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Back in 2022, on the first day of Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard, Jessica Reed Kraus was watching her son play soccer when she received a phone call from an unknown number. Lately, she’d been posting about the case on her House Inhabit Substack, commenting on Heard’s testimony with a heavy dose of skepticism. Kraus had gained influence online in the early 2010s as a liberal-leaning “mommy blogger,” but became disillusioned with the left during the pandemic—and a bit bored with writing about motherhood. She’d pivoted to covering celebrity trials from a “just asking questions” perspective.
Depp must have liked the questions Kraus was asking publicly about his ex-wife’s credibility, because it was his voice on the line when she answered. “We talked for an hour, and I was driving a beat-up surf van with no air conditioning, so I had to drive with my window down, and he’s like, ‘Are you in the grocery store? Why is it so loud?’” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m a mom living my fucking life, and I didn’t know you were going to call me.’”
The movie star had been connected to Kraus through a friend’s wife, who knew about House Inhabit’s huge female following and noticed that her takes leaned against Heard. Kraus tells me that Depp wasn’t allowed to discuss the trial with her for legal reasons, so he mostly just tried to entertain her. “He was talking about the death of journalism and went into a whole rant about Hunter S. Thompson,” she says. “He started doing impersonations. He told me about Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson. The man is just rambling, rambling. I think he went into ancient wars, I don’t even know.”
This conversation, and a dramatic recounting of it on her newsletter, effectively launched Kraus into a new stratosphere of celebrity gossip writers. It also helped her carve out a niche on Substack, a subscription-based platform where independent writers, journalists, and content creators can say whatever they want, often unencumbered by editors or fact-checkers. “I just post and hope for the best,” she says. “I would never reread any of the articles I’ve written, because it is sometimes just stream of consciousness. It’s very passionate. It’s like you’re trying to capture how you felt in a moment.”
Kraus covered the rest of the defamation trial from a solidly pro-Depp perspective—not because he called her, she insists, but because she’d made up her mind after poring through legal documents and opening up her DMs to invite anecdotes and opinions about Heard. “I [came] to believe that this is the kind of person she is,” Kraus says. And as anti-Heard content raged through social media that year, often deliberately spread by right-wing media, her own clout began to skyrocket, too.
The Kraus I meet two years later for brunch on a chilly fall morning in Manhattan has strayed even further from the Hillary Clinton supporter she was back in 2016—the one who sold handmade canvas tepees on Etsy and posted travel tips for moms with four sons. The 44-year-old now earns seven figures as the top culture writer on Substack, where she boasts nearly 400,000 subscribers (roughly 20,000 of them paying $7 a month) and is covering—or what she constitutes as covering—the 2024 election from an “independent perspective on the campaign trail,” as she says in her Instagram bio. “This is a time that I feel like I was made to cover,” she says.
Kraus is an avid fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to the extent that she posts about him looking hot in his jeans. (They share similar anti-vaccine views.) She’s described JD Vance as “America’s newest crush” and “the blue-eyed October surprise no one saw coming,” though she tells me that she thinks his comment about childless women being “miserable cat ladies” was “really dumb.” And more recently, she has grown to love and support former President Donald Trump, because she says he always puts “America first.”
All of the posting, blogging, and social media boosting for Republicans has helped land her at glitzy Mar-a-Lago parties, rubbing elbows with some of the biggest names in MAGA land. “Bring me in and just let me witness it myself,” she says. “I want access to anyone who’s relevant to culture.”
Mainstream journalists would certainly take issue with Kraus calling herself one, especially as she regularly pits herself against them—picking fights with NBC reporters and threatening in her Instagram Stories to put the faces of writers she doesn’t like on billboards. She’s a subject of fascination in the media—both Mother Jones and The Wall Street Journal have profiled her—while also loathed for spreading conspiracy theories, criticizing women who accuse powerful men of abuse, and essentially campaigning for Republicans. “I don’t really care if I’m categorized as right-leaning,” she says. “Because the media is so heavily funded by liberal bias that I’m like, ‘Maybe it’s a counter.’”
