Nuzzigate is journalism's ‘Bye Sister’

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The corners of the internet where reporters congregate have been seeped with gossip about disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi for weeks. Between her nonstop self-defeating book tour and her ex’s never-ending Substack series about her, I’m sick of it. I think most of us are. We are now a month out from the New York Times’ aggressively sympathetic profile of Nuzzi’s attempted comeback after having an affair with RFK Jr., a then-presidential candidate, while covering the 2024 election for New York Magazine. A year later, the NYT attempted to resuscitate Nuzzi’s reputation and Vanity Fair tried to resurrect her career with a plum position. That all backfired, in large part because most of the journalists who are the main audience for this story hate her. But also, once Nuzzi started to re-emerge from the scandal intact, her ex-fiancé and fellow ousted political journalist Ryan Lizza unleashed another onslaught of damaging allegations, humiliating details, and overwrought metaphors in the form of a paywalled six-part exposé. Regrettably, it has still not ended as of writing.

This kind of explosive but overcooked drama is pretty unprecedented among mainstream media journalists. Sure, there have been stories of sexual impropriety and serious journalistic malpractice, but the way Nuzzigate has unspooled is different. The participants are rushing to monetize their sides of the story through media platforms new and old. The hyper-specific niche of journalists who cover other journalists became entangled in the web of personal biases and questionable ethics being aired from newsletter to newsletter. And although the story also illuminates disturbing power imbalances between Nuzzi and the much older men who have exploited her, the salacious alleged details of her sex life are what captured the most public interest and scrutiny, cheapening and twisting something more serious.

To me, it’s all eerily reminiscent of Dramageddon, a convoluted series of controversies between 2018 and 2020 involving the most-followed beauty YouTubers of the late 2010s. If I had to guess, most people who are subscribed to Spitfire News are familiar with either Nuzzigate or Dramageddon, but probably not both (maybe neither, if you’re really lucky). My career as a full-time journalist started with covering Dramageddon in excruciating detail for Business Insider (this timeline of events from 2020 is 6,000 words long), which resulted in tens of millions of page views. That is certainly more viral than anything involving Nuzzi, who for all her inside baseball press coverage could only sell 1,200 copies in the first week of her memoir’s publication. That’s how many YouTube subscribers James Charles was losing every 80 seconds the day after “Bye Sister” dropped.

Inversely, from what I could tell, most of my New York media peers besides internet culture reporters were unaware or uninterested that a significant chunk of the population was obsessed for years with an esoteric feud between a gay teenager (James Charles), a former MySpace celebrity (Jeffree Star), and a beauty guru in her late thirties (Tati Westbrook), who were competing over gummy hair vitamin #sponcon and eyeshadow palettes. Their perfectly lit and staged YouTube confessionals (the most famous of which is the one titled “Bye Sister”) also included salacious details about the teenager’s alleged sexual proclivities—some of which were later determined to be baseless smears, while others turned into more serious allegations. If you tilt your head and squint, it’s kind of a similar dynamic to Nuzzi (who I guess is the Charles of this situation) and her exes, including Lizza (who I guess would occupy the Westbrook/Star role).

One of the more significant things Nuzzigate has in common with Dramageddon is that both scandals are catnip for alternative media ecosystems that engage in sometimes dubious back-and-forth with the main players. Beauty YouTube spawned drama channels, a cottage industry of YouTubers who made content about other YouTubers. Nuzzigate has largely been the purview of independent media reporters on platforms like Substack and Beehiiv. When Lizza wanted to take control of the narrative, he used his own newsletter to get revenge against Nuzzi and some of the reporters and PR flacks who initially dictated the coverage of their relationship fallout in 2024. Even if Lizza’s sordid and self-flattering retellings were purely newsworthy details that had been independently verified, the timing, pace, and price of his releases show where his motivations really lie. Lizza can use the venue of Substack, which is more of a social media platform than a newsroom, to manipulate his audience, rehabilitate his own reputation, and undermine Nuzzi’s to deny any of his own culpability and wrongdoing. And he can do it while still masquerading as a “serious journalist.” He really is like Star, minus the sculpted cheekbones.

Similarly, some beauty YouTubers fed drama channels damaging information about their rivals behind the scenes and played the role of gonzo journalist on their own massive platforms, all under the guise of being authentic. Some drama channels would later reveal this incestuous nature of their coverage and sourcing, how they were receiving biased information to make slanted content that was also guaranteed to get them clicks and cash. It makes a lot of sense to me that Substack’s incentives would drive the same kind of personality-on-personality warfare among journalists that YouTube’s did among influencers—in a more pseudo-intellectual way, of course. We’re now firmly in the drama farming era of journalism, thanks to the migration from traditional outlets to self-sustaining operations. Dramageddon isn’t the only influencer scandal to play out this way, and Nuzzigate won’t be the last among journalists.

And just like how Lizza is testing his new subscribers’ patience with his unrelenting monologue and how interest in Nuzzi’s memoir evaporated by the end of one of her run-on sentences, Dramageddon also hit a wall after every drama channel rehashed “Bye Sister” for the umpteenth time. Eventually, there is no tea left to spill, just a rag wrung until it’s bone dry. It’s the gossip equivalent of gorging on a family-sized bag of chips until you’re left with an empty bag and a stomachache.

For beauty YouTube’s A-listers and their orbiting drama channels, Dramageddon turned out to be a swan song. It delivered the most views and income of many participants’ careers, but those who couldn’t move on from it have seen their audiences and paychecks shrink ever since. The makeup gurus at the center of the drama never regained the popularity on YouTube they had before, during, and shortly after the conflict. Everyone involved still makes content, but it’s a mere echo of their glory days. And no one was held legally or socially accountable for the most serious allegations in the story. I imagine this will also be the case for Nuzzi and Lizza and certainly RFK, who skated above the entire controversy’s pay grade.

I also have to wonder if the future arc of elite NYC/DC media figures and commentary about them is going to be similar to the golden age of beauty YouTubers. The ones who survived and thrived—both the gurus and the drama channels—had to pivot significantly. Some channels now cover other kinds of internet culture niches, other creators chase viral TikTok trends, and some of them hawk increasingly pseudoscientific products—another unfortunate tie-in with RFK taking a sledgehammer to public health. Truthfully, as I learned from covering beauty YouTube and fascist politics simultaneously, these influencers are not that different from the people in the White House. And political access journalism is not that different from inserting yourself into YouTube drama. From Dramageddon to Nuzzigate, similar lessons have gone unlearned. And once the story is milked well past its expiration date, no one will want to hear them.