Olivia Nuzzi, the young and talented Trump reporter, committed the apparently cardinal sin of becoming romantically entangled with a subject. And, worse than that, the subject was widely reviled, particularly among journalists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-Kennedy. And then it turned out –her jilted fiancé, another journalist, was telling all – that there were other politicians she’d been involved with, too. This scandal, which has consumed the journalism world, was good for me because it forced the heaps of opprobrium I was getting from other journalists for my emails with the reviled Jeffrey Epstein off the front page.

I had interacted with Nuzzi a few times shortly after my book Fire and Fury was published in 2018, when she was first trying to get a toehold in the Trump business. I had a sense to stay away from her – she was too hungry for comfort. But damn if she wasn’t a good writer, certainly among the best of the mostly bad lot of Trump reporters. So, the other day I wrote a defense of her: who cares who she slept with if she was writing brilliantly? But that got me more opprobrium and a lecture from my wife Victoria about leaving well enough alone.

Thankfully, Victoria herself has also recently supplanted me in the news. She has been adamantly anti-news since, long ago now, we got in tabloid trouble for our May-December relationship (in part, this was payback from Rupert Murdoch for the biography I wrote about him, which he didn’t like at all). She had, ever since, retreated into privacy and domesticity – my Trump life and four books about him were, at best, of minor interest to her. Indeed, a year ago, she dragged me from my half-century in Manhattan to a bucolic Hamptons life, a nearly unimaginable development for me. This life has increasingly been displayed on her Instagram account – and on mine too. She takes videos of me talking about politics against the backdrop of the 1829 farmhouse she’s refurbished, with, apparently, many more people interested in the house than the politics. Indeed, the house is an antidote to the politics.

This has made Victoria not just Instagram famous, but the subject of various newspaper and magazine articles. It is domesticity as a defense against the Trump Leviathan. At best, I get a mention in the second paragraph.

As though we are in competition – and I swear we are not – a month ago, in a certain grab for the front page, I sued the First Lady of the United States. I do a thrice-weekly podcast with the journalist Joanna Coles called Inside Trump’s Head. I happened to mention in passing some of what Jeffrey Epstein had told me about his relationship with Donald Trump and their pursuit of fashion models together in the 1990s, which was how they both came to know the model Melania Knauss. I was shortly notified by lawyers representing the First Lady that she demanded a retraction and was set to sue me for a billion dollars – surely an overreaction to my statements, largely backed up by photographs of the trio together. Most obviously, here was an effort to discourage anyone from linking her with Jeffrey Epstein.

In New York State there are laws against using libel suits for the sole purpose of intimidating people not to say what you don’t want them to say. So, before Melania sued me – assuming, she would have followed through on her threat – I sued her. This now gives me the opportunity to depose the First Lady, as well as her husband, under oath and ask them virtually anything I want about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. For taking this action, I was, that week, a saint of sorts – almost instantly raising, in a GoFundMe account, $750,000 from thousands of small donors to wage this suit. But the news cycle is harsh. I can’t possibly be the person who knew Epstein best. But I am probably the writer who knew him best. We conducted a pretty steady conversation between 2014 and 2019, when he died. This was because he was, to me, a figure with an intimate view of money and power quite unlike anyone I had ever met, with mysteries begging to be unraveled – and because he was a figure with an intimate view of Trump. This is a story I have been telling for some years now.

The telling of it – that is, being the writer of it – was interrupted early one morning a few weeks ago when Victoria and I, having come into the city for the night, were staying at the Bowery Hotel and were awakened by reporters, one, two… then 100, who had just received the first drop of the Epstein emails. We like the Bowery Hotel not least because of the celebrity sightings in the lobby, but by the time we went down to breakfast all eyes were on us.

Shortly after Epstein’s death, the New York Times, in quite a broad indictment, offered in an editorial that “anyone who has shaken hands with Mr. Epstein in recent decades should be scrutinized.” (In fact, Epstein, like Trump a germaphobe, did not shake hands… but you get the point.)

I’m sure there is a lesson here about writers who court news and then make news. It upsets some imagined balance (for my own part, I would certainly say becoming part of the story does detract from writing it). But, on the other hand, everyone in every news organization, and indeed in every walk of life, is grappling with the Epstein story, precisely because they don’t know it. But I do – or, at least, more than anyone else.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.