Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi was born on January 6, 1993, in New York City, New York to parents Kelly and John Nuzzi. Her father was originally from Brooklyn, New York and had worked for the city’s Department of Sanitation for 20 years. He passed away in 2015.

She was raised in the River Plaza community in Middletown, New Jersey alongside her brother, Jonathan. Nuzzi studied at Middletown High School South before enrolling at Fordham University, in New York. However, she left school before graduating to accept a job offer from ‘The Daily Beast.’

At the age of 18, Olivia Nuzzi started writing for triCityNews, the alternative weekly magazine published out of Asbury Park, Monmouth County, New Jersey. She was also a regular contributor to the conservative blog and news website More Monmouth Musings.

She did a four-week internship for the ill-fated mayoral campaign of Anthony Weiner in 2013. Nuzzi joined NSFWcorp in July that year and in a blog posted on the website, she spoke about her experience. She revealed that Weiner called her and all the other 20 female interns “Monica” because he could not remember their names. She went on to write several other articles on the campaign for the website. Later, the New York Daily News hired her to write a follow-up piece for them on the same matter. On July 30, her article was published.

In November that year, NSFWcorp let Nuzzi go along with sex and science editor Leigh Cowart and one other staffer. In an interview, she stated that although she did not want to leave the news outlet at the time, there were no hard feelings between “her and anyone on the staff or within the company”.

In May 2014, she was hired by ‘The Daily Beast’ for whom she covered the presidential campaigns of Republican hopefuls Rand Paul and Chris Christie. She regularly wrote pieces on the swift rise of Donald Trump as a political leader. Nuzzi gradually established herself as a respected political analyst and journalist. In November 2016, she was ranked among the "16 Breakout Media Stars" of the presidential election by ‘Politico,’ and a month later, she was included in Mediaite’s list of 2016's twenty-five "most influential" people in news media.

Since February 2017, she has been employed at the ‘New York’ magazine as their first ever Washington correspondent and reports on the Trump administration and Congress for the print magazine and its "Daily Intel" blog.

In the articles Nuzzi wrote for NSFWcorp and the New York Daily News, she was highly critical of Weiner and his senior staff, referring to them as “inexperienced” and asserting that there were many “short résumés around the office”. She also remarked that most of the interns were there to get into the good graces of Weiner’s now-estranged wife Huma Abedin, who is a close associate of Hillary Clinton.

The campaign’s spokesperson and communication director Barbara Morgan responded, calling Nuzzi, among other things, a “slutbag”. The ensuing controversy drew unwanted attention toward Weiner’s 2013 bid for the New York mayoral office, which was suffering after the revelations that Weiner had been continuing his illicit online interactions that had resulted in his resignation from Congress back in 2011. Morgan later told the reporters that she had personally apologised to Nuzzi who in turn tweeted that “of course she accepts it”.

In 2013, in an article for The Atlantic, journalist Garance Franke-Ruta called her a “lissome blonde”.