Vanity Fair’s Olivia Nuzzi allegedly had affair with SC’s Mark Sanford, ex says
A former Politico staffer, now blogger, claims his ex-fiancé had an affair with former South Carolina governor and 2020 presidential candidate Mark Sanford.
In a blog post filled with metaphors and imagery, Ryan Lizza told readers he discovered that his ex of 10 years — Olivia Nuzzi — was allegedly having an affair with Sanford while Lizza and Nuzzi were writing a book about the 2020 presidential campaign. Lizza revealed the allegation on his website, Telos.news.
Lizza wrote that he found an “aborted love letter” from Nuzzi to Sanford that was dated March 5, 2020.
“If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house, I would still thirst for you,” Lizza claimed Nuzzi wrote to Sanford.
“I flipped to another page and saw a name and the first line of an unfinished love letter to him that included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out,” Lizza wrote in the post. Sanford could not be reached for comment.
Lizza’s accusation is now raising questions about whether Nuzzi acted ethically as she was covering Sanford’s 2020 presidential bid while serving as the Washington, D.C., correspondent for New York Magazine, according to the New York Times.
Recently hired by Vanity Fair, Nuzzi’s employment at the magazine is reportedly under scrutiny, with staffers “shocked” and frustrated, according to a newsletter by Status and an article by the New Yorker.
Lizza said that Nuzzi told him that she became “infatuated” with Sanford following an interview she’d had with the then-2020 presidential candidate.
“As her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother,” Lizza wrote.
This isn’t the first time Nuzzi has been embroiled in a sex scandal. In 2024, it was revealed that Nuzzi, while engaged to Lizza, was having an affair with now Human and Health Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Nuzzi later revealed details about the encounter, which she claimed was never physical, in a memoir, American Canto, according to the New York Times and the New York Post.
Lizza’s allegation also places Sanford in the spotlight for a second time. The then-South Carolina Governor admitted he had an affair with an Argentine woman, Maria Belen Chapur, in 2009.
For six days in the summer of that year, Sanford said he’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail, but his family and staff members couldn’t account for his whereabouts.
Acting on a tip that The State newspaper had received, political reporter Gina Smith was at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport waiting for Sanford when he got off a flight from Buenos Aires. Sanford told Smith that he had been in Argentina. And, at a televised news conference later that day, he admitted an extramarital affair.
This story was originally published November 22, 2025 at 11:44 AM.
