before joining New York magazine, she was a political reporter for the Daily Beast. Nuzzi also has a new Bloomberg Television interview show. And she once made a brief cameo on Billions . Earlier this year, the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal. During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source. The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York. Well, according to reporting from CNN , a person with direct knowledge of the matter “said the relationship was emotional and digital in nature, not physical.” You could imagine that “digital in nature” encompasses … a lot of different things. Nuzzi told New York magazine that it started in December 2023, and went through the end of August, according to a statement that David Haskell , the magazine’s top editor, sent to staff. This is the statement that a representative for him has been giving the media : “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” Which wouldn’t be incorrect if the relationship was only digital! Yes, that’s true! At 20, Nuzzi wrote a piece for a now-defunct website called NSFW Corp and a follow-up for the New York Daily News about her time as an intern on the Anthony Weiner mayoral campaign . Yes, Weiner reportedly called the female interns “Monica” after former Clinton White House intern Monica Lewinsky. After the articles came out, Weiner’s spokesperson called Nuzzi a “slutbag ” and other expletives. This was back in 2013. Why does anyone care about her relationship, or whatever, with RFK Jr.? Despite commonplace portrayals in film and television, it’s universally considered unethical for journalists to sleep with sources, or have close personal relationships with them of any kind. It’s exceedingly rare and almost always results in firing or a swift departure from the profession. There are exceptions: New York Times reporter Ali Watkins had a romantic relationship with Senate Intelligence Committee security chief James Wolfe, who went to prison for making false statements to the FBI. Watkins had disclosed her relationship to bosses at the Times, but not to her superiors at McClatchy News—where she interned and later worked—when the relationship started. Watkins was reassigned to a different beat at the Times. When dealing with sources, it’s important to be impartial. If you’re friends with a source, or in a romantic relationship with a source, your allegiance can end up being to them rather than to your readers. The ideal is that reporters and sources never really have buddy-buddy relationships. In practice though … that doesn’t mean that journalists don’t have favorite sources, sources that favor them, or all sorts of strange access-based rapports with important or well-informed people. That’s