What is the price of love? A spreadsheet quantifying a journalistic scandal

Adventures in personal essays

Love requires self-debasement. The humiliation of vulnerability, the intimacy of potentially being rejected by someone we want, the frenzy of desire to begin with, really, it’s all debasing if you think about it. Lust has that too with the accoutrements and awkwardness of all those debasing feelings accompanied by fluids. Usually we keep this debasement private.

But Olivia Nuzzi and her paramours have made it public, turned it into content, monetized it…which makes it fair game to ask: what’s the actual price?

All publicity is good publicity as the adage goes. In a 24-hour news cycle where things flow in and flow out, something outrageous today is forgotten tomorrow.

Well it does work for getting clicks, for getting clickbait, for getting this, for getting that, and for forgetting overall. This has not been the case yet as the discourse around Nuzzi and her certain set of romantic liaisons with a certain group of men have dominated the discourse - at least on my Twitter feed, which I had hoped the algorithm had balanced out given how much it skews towards cute cat videos and takes on AI research.

If you can’t beat the hype, join it, right? I thought about running the numbers like an Excel spreadsheet on a scandal. Between confirmed and estimated figures, Keith Olbermann may have spent roughly around a quarter of a million to around $200,000 on her between two years of university tuition at Fordham at $86,000, rent on a West Village studio around $65,000, a designer wardrobe of Tom Ford/Hervé Léger items around $25,000, Cartier jewelry at $15,000 (confirmed via Twitter/X where he itemized it to $1,250 per celebration over the course of their four years together).

Now, on Nuzzi’s side for income, based on media industry benchmarks, her New York Magazine salary was probably around $100-150,000 yearly. The book advance for “American Canto”? Industry standard: $150,000-300,000. Her current Vanity Fair West Coast Editor role: $170,000 a year or so. Adding it all up, her estimated career gross lands around $1.4-1.5 million.

But there’s no accounting for when search algorithms permanently bind your name to terms that should have remained private, when professional accomplishments become secondary to personal details revealed in someone else’s monetized memoir. We all know it now. We wish we didn’t.

There. I ran the numbers. Are we done?

Of course we’re not done. What I’m trying to qualify - not just through quantification - is the price of love and the self-debasement that follows. The cost of this endeavor is usually kept to yourself, it can’t be loaned out unless the currency of your mythos and mythology is disseminated. But this ledger is public. And when the ledger is public, when you’ve become part of the public record and discourse, you’re subject to the rules of vox populi. The internet forgets but it remembers everything all at once.

All this hype is in anticipation of Nuzzi’s book American Canto being released, but already, her ex lovers have taken to profiteering, monetizing, accounting, balancing sheets by sharing what happened between sheets.

While search terms for a particular sexual act spike across search engine indexes for the first time in years, while we are all subject to these details without ever having asked for it, the men have taken to literally doing public accounting of their relationships. Olbermann breaking their time down together via Twitter as if it’s a profit and loss statement. Lizza with the Substack paywalling parts of this series, what’s next? They’ve made the private transactional retroactively. That is humiliating for everybody involved but really what does that tell you about the transactional nature of their love towards her as well?

(I need to briefly acknowledge here that Keith got involved with her when she was 18 and he was 52. That’s its own conversation about power. Lizza has his own scandals, but that’s not what this essay is about.)

Look, far be it from me to judge another woman or another man or another person for their romantic choices. However, I don’t think this is judgment as much as it is a reflection because for every Olivia Nuzzi - I mean in other industries, in industries where one doesn’t write about these things but does them anyways, right?

For every Olivia Nuzzi in some sort of consulting role toeing the line between finishing a PowerPoint deck at a Hyatt Regency and three drinks in with the client after reasonable hours, for every Olivia Nuzzi in some tawdry back of house liaison with the portly restaurant operator, for every Olivia Nuzzi in a garage at a mechanic shop, at a university, at a hospital, at the post office, at the bakery, everywhere around you with people - for every problematic dissolution of ethics that has happened, what distinguishes this case is that the written word is at the heart of the industry where these people operate. That’s what makes it fair game, since it’s giving greed and gossip as golem, as gotcha, as goddamnit who hired these people to begin with.

Besides, what is the price of love? I think about the longer term here, when Olivia and I are both 35, 40, 45, 50, about what it means for a woman to enter a room where her career is not derived from the things she has done or made but how she’s been done and made out with. She is judged based on where her mouth has (reportedly) been, not on the basis of the words coming from them. She is judged not for her words but for her deeds as words.

Nuzzi is judged, of course, and since all women are judged all the time in all sorts of ways, this means Nuzzi is judged with a particular scrutiny based on weaponizing exactly what the patriarchy wanted from her - youth, beauty, availability - and conjuring it into bylines and book deals.

Along the guise of journalism and the access it afforded, Nuzzi fed on desire, turned it into discourse, and now it feeds on her so that what nourishes her is what destroys her.

Everything we know about Olivia Nuzzi against our desire to know it is the cannibal paradox of performing femininity at its apex. And we love to see it. We really do.

But the same system that rewarded her for this will ensure it’s all she’s ever known for. What nourished her will destroy her. Or maybe it won’t, and she’ll fail upward forever while I run spreadsheets on her success. Either way, we love to see it.

What I’m really getting at is that Olivia is going to have this follow her her entire life. This self-debasement and the price of it is something that is associated not just in the search engine optimization, not just in the words, but in one’s reputation. Forget a big fat red scarlet A on her, it’s a big fat red scarlet F.

The price paid follows a woman who has debased herself in public, just like the work of OnlyFans models, all of them their entire life. Just like the work of porn stars follows them their entire lives. I can’t think of any male porn star or any male OnlyFans model being someone who has paid as heavily as the women have. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but once you get started, there is no going back as a woman. Your mythology is fixed in this way. You have been priced-in hereafter. Nobody ever forgets. They will not let you forget. There is Return on Interest and then there is Returning To Your Interests, Compounding Interest, Dilution, Derision, Delusion, Joan Didn’t-ion, Disillusion.

Keith Olbermann gets to make jokes about dodging bullets. Ryan Lizza - who was fired from The New Yorker for sexual misconduct - gets to be the wounded party. RFK Jr is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Sanford already had his Appalachian Trail scandal and moved on.

Sure, she has profited from it - she has certainly had a higher profile lifestyle and opportunities that are shut out to most people, including people like myself (currently - I’m just a temporarily embarrassed prolific writer analyst policy trifecta hybrid, right?)

When I pose the question what is the price of love, I’m posing the question of what is the price we are willing to pay in debasing ourselves, and how is that augmented by the public spectacle of it?

What is the price for what we think, for what we feel, for what we do, for what we say, for how it is commemorated, retold, churned into lore?

What is the price outside of the narrative that we constructed as we privately debased ourselves and now it’s made public?

Now on the subject of journalistic ethics and Miss Nuzzi’s output particularly when it comes to politicians, there is quite a lot of discussion going on about this - very good discussion, very good discourse and I think it is absolutely worth acknowledging. I don’t know how you can quantify the impact of a piece and its political ramifications but it certainly played a huge part here. One wonders why Vanity Fair even issued a statement when it was already all out there. Apparently they’ve lost some subscribers. But there is a duty of care and integrity involved with this line of work that has been repeatedly breached.

Why are we giving such problematic people power to begin with? Why does the industry insist on picking from the same bit players to turn them into names known? Whatever happened to casting calls for Hollywood movies and unknowns? Is there not an American Idol for journalism and writing? What does it say about the entire ecosystem that decided to prize Nuzzi’s particular price of love?

And of course because this is timely and the algorithm needs to be optimized and my writing needs to be built and circulated and because the book doesn’t come out for another two weeks and because there’s a Substack that needs to be fed and because there is a Google doc feeding in snippets from the paid Substack to save countless numbers of people $9 a month - we are all complicit and we are all in on it and of course this is my way of transacting as well - well it’s all a mess isn’t it?

We tell ourselves stories to live, right? The price of love is the price of not forgetting. And in this time and age I think the price paid is far grander than what any of these calculations come out to. Maybe she walks away unscathed. Maybe she gets the last laugh. Maybe it doesn’t even matter to Nuzzi. Maybe she’s fine with it. Maybe it’s worth it to her. Maybe it’s what she intended. We’re all certainly talking about it, about her, about them.

The price of it is like the price of any good on the market in any hype cycle, any boom and bust. Except it applies to a woman and her trajectory and her story from here on out.

The price of love? For men, it’s a line item they can joke about on Twitter. For women, it’s compound interest on a debt that never gets forgiven.