Wired listed Kraus as one of the top influencers shaping the 2024 election, alongside Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. House Inhabit was dubbed “InfoWars for wine moms” (a reference to Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones’s show), because of the way she spreads falsehoods and normalizes far-right conspiracy theorists, including Jones himself. “My whole thing is, I’ll talk to anyone,” she says. “Back in the day, I was part of a campaign supporting the parents of Sandy Hook. But I’m so distrustful of everything I’ve ever known or read now that I am open to hearing it. Half of my friends love him and think he’s like a prophet, and the other half think he’s the devil. I’m very fascinated by this dynamic.”
Kraus doesn’t really mind that taking photos with people like Jones and “just asking questions,” like she says she’s doing, essentially makes her a conspiracy theorist herself. She shared the Mother Jones piece describing her as a “conspiracy-peddling gossip blogger” to Instagram, with a caption proclaiming how proud she is to be “aggravating” traditional journalism. “People log on [to read House Inhabit] every day not knowing it, but they’re either getting a journalist—or we’re going to dive into aliens,” she says. “That’s why everyone’s confused, and that’s why it works.”
In person, Kraus doesn’t seem like the kind of woman to espouse dangerous falsehoods or snap selfies with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach. She shows up to our interview in a simple black suit and understated makeup, styled by her best friend from childhood, whose studio she’s staying at while in town. She comes off as warm, down-to-earth, and relatable.
I ask what brings her to New York, since her assistant made clear that Kraus did not fly in from San Clemente just for this interview. She takes a full minute to try to remember why she’s in town. “Oh, falconing,” she finally says.
Yes, she’s just returned from a falconry trip upstate two days earlier with RFK Jr., Trump Jr., and her teenage son. She loved it, she says, aside from the falcon killing small animals. The rare, intimate access she got to two of the most polarizing MAGA men was a gold mine for House Inhabit content. “It’s behind-the-scenes coverage, stepping away and capturing these little intimate moments,” she tells me. Like when “Don Jr. picked up a tiny, tiny puppy, one of those little wiener dogs, and he was sweet with it,” she says. “[People have] never seen Don Jr. as a regular guy before….There’s not a production crew anymore. They don’t even know I’m filming. I think it’s breaking the fourth wall.”
After the falconry day, Kraus posted a moody black-and-white photo of Trump Jr., RFK Jr., and the falcon to her Instagram grid with the caption, “Make America Masculine Again.” I ask if she considers posts like that to be propaganda more than journalism. “No,” she says. “I feel like it’s the most pure form of journalism.” She adds that she’d be happy to document these kinds of intimate trips with Democrats, but they don’t invite her. “If the left would’ve invited me in, I would’ve done it with them, too,” she says.
Looking back, Kraus can pinpoint the exact moments that put her life and career on this unexpected trajectory. She got pregnant in college while pursuing an English degree, at which point she told her then-boyfriend, now husband Mike, a construction worker, that she had always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. To support their growing family, he picked up multiple jobs to earn extra money.
Kraus started writing about motherhood on Blogspot in 2011, because it was what she saw other proto-Instagram moms her age doing. “Everyone had a blog,” she says. Her natural talent for writing and taking photos on a Canon point-and-shoot gave her an advantage in the space, and by 2014, she’d built up enough of a following on social media to make money.
She thinks her audience of mostly liberal-leaning fellow moms grew so quickly because she was willing to portray an “undone” version of motherhood when everything else was heavily curated and aspirational. “I showed my kids fighting, hitting each other, and having a breakdown,” she says. “I’m going to show the ugly, but still in an aesthetically pleasing way. Do you know what I mean?”
Her gradual detachment from the left began just before the pandemic, when other moms lectured and unfollowed her over posts she thought were innocuous, like a photo of her sons in what she calls “pilgrims and Indians” costumes at school for Thanksgiving. “I got so sick of defending holidays,” she says.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard listen to a question from Jessica Reed Kraus during a panel at Arizona Christian University’s Firestorm Recreation Center in Glendale on Sept. 14, 2024.
