For months, political circles whispered about the alleged digital affair between RFK Jr. and journalist Olivia Ames, the 32-year-old reporter whose career has been tightly interwoven with the very men she profiles. But the latest revelation has detonated a new explosion in Washington: Ames’ ex-fiancé now claims Kennedy was not her first political entanglement.

According to him, she had already crossed a similar line years earlier — with another Republican politician more than three decades older than her.

And this time, the accusations strike even closer to the heart of Washington’s tangled web of political obsession, media power, and the blurred lines between professional admiration and personal infatuation.

A Confession in Print

The allegation came not from a tabloid leak, but from Ames’ own former partner, veteran political journalist Thomas Reddington, 51, who broke his silence in a highly personal Substack post titled:
“How I Found Out.”

In it, Reddington describes discovering a love letter addressed not to him, nor to RFK Jr., but to another high-profile Republican — a former congressman whose name became synonymous with scandal a decade earlier.

The piece does not initially reveal the politician’s identity. Instead, Reddington builds suspense, describing the man only as:

• “A presidential candidate,”
• “A source,”
• “Someone she had been profiling,” and
• “A famous politician 32 years older than Olivia.”

Only at the end does he deliver the punchline:
The politician wasn’t RFK Jr. at all. It was former South Carolina governor Marcus Sanderson, the once-promising Republican whose career imploded after his extramarital affair in Argentina became international news.

The political world hadn’t seen his name in years. Now, suddenly, he was back — in a scandal he never expected.

A Pattern Emerging

According to Reddington, Ames became “infatuated” with Sanderson after interviewing him during his short-lived presidential challenge against Donald Trump in 2020.

What followed, he says, was a downward spiral:

Secret messages.
Late-night obsession.
A burner account created just to follow Sanderson on the campaign trail.
And finally — the night she disappeared for hours, telling her fiancé she was tending to her sick mother, when in reality, Reddington claims, she had flown to South Carolina.

Their relationship, he writes, was consummated at Sanderson’s lakeside home.

The detail that stunned readers:
All of this happened while she was in a committed relationship — and while she was reporting on Sanderson professionally.

If true, the ethical breach is extraordinary.
But for Reddington, the betrayal was not professional.
It was deeply personal.

“We were in a period of calm,” he writes. “A rare stretch of true domestic peace. And that’s when I learned she had been living a second life.”

The Kennedy Layer

Reddington’s discovery of the Sanderson affair predates the RFK Jr. scandal by several years. Yet he says the emotional wound never fully healed — making the Kennedy revelations in 2024 the breaking point.

RFK Jr., 71, denies ever having any romantic involvement with Ames. His wife, actress Susan Hales, has publicly stood by him. But the digital paper trail — late-night messages, intimate tone, and Ames’ own writing — left lingering doubts in the public imagination.

Reddington says he had promised never to speak publicly about any of it.

But when Ames announced her upcoming tell-all memoir — and hinted heavily that it would contain “personal revelations about power, desire, and the people who shaped my professional life” — he decided silence was no longer an option.

“She told me none of this would ever see daylight,” he wrote. “That was not true.”

The Fallout in Washington

The reaction was immediate and brutal.

Sanderson, now 65, has avoided the spotlight for years. Requests for comment have gone unanswered. His former staffers, however, appear shaken.

One aide privately described the new allegation as “disastrous,” adding, “He barely survived the first scandal. This one — even if it’s years old — will reopen every wound.”

Ames’ employer, Vanity Fair, declined to comment but confirmed she remains on staff.

Political ethics experts say the story raises urgent concerns about the blurred boundaries between journalism and political influence.

“This isn’t about private relationships,” one ethics professor said. “It’s about power. About access. About a journalist shaping stories while pursuing secret romantic attachments to her sources. That undermines public trust in a way few scandals do.”

I spent some time in South Carolina with Mark Sanford for @NYMag (📸 by Lauren Matarazzo): https://t.co/NiHKlpLBhW pic.twitter.com/Ajf3BFlQSv

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 15, 2019

A Scandal With No Clear Ending

The story shows no sign of fading. Ames’ memoir — whose release date has suddenly skyrocketed in visibility — has not yet been officially titled, but insiders claim it contains a chapter “loosely based on” the Sanderson episode.

Reddington, furious at the pre-release marketing, published his Substack to “set the record straight before the narrative becomes fiction.”

For now, all three figures — the reporter, the ex-fiancé, and the former governor — remain silent.

Washington, however, is not.

Once again, a scandal involving desire, ambition, and the political class’s oldest temptations has burst into public view — exposing a world where access can blur into intimacy, interviews into obsession, and the truth into something even stranger than rumor.

And the most dangerous part?
This story is still unfolding.