Maine's Sam Patten on Olivia Nuzzi: May The Farce Be With Her

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Alice in Wonderland’s Cautionary Canto Reveals a Broken Craft in a Swampy Setting

Olivia Nuzzi was a mirror to the weird world she covered

By Sam Patten

“Two things for you to think about,” the high-priced, quite possibly best in the business First Amendment lawyer told me. “First, I’m not sure you can really afford us right now, and second, more importantly, I don’t think you need to worry too much about Olivia because she’s going to get what’s coming to her anyway.”

On both scores, she was right, though it took six years for the second, pro bono prophecy to manifest.

When I agreed to give Olivia Nuzzi exclusive access to my sad story, I was pretty desperate and figured not much more could go wrong. I knew she specialized in freaks of nature, or perhaps more gently put, oddballs. While owning the fact I fit that qualifier, what I was gambling on was her giving me a fair shake.

Before profiling me, she’d become a sort of fixture in Trump-world and had done a sympathetic, if not surreal, piece on then-White House press secretary Hope Hicks in which the former model couldn’t get in a word edgewise because her boss at the time, President Donald Trump, did all the talking. She was in talks to do a profile on First Lady Melania Trump, whose press people ended up being a lot smarter than me.

It was only after her half-hearted hit job on me that she did a more cutting one on Rudy Giuliani, whom she quoted as saying he was more Jewish than George Soros, and now, more infamously still, on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with whom she allegedly had a “sexting affair” – after she did a hit job on him.

Maybe it was because of her niche I thought she’d appreciate the Alice in Wonderland aspects of my own misadventures. But Olivia is no Lewis Carroll, instead she is Alice herself.

When she showed up on my doorstep wearing a black turtleneck, black Coco Chanel shades and smoking an American Spirit, I have to admit I was a little taken by the whole schtick. Men seem to swoon for her to ill effect, like sailors drawn by the singing of the harpies. The effect caused me to downplay red flags I should have caught.

Perhaps it was because I’d offered to show her my dungeon during that first house call that she insisted on our second meeting being in a bar – knowing full well I am an alcoholic then in early stage recovery.

In that interview, I snapped and used a politically-incorrect term to describe Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and when the word, part of a lyric in the Eminem and Guns n’ Roses songs of my youth, crossed my lips, she stared at me in horror like I’d committed a war crime. Other than making fun of my wife’s outfit in church – yes, we brought her to church with us – quoting me on that was about as bad as her piece on me got.

The rest was just weird, friends later told me.

Few people today challenge the fact that Russia-gate was largely made up, but back in the eye of the storm, Nuzzi showed precious little interest in any of the evidence why that was so. I suppose she was no different than the rest of the American mainstream media in that respect, but what I was telling her – especially in retrospect – was not only news then, but established fact today.

I put her in contact with my former business partner, then (I still maintain farcically) on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, but she never bothered to reach out to him. And she didn’t bother showing up at my sentencing either, which only confirmed her interest in my story had more to do with a pre-cooked narrative than the actual developments.

When my wife asked for a separation nine months after Nuzzi’s piece came out in New York magazine, I would be kidding myself to say the feature gone wrong had played no role. Laura had thought it would vindicate us, not make us risible.

Given all this, I ought to find some Schadenfreude in how the New York Times this week trashed her memoir, or about how the revelations of her crossing the line with (other) subjects tanked her career at New York magazine – and indeed her credibility as a political journalist. But I don’t.

As the result of enormous, and ongoing, effort, I no longer view myself as a victim. If only on the margins, I played at one point in time in a world more grotesque than the capital city in Hunger Games. That’s what put me on Olivia’s radar screen. I would have shut the whole thing down early on, and because I didn’t, I’m in part to blame for the outcome.

The world renown French alpine skier Jean Claude Killy once reflected on his sport, “if you never fall you’re no good.” I can only hope that applies somehow to press hacks. We make mistakes so others don’t have to.

Olivia has been fully swallowed whole – counter though that may be to RFK Jr.’s alleged instruction – by her own metier.

From the moment she became a journalist, by trading the dish on Anthony Weiner’s strange New York City mayoral campaign on which she’d been employed just prior, to her being ‘mentored’ by older me like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and her ex-fiancee, Ryan Lizza, who was her supervisor at The New Yorker when they met, she played the game.

In reptilian fashion, Lizza has recently written a series of blog pieces to book-end Nuzzi’s launch of American Canto that reveal her affair with former North Carolina Governor Mark Sanford as well as the lewd contents of her love letters, playing the part of a shmarmy, jilted cuckold to the hilt. Where she did a swan-dive into the cesspool she was covering, her ex was just cheaply vindictive.

The chattering class now dismissively says they deserve each other, but not so long ago Nuzzi and Lizza were the “it” couple in Washington

It is the moralizing of the Fourth Estate on this tawdry tale that is perhaps the most repulsive aspect of it all. Recall the lyrics of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry,” which premiered before Olivia was likely born: “Bubble-headed bleach blonde comes on at five, she can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.“

Olivia’s not bubble-headed, nor is the anchor in Henley’s song. The media is drawn like a moth to the flame to Greek-level tragedy, Olivia’s sin – other than a soft-spot for the goblins – was considering herself to be an actress too. But she’s not alone in that respect, only more interesting because of the scale of how she’s crashed and burned.

She was encouraged every step of the way, and took her job more seriously than she did herself. There’s something touchingly human to that.

I’ll give her book about as much attention as she did my life, which is to say fleeting.

Maybe I’ll buy it for a special someone for Christmas.

Sam Patten is the Managing Editor of the Maine Wire. He worked for Maine’s last three Republican senators. He has also worked extensively on democracy promotion abroad and was an advisor in the U.S. State Department from 2008-2009. He lives in Bath, Maine.