Kraus grew up idolizing prominent gossip columnists like Cindy Adams and Liz Smith, who both covered the Trump family in the ’90s, and she became fascinated by the Britney Spears conservatorship case in 2021. When she learned that she could just show up at the courthouse as a random citizen and cover a celebrity trial, injecting her own observations and opinions about the proceedings, Kraus started building a new following of people fascinated by her work. “I think it kind of grabbed our attention, because it was questioning everything we’d ever known about her as far as the conservatorship and what was real or not,” she says. “It opened up dialogue again, because people wouldn’t talk to me about politics or COVID, but they would have opinions on Britney Spears.”
She dropped her Venmo link for a “coffee fund” on Instagram Stories one day while writing about Spears and received $22,000 from supporters overnight.
Later, while covering the Ghislaine Maxwell trial from a New York City courthouse—where she had to get up at 4 A.M. each day in 35-degree weather to snag one of the four courtroom spots open to the public—her followers donated roughly $50,000 to support her work. “I would sit in the freezing cold, get into court, sit for eight hours, make content, go to bed, and do the same thing [the next day],” she says. “So that was six weeks of flying back and forth, because it was Christmas.”
It was so draining on her body that on one trip back home to California, she ended up in the emergency room with severe dehydration and constipation. “I thought I was dying,” she says. “I cringe when I think about doing that again.”
Through the Maxwell trial, Kraus developed a reputation for going against the grain. While most people saw the former British socialite (who was later found guilty of child sex trafficking, among other offenses) as complicit in the sex trafficking of teenagers, Kraus saw her as simply trying to give them economic opportunity: “I become obsessed with her story, because I’m like, this woman holds all of the top secrets in the world right now. She could literally destroy everyone, and I’m sitting in a courtroom sometimes just me and her together, and she’ll turn around and look at me. And she is not a normal person. She has this crazy magnetism—I always get in trouble for saying this, but everyone there knows it—and what made me mad was that we would all talk about this, but I would be the only one who would write it.”
Kraus openly admired Maxwell at a time when few others would admit to admiring someone accused of helping the billionaire rapist Jeffrey Epstein traffic underage girls. “It was the first time I was confronted with a very conflicting perspective in comparison to mainstream media,” she says. “We would all talk at lunch tables about what we thought about Ghislaine, but then when we went to print, they all printed what their outlets wanted—that she was always the evil monster—and I would print that I didn’t agree with that….In [Maxwell’s] mind, she’s a feminist. She sees herself as, I took these poor girls, gave them jobs to massage these men, paid for their school, fixed their teeth, bought them Prada bags. Why are they complaining?”
The trial taught her “so much,” and Kraus also began to see herself as a feminist and contrarian—someone who exploits the weaknesses and limits of traditional journalism, as public trust in newspapers and cable news continues to plummet. “We’re at a monumental point in history where free speech is on the line, and we’re [bordering on] World War III,” she says.
“I was a liberal for 40 years, so it’s not like I don’t understand the games and things played,” she adds. “I actually resent that I was a product of that for so many years. I do feel like the right is now more punk rock….I think they’re like, ‘Fuck the system.’ If you want to talk to Alex Jones, you can. [But] if you want to talk like the left, there are too many guardrails.”
While covering the Harvey Weinstein trial in 2022, Kraus claims reporters for prestige outlets began openly expressing their envy of her freedom to write whatever she wanted and her ability to react to witness testimonies in real time. “What you put into one [Instagram] Story slide would take us 10 weeks to fact-check,” she says a New York Times reporter once told her. (One journalist covering that trial alongside Kraus, who isn’t allowed to speak on the record about it, nevertheless confirmed that the anecdote rings true.)
The same freedom to share gut reactions and gossip in a very personality-driven way, untethered by fact-checking or traditional journalistic ethics and principles, is what she brings to House Inhabit. “I felt like this election was going to be really crazy,” she says. “I thought if I cover a Kennedy, there are endless angles. I know a lot about the family, and there’s glamor. It’s all the things I want.”
