WASHINGTON — It was March 2020 when veteran journalist Ryan Lizza discovered an apology notice in his DC residence that wasn’t meant for him.
His live-in girlfriend, Olivia Nuzzi, had penned a letter on lodge stationery, and it was spilling out of her backpack on the ground of their three-story townhouse in Georgetown.
“Mark, I’m sorry. I can’t say that I want I hadn’t touched you, hadn’t,” the unfinished, deserted handwritten letter dated March 5, 2020, obtained by The Submit learn.
The Mark, on this case, was former 2020 GOP presidential hopeful Mark Sanford, Lizza has publicly alleged. The aborted letter was one in every of three draft notes Lizza discovered handwritten by Nuzzi, a fellow journalist.
The notice, penned on a Kimpton Lodges notice pad from a reporting journey, is early proof that Nuzzi crossed journalistic boundaries by having sexual relationships with sources, Lizza defined in his tell-all collection on Nuzzi.
The wild non-public lives of each Nuzzi and Lizza, as soon as a Washington energy couple, have been on full show in latest days. Nuzzi launched a guide, “American Canto” on her alleged digital affair with one other presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whereas her former lover, Lizza, launched an online collection to reveal a sample of Nuzzi’s alleged sexual encounters with well-known males.
“My coronary heart stopped once I realized who he was,” Lizza recalled in his Telos piece final month of the Sanford notes. “He was a presidential candidate, a supply, and the topic of Olivia’s latest profile for New York [Magazine].”
“…I known as my agent. ‘We have now a giant drawback,’ I stated. ‘Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford,’” Lizza concluded in a dramatic cliff-hanger to his Half 1 kickoff tell-all collection piece on Nuzzi.
Whereas the notice didn’t point out Sanford by identify, Lizza was in a position to put the items collectively, realizing that she had been “spending increasingly time in South Carolina,” and finally, he acquired the reality out of her.
Nuzzi later fessed as much as changing into “infatuated” with Sanford after their interview and had despatched him “risqué footage and texts” whereas quietly following him round on the marketing campaign path, in line with Lizza’s telling.
The tryst included some rumpy-pumpy at his South Carolina residence when Nuzzi allegedly “went darkish” on Lizza and tried to hide it by making up a “story about how she was coping with a disaster regarding her sick mom,” per the Telos piece.
“Olivia insisted that she and Mark solely had intercourse one time, on the evening of February 24, 2020, after she arrived at his residence at about 7 PM,” Lizza defined in Half 2 of his tell-all collection piece on Nuzzi.
“Throughout their encounter, he was paranoid that she was taping him, so she briefly turned her telephone’s recorder on and off to indicate him the way it labored, forsaking a brief voice memo of the 2 of them laughing. She left his home round 11 PM.”
Lizza stated he was used to “clearing up Olivia’s messes,” and regardless of her alleged affair with Sanford in 2020, the pair caught it out and acquired engaged in 2022 earlier than calling it off final yr amid their explosive falling out.
The Sanford revelation was fascinating partly due to his historical past. The previous governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011 was infamously caught having an affair throughout a June 2009 disappearance.
His alibi was that he was climbing the Appalachian Path. In actuality, he trekked over to Argentina to be together with his mistress. A decade later, Sanford mounted a long-shot GOP main marketing campaign towards President Trump in 2020.
Sarcastically, Lizza claims to have touched down in South Carolina the day after Nuzzi’s alleged affair with Sanford and was oblivious to their actions the prior evening.
Round that point, Lizza reached out to Sanford to rearrange a lunch between the 2 and Nuzzi, one thing he “later discovered had despatched her right into a panic.”
“She known as Mark, defined that I used to be her boyfriend, and requested him to not meet with me,” Lizza wrote in his Half 2 piece. “Amongst different issues, her recklessness detonated my relationship with an excellent supply in a key state. Mark politely instructed her to not contact him once more till she was single.”
Sanford’s directive to Nuzzi prompted her to write down and re-write apology notes to him on the Kimpton Lodge notice pad – later discovered by her boyfriend.
Different items of proof of the affair Lizza cited have been a voice memo and a draft, “tabloid-style information story” Nuzzi concocted about her romance with Sanford to map out the worst-case situation of their affair changing into identified.
Lizza described the fallout as “devastating” and harassed the way it pressured the 2 to shelve one in every of their guide tasks. They later scrapped one other guide mission in 2024, the identical yr her alleged affair with Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got here to mild.
“She had crossed a journalistic purple line. How may we write a guide concerning the presidential marketing campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of many candidates?” Lizza recalled pondering after discovering the aborted notice to Sanford.
The Submit made a number of makes an attempt to name a press quantity for Sanford and despatched an electronic mail. The Submit additionally reached out to Nuzzi and her reps for remark.
