Is Olivia Rinaldi related to Tom Rinaldi? All about the CBS reporter going viral over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's engagement reaction

CBS News 24/7 reporter Olivia Rinaldi had a fangirl moment on Tuesday after learning that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged. Moments before going live, she saw the Instagram announcement by the pop singer on her phone, turned it towards the camera, and called out her producer by saying:

“Taylor Swift is engaged. Taylor Swift is Engaged. Come back to me. She just posted it. Oh my god! Oh my god! This is so huge! This is ginormous! This is so exciting! Oh my god! It’s on her Instagram…”

Olivia Rinaldi, CBS News’ White House reporter, is not related to veteran reporter Tom Rinaldi, who now works for Fox Sports and previously worked for ESPN.

As studio host Reed Cowan laughed at his colleague’s fangirl moment, Olivia declared on camera:

“I feel like Paul Revere right now… This is a very exciting moment for me in my professional career because I get to announce that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged.”

While she held her phone to show Taylor Swift’s engagement announcement, Cowan speculated about the upcoming wedding. In the end, Rinaldi, 27, added about the nuptials,

“I volunteer to cover it. Just in case you need… I’ll be there to cover it.”

Olivia Rinaldi’s reaction to the Swift-Kelce engagement has now gone viral on social media platforms, after CBS News posted the moment online.

Exploring the career of Olivia Rinaldi

According to her LinkedIn bio, Olivia Rinaldi is a White House reporter at CBS News who covered Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, including his assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention, and election night.

Olivia joined the network in October 2019 and served as a broadcast associate for Face the Nation for a year. Between October 2020 and May 2022, she continued in the same role at CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell.

In mid-2022, she was promoted to the position of an associate producer on the same program as well as producer for Person to Person. Rinaldi collaborated with O’Donnell for other CBS shows, such as 60 Minutes and CBS News Sunday Morning, for the next three years.

An alumna of the University of Virginia’s class of 2019, she won the duPont-Columbia Award for CBS Evening News in 2021 for contributing to an 18-month investigation into “the mishandling of s*xual assault inside the U.S. military.”

In a September 2024 profile for her alma mater’s campus website, UVA Today, Olivia shared that she adored what she did and called it “the best job.” She also credited her mentors, Anna Katherine Clay, a professor in the UVA Department of Media Studies, and retired CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews, for helping in her career.

Between October 2023 and January 2025, Olivia Rinaldi was CBS News’ election campaign reporter. Following her significant contribution, she was promoted to serve as the network’s White House reporter.

Earlier, Rinaldi served as a business news intern at Bloomberg, a news intern at Virginia Public Radio, WVTF, and Radio IQ, a writer at The Cavalier Daily, and a staff writer at the Bristow Beat.

Between 2015 and 2019, she attended UVA, where she obtained a double major in media studies and foreign affairs. In 2017, she pursued a senior research fellowship at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.

Olivia Rinaldi herself is engaged to Will Clarke, according to her December 2024 Instagram post. She was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and now lives and works in Washington, D.C.

Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce on August 26, 2025, after dating for two years. Her Instagram post saw a carousel of engagement images of the pair inside a garden, including the one where Kelce went down on his knees. It was captioned,

Trending

"Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married."

The post immediately went viral and earned happy reactions from their fans. Donald Trump also responded positively to the news during a cabinet meeting. He called Travis "a great player, a great guy," and Taylor "a terrific person" and wished them "a lot of luck."

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