Gone in a New York Minute

Last week, Olivia Nuzzi, the star journalist whose digital affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ignited an unrelenting Category Five shitstorm, received a message. Nuzzi, who had been placed on leave while lawyers from the white-shoe law firm Davis Wright Tremaine conducted a third-party probe into the matter, was informed that a decision about her future employment at New York magazine had been made.

The decision reached by New York-parent company Vox Media, in consultation with DWT, was not the one Nuzzi was hoping for. Nuzzi had participated in the third-party probe, sitting for a hours-long grilling with its attorneys, as we reported earlier this month, with the hope that she would be permitted against all odds to return to her perch as Washington correspondent for the magazine.

In her eyes, she had made an embarrassing mistake on the national stage, but not one that warranted her being ousted from the outlet she had called home for the better part of the last decade. In truth, however, Nuzzi's fate was very likely sealed the moment Vox Media sought the services of DWT, a firm that doesn't exactly have a reputation which would have suggested she would be cleared to return to work.