Ryan Lizza Says Viral Substack Tell-All on Olivia Nuzzi Didn’t Equal a Big Pay Day

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Political journalist Ryan Lizza told Semafor that his scorched-earth viral Substack tell-all on ex-fiancée Olivia Nuzzi wasn’t as lucrative as people might think.

Nuzzi, also a journalist, allegedly engaged in a “text affair” with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the married 71-year-old’s 2024 presidential campaign, and while engaged to Lizza.

In advance of Nuzzi’s memoir, American Canto, Lizza published his first Substack on her exploits. “Part I: How I Found Out” quickly went viral, leading to six more installments. And while Nuzzi’s book sales flopped, Lizza said he received a “flood” of new paying subscribers, the life-blood for Substack writers.

Lizza told Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast that although the 25,000-word series was the talk of the media world, it still didn’t bring in “enough” money.

“Olivia left me with a $127,000 legal bill that is still unpaid,” Lizza told the outlet. “There’s nothing that can compensate me for the damage that her recklessness did.”

“The reporting drove eyeballs to his site, but Lizza said his decision to keep 60% of the content outside of a paywall meant the readership wasn’t really monetized,” Semafor reported. “Not to mention the shared Substack passwords and PDFs that bounced around media industry group chats, removing the need to actually sign up for his newsletter.”

Lizza said, “The original piece got a lot of attention and a flood of subscriptions,” but he remained skeptical about long-term retention, believing, correctly, that many subscribers were “not people that are going to stick around.”

“He added, “I think we did better than [Nuzzi’s] book, but that’s a very low bar.”

Through a spokesperson in September 2024, Kennedy denied having an “inappropriate relationship” with Nuzzi.

Although Nuzzi never used Kennedy’s actual name in her book, tech journalist Kara Swisher said it was common knowledge who she was talking about.

“It was just so f**kin’ random. Someone from tech said, ‘Oh, I saw these texts.’ RFK was showing them off to some tech people, and they called me,” Swisher told The Bulwark. “They were like, ‘Can you believe this? And it was a reporter from your magazine.’ I don’t really write for New York Magazine, but obviously Pivot’s affiliated with it. And I was like, ‘RFK? What?’ Cause he’s pals with those people. He hangs with those people.”