Olivia Nuzzi and the male power fantasy

I wasn’t sure there was much more to say about the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, whose press tour for her memoir American Canto kicked off a new storm of revelations about her affairs with politicians she covered. Despite being the subject of mainly mockery on social media, Nuzzi managed to keep her career intact with a new job and a book deal. This has prompted a slew of takes, many of which are predictably bad, but some of which have been quite good, like Colby Hall’s for Mediaite and Marisa Kabas’ for The Handbasket.

But when I started seeing posts about Nuzzi releasing a song called “Jailbait” as part of a failed adolescent music career, I started thinking more about the uncomfortable side of the Nuzzi story, the appeal some people see in exposing her at even this tender stage of her life. Nuzzi’s ethical transgressions as a journalist were plainly wrong, but there’s another kind of exploitation happening with her narrative now. The sordid details being spilled paint a more disturbing portrait of Nuzzi’s life and career. In totality they represent what the men around her have to gain from her humiliation. 

Before I talk about Nuzzi, I wanted to give an update on a previous Spitfire News story I covered about a young woman who said her DoorDash customer exposed himself to her. That woman, Livie, has since been arrested and charged with felony counts of surveillance and dissemination. That’s because she recorded the incident when it happened and posted it to TikTok. She also reported the man to her local Oswego Police Department in New York. They investigated and declined to charge the man, instead choosing to pursue a case against Livie for trying to expose what happened to her. She wasn’t held in jail, but she has an arraignment date. 

Oswego PD directed me to a press release they posted on Facebook and did not respond to further questions about why Livie’s actions constituted a crime but the man’s didn’t. They didn’t answer whether this would have a chilling effect on other victims, causing them to fear documenting evidence of a crime and reporting it. The Department of Justice has previously acknowledged that there’s work to be done around the issue of police officers arresting and charging victims of domestic violence instead of perpetrators, and retaliation against victims by the criminal justice system is not uncommon. But online, where Livie had already been turned into a viral villain, news of the arrest delivered another catastrophic blow to her smeared reputation. Viral posts echo disinformation about what happened to Livie, mock her relentlessly, and create the kind of environment where victims of sexual violence are explicitly told to shut up and endure it or be further punished by society and the state. Livie has not responded to my requests for comment.

Cases like these occupy the back of my mind when I examine other viral discourse about women and how it shapes our perception of power and gender and consequences. 

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