In the forthcoming “American Canto”, Olivia Nuzzi will reportedly write about her “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
This is fair game, of course, but sharing personal intimate messages feels a tad icky. To me, at least.
There’s titillation in sharing private texts, of course, but not much personal honor. I’m no fan of RFK Jr.’s thinking about vaccines and whatnot, but revealing allegedly intimate texts that he sent to Nuzzi is ethically questionable or, if you will, a bit slimey. (It would be different if Nuzzi had somehow obtained transcripts of texts that RFK, Jr, had sent to another would-be digital lover…that’s a different deal.)
Roughly the same thing happened to me when the careless James Mangold forwarded a private email that I’d sent to him. Out of the emailed 15-paragraphs my thoughts contained a single paragraph that touched very briefly on private voyeurism. Embarassing, yes, but also private. Mangold in turn sent it to Lionsgate’s Tim Palen, who in turn forwarded it to Nikki Finke because she wanted to “get” me because I had shared a relatively minor anecdote about Finke with some N.Y. Daily News guys back in’94.
It was a cheap and callous move on Mangold’s part, because it was meant for his eyes only and yet he violated that trust without blinking an eye. Mangold could have copied and pasted the content of a single live-wire paragraph in my email that he figured Lionsgate would want to know about (i.e., I’d spoken with Elmore Leonard about Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma) but naaahh….too much trouble, right?
