WASHINGTON — It was March 2020 when veteran journalist Ryan Lizza found an apology note in his DC home that wasn’t meant for him.
His live-in girlfriend, Olivia Nuzzi, had penned a letter on hotel stationery, and it was spilling out of her backpack on the floor of their three-story townhouse in Georgetown.
“Mark, I am sorry. I can’t say that I wish I hadn’t touched you, hadn’t,” the incomplete, abandoned handwritten letter dated March 5, 2020, obtained by The Post read.
The Mark, in this case, was former 2020 GOP presidential hopeful Mark Sanford, Lizza has publicly alleged. The aborted letter was one of three draft notes Lizza found handwritten by Nuzzi, a fellow journalist.
The note, penned on a Kimpton Hotels note pad from a reporting trip, is early evidence that Nuzzi crossed journalistic boundaries by having sexual relationships with sources, Lizza explained in his tell-all series on Nuzzi.
The wild private lives of both Nuzzi and Lizza, once a Washington power couple, have been on full display in recent days. Nuzzi released a book, “American Canto” on her alleged digital affair with another presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while her former lover, Lizza, released a web series to expose a pattern of Nuzzi’s alleged sexual encounters with famous men.
“My heart stopped when I realized who he was,” Lizza recalled in his Telos piece last month of the Sanford notes. “He was a presidential candidate, a source, and the subject of Olivia’s recent profile for New York [Magazine].”
“…I called my agent. ‘We have a big problem,’ I said. ‘Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford,’” Lizza concluded in a dramatic cliff-hanger to his Part 1 kickoff tell-all series piece on Nuzzi.
While the note didn’t mention Sanford by name, Lizza was able to put the pieces together, knowing that she had been “spending more and more time in South Carolina,” and ultimately, he got the truth out of her.
Nuzzi later fessed up to becoming “infatuated” with Sanford after their interview and had sent him “risqué pictures and texts” while quietly following him around on the campaign trail, according to Lizza’s telling.
The tryst included some rumpy-pumpy at his South Carolina home when Nuzzi allegedly “went dark” on Lizza and tried to conceal it by making up a “story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother,” per the Telos piece.
“Olivia insisted that she and Mark only had sex one time, on the night of February 24, 2020, after she arrived at his home at about 7 PM,” Lizza explained in Part 2 of his tell-all series piece on Nuzzi.
“During their encounter, he was paranoid that she was taping him, so she briefly turned her phone’s recorder on and off to show him how it worked, leaving behind a short voice memo of the two of them giggling. She left his house around 11 PM.”
Lizza said he was used to “clearing up Olivia’s messes,” and despite her alleged affair with Sanford in 2020, the pair stuck it out and got engaged in 2022 before calling it off last year amid their explosive falling out.
The Sanford revelation was captivating partly because of his history. The former governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011 was infamously caught having an affair during a June 2009 disappearance.
His alibi was that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. In reality, he trekked over to Argentina to be with his mistress. A decade later, Sanford mounted a long-shot GOP primary campaign against President Trump in 2020.
Ironically, Lizza claims to have touched down in South Carolina the day after Nuzzi’s alleged affair with Sanford and was oblivious to their activities the prior night.
Around that time, Lizza reached out to Sanford to arrange a lunch between the two and Nuzzi, something he “later learned had sent her into a panic.”
“She called Mark, explained that I was her boyfriend, and asked him not to meet with me,” Lizza wrote in his Part 2 piece. “Among other things, her recklessness detonated my relationship with a good source in a key state. Mark politely told her not to contact him again until she was single.”
Sanford’s directive to Nuzzi prompted her to write and re-write apology notes to him on the Kimpton Hotel note pad – later found by her boyfriend.
Other pieces of evidence of the affair Lizza cited were a voice memo and a draft, “tabloid-style news story” Nuzzi concocted about her romance with Sanford to map out the worst-case scenario of their affair becoming known.
Lizza described the fallout as “devastating” and stressed how it forced the two to shelve one of their book projects. They later scrapped another book project in 2024, the same year her alleged affair with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to light.
“She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates?” Lizza recalled thinking after discovering the aborted note to Sanford.
The Post made multiple attempts to call a press number for Sanford and sent an email. The Post also reached out to Nuzzi and her reps for comment.
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