Media Mudlarks

I spent the last 3 weeks reporting on Dr. Oz for @NYMag. Things got strange quickly. https://t.co/aa2k8A1raM

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) December 28, 2021

Yes, Nuzzi is problematic (and she seems to have terrible taste in men), but it’s always fun to watch an assassin stalk a member of the enemy party:

… I decided to try reaching the Ozes directly, since my efforts to contact the candidate via what you might call the formal process were not working. There was no answer at a number listed for their home in New Jersey. And no answer at the 212 number listed for Dr. Oz himself. Then I tried Lisa Oz, the self-help author and self-described certified Reiki expert who has been married to the candidate for 36 years. To my surprise, she picked up — for about a second. Just as quickly as it started, the call was over. I had barely said hello. Unsure if we’d been disconnected or she’d hung up on me, I tried her back. The tone of her voice suggested it had definitely been the latter.

“How did you get my number?” she asked sharply. I told her that her number was listed in public records, and this annoyed her too. “Oh,” she said, “I should have gotten rid of that.” I was about to explain that public records don’t work that way, but she cut in. “Have a nice day,” she said, but it sounded like a cross between the way women of the South say “Bless your heart” and men of Brooklyn call some asshole “pal” after being cut off in traffic. Then she hung up.

Or she thought she did.

“It’s Olivia from The New Yorker, the woman who talked to Michelle,” she said…

Another voice answered. It was Dr. Oz.

“Michelle should never have spoken to her,” he said. “That’s who’s down at the office now.”

Dr. and Mrs. Oz did not or could not hear me, and they did not realize that, rather than end the phone call, Lisa Oz had mistakenly connected her device to what sounded like the sound system of a vehicle, meaning that as they engaged in paranoid conversation and argument for more than four minutes, I remained on the line, hearing every word of it…

“That’s what Casey — ” Mrs. Oz began to say, referring to the campaign manager. “When Michelle told me she spoke to her — ” she continued, referring to Michelle Bouchard, a longtime friend of the couple whom I had interviewed a few days earlier. We’d hit it off during a long conversation that I found helpful for understanding Dr. and Mrs. Oz, and she had volunteered to forward my request to the couple and encourage them to speak with me too. Then she clammed up. If she was going to talk with me again, she said, she would have to get approval from the Ozes before doing so. Another friend of the couple, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that Lisa Oz was not happy to hear that associates were freely commenting about her husband to a reporter and that she had been calling around, complaining that “some fucking girl” was “doing a hit piece” and that the policy going forward should be “Don’t fucking talk to her.” It was only day two of my assignment, when my questions were devastating suggestions of character assassination like “What is Dr. Oz like?” and “What do you think of his decision to run for office?”…

Doors slammed. Dr. and Mrs. Oz seemed to exit the car and enter a space where they greeted others with whom they engaged for a few seconds in animated conversation about what sounded like a million random things at once, from Mrs. Oz bringing someone something to eat to, out of nowhere, the subject of NFTs. The call ended.

I stared at my phone, upset by what I had heard and not sure what to do. Before I could figure it out, the phone rang. It was Lisa Oz. I picked it up and said hello. She paused, then she hung up on me. This time she was successful…

NB: Nuzzi also did a memorable story about Giuliani accidentally butt-dialing her — and a bunch of others. And she got her big break with the first story about Anthony Weiner’s insalubrious phone habits. Fortune, or at least modern communication technology, favors the young.

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For Entertainment Purposes Only: <em>‘The Political Life of Dr. Oz’</em>Post + Comments (116)