A choose on Tuesday granted a protecting order to Olivia Nuzzi, the political author sidelined as a consequence of her ties to fringe presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after she accused her ex-fiancé of harassing and blackmailing her.
New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent was placed on go away final month after admitting to a “private relationship” with Kennedy throughout his short-lived White House run. “The relationship was by no means bodily however ought to have been disclosed to stop the looks of a battle,” Nuzzi mentioned in a press release on the time, whereas a Kennedy spokesperson wrote that he “solely met Olivia Nuzzi as soon as in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded successful piece.”
Nuzzi accused former boyfriend Ryan Lizza, himself a distinguished political journalist with Politico, of organizing a harassment and blackmail marketing campaign towards her, culminating with final month’s career-threatening disclosure.
Magistrate Judge Robert Hildum routinely granted Nuzzi’s request that Lizza not have contact along with her and keep a minimum of 100 yards away till an Oct. 15 listening to.
Nuzzi requested for the protecting order on Monday, accusing Lizza of in search of to wreck her fame following their damaged relationship.
Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public private details about me to destroy my life, profession, and fame — a menace he has since carried out,” Nuzzi alleged in her Monday submitting in Washington, D.C. Superior Court.
Nuzzi claimed that Lizza hacked “my units for the needs of stalking and surveilling me and to gather supplies to deploy as blackmail to intimidate me again right into a relationship and to inflict public ridicule and humiliation in addition to skilled harm as punishment after I wouldn’t return to the connection.”
While Kennedy’s title was not talked about in her submitting, Nuzzi seems to hyperlink that disclosure to Lizza. “Respondent contacted my boss to provoke a dialog concerning the matter,” she wrote.
The journal author additionally accused her former flame of constructing threats of “bodily violence to coerce me to conform to assume his share of monetary accountability” in a joint e-book deal the 2 of them had with a writer. Nuzzi didn’t go into additional element on this alleged contract with Lizza, a fellow Washington correspondent who was as soon as fired by The New Yorker over allegations of sexual misconduct. (Lizza disputed the journal’s resolution on the time, calling it a “horrible mistake” to fireside him over a “respectful relationship with a girl I used to be courting.”)
Lizza and Nuzzi couldn’t be instantly reached for touch upon Wednesday. Lizza wrote in a press release to CNN on Tuesday: “I’m saddened that my ex-fiancée would resort to creating a sequence of false accusations towards me as a solution to divert consideration from her personal private {and professional} failings. I emphatically deny these allegations and I’ll defend myself towards them vigorously and efficiently.”
In November final yr, Nuzzi wrote a prolonged piece on Kennedy’s long-shot White House bid, titled “The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign.” The subhead added: “He’s a conservative. He’s a liberal. And he might flip the presidential race the other way up.”
Kennedy, the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is greatest often known as an anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist.
He dropped out of the race in late August and endorsed Donald Trump, who additionally has an extended historical past of spreading falsehoods and harmful, baseless claims.