Her audience of now mostly right-leaning women and anti-vaxxers has grown like a weed. “People on the right feel very maligned by the media, so now they see me as this savior. [But] they’re like, ‘She doesn’t actually look like MAGA, and she’s sort of confusing to MAGA people,’” Kraus says. “Even MAGA doesn’t really understand me. They just know it’s effective, because I write as if we’re on a million-person text thread. I am like, ‘This bitch fucked me over,‘ or ‘My kid just got suspended,’ or ‘Look how hot RFK looks in these Levi’s.’ Everything I share is as if I am texting a million friends. And then, sometimes, I try to be serious and be a journalist.”
The right-wing media ecosystem is perfectly set up to boost and financially reward personality-driven media figures like Kraus, says Taylor Lorenz, a tech and internet culture reporter who recently left the Washington Post to launch her own Substack. “You are never going to find the equivalent of Jessica Reed Kraus on the left, because that entire infrastructure doesn’t exist,” she tells me. “The far right built this infrastructure 15 years ago. Liberals have no desire to do it, because they’re still clinging to the broken media model.”
Substack has been exploding in popularity these past few years, as writers flock to the platform and earn money independently, especially amid brutal media layoffs and a gloomy financial outlook for the news industry. Lorenz says she’s already earning more from her one-month-old newsletter than she was as a salaried reporter—but as a leftist voice, she’ll probably never make close to the kind of money that’s accessible to someone like Kraus or Bari Weiss, who agitates from the right. “If you start to amass an audience online and you’re pushing conservative messaging, there is an endless amount of money,” she says. “There are an endless amount of people and organizations that will give you millions of dollars.”
Even Kraus is surprised by how fast she has reached celebrity status on the right, to the point where she says she’s being treated like “John Lennon” on the campaign trail. “I’m getting recognized on the plane, on the streets,” she adds. “People are crying, people are asking for my autograph. Like, that’s insane.”
But at this point Kraus isn’t just an “independent” writer, as she claims on Instagram, documenting observations about former President Trump and his inner circle. She has become a character in her own stories—cooking with Roseanne Barr, sitting around a fire with Trump Jr., and inserting herself into the sexting scandal between RFK Jr. and former New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi.
She has also been openly posting about “fighting for” former President Trump to be re-elected, rather than simply covering his campaign. “He’s been totally misconstrued by the media,” she says. “What he believes in is really pretty simple. It’s like patriotism and God—I dunno how religious he really is, but the idea of God.”
Even though Kraus says she doesn’t “belong to a certain religion,” she does love that Trump talks “a lot about a higher power.” She also tells me she’s pro-choice and believes that “gay people are born gay,” which she feels differentiates her within the world of MAGA.
As Kraus counts down the days until the election on Instagram, sharing positive memes about former President Trump and negative ones about Vice President Kamala Harris, any sunlight between her and MAGA is increasingly difficult to find.
She’s become a primary source of election news for many women her age who love her signature gossipy style of coverage. “What I do is designed for women who would never really pay attention to politics,” she says. “My audience is 96 percent women. These are women who have kids, or who work full-time jobs. I spend my entire day curating news for them to watch at the end of the night, and then if they want, there’s a long-form version on Substack.”
I ask if she finds it concerning at all to be the main platform for some busy moms sourcing political news, considering her lack of fact-checking or any kind of prior journalism training or editorial standards. “I mean, yeah,” she admits. “I feel like it’s a lot of pressure for someone who is also questioning things in real time.”
She occasionally pays a copy editor to edit longer pieces, but often just hits publish without even reviewing her own work. Her best friend in New York, whom she describes as “the most liberal” lesbian, helps her put together slides for social media, even on issues the two of them disagree about.
Political arguments with that friend, who was previously married to a trans woman, are the kinds of discussions she wants her work to spur. “I really feel like we should break down the barriers and stop being insulted and offended all the time,” she says.
Ironically, after insisting on being a stay-at-home mom in college and launching her career