Writer who ditched husband, job for ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli defends Olivia Nuzzi over RFK Jr. ‘sext’ scandal

A business journalist who famously ditched her husband and job for disgraced “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli defended New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi over her alleged sexting scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – and even wildly suggested that the publication may have colluded in the supposed emotional affair.

“So f-ing tired of women being scandalized for things that would be complete non-events if men did them,” Christie Smythe wrote on X shortly before 1 a.m. Friday, just hours after the bombshell accusations surrounding Nuzzi and Kennedy first made headlines.

So f-ing tired of women being scandalized for things that would be complete non-events if men did them.

Yes, she should have disclosed any conflict, but also, like maybe the magazine quietly encouraged this “conflict” because it wanted scoops?

— Christie Smythe (@ChristieSmythe) September 20, 2024

“Yes, she should have disclosed any conflict, but also, like maybe the magazine quietly encouraged this “conflict” because it wanted scoops?” Smythe suggested.

The Post has reached out to New York magazine for comment on Smythe’s remarks.

Nuzzi, 31, was placed on leave from her plum job as a politics reporter at New York magazine after she acknowledged a “personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign,” the publication said Thursday.

The former subject was later revealed to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr, 70, whom she profiled for the magazine in the fall of 2023.

Sources told The Post that the pair was allegedly sexting earlier this year.

Smythe, now in her early 40s, generated her own controversy in 2020, when she penned a story in Elle magazine about how she left her husband and a job at Bloomberg News to pursue a relationship with Shkreli.

Smythe met the future felon in 2015, when she was assigned to cover him for Bloomberg.

She later broke the news of his arrest for securities fraud. Shkreli – who became a pariah when he amped up the price of an anti-parasitic drug as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals – was convicted in 2017, and spent several years behind bars.

Smythe insisted that her relationship with Shkreli remained platonic until she started visiting him in prison in 2018.

She even admitted to missing her first marriage counseling session with her then-husband in order to see the reviled “Pharma Bro.”

Smythe and Shkreli eventually became a couple – and were so serious at one point that they had some of Smythe’s eggs frozen and discussed having a child together, she said.

“It was such a slap in the face to the media establishment. The matter had been settled. Martin was the villain and that was that,” she later told The Post about the backlash to the Elle piece.

Shkreli was so irked by her decision to air their relationship to the public that he broke it off via a letter from his lawyer, Smythe said.

But Smythe also claimed that the pair never completely cut ties, and a few weeks after his early release in 2022, said that she was hoping to see him.

“I’ll always have feelings for him,” Smythe said of her former paramour.

Neither Nuzzi nor RFK Jr. have publicly confirmed their alleged relationship.

Nuzzi did not name the Kennedy scion in her own statement, in which admitted that “the nature of some communications between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal.”

The relationship was never physical, she claimed.

Nuzzi’s former fiancé, Politico reporter Ryan Lizza, confirmed their split in a statement in Politico PM on Friday afternoon.

“Because of my connection to this story through my ex-fiancée, my editors and I have agreed that I won’t be involved in any coverage of Kennedy in Playbook or elsewhere at POLITICO,” the comment read.

A spokesperson for Kennedy denied the rumors, saying that the married dad of six only met Nuzzi “once in his life,” when she profiled him for New York magazine last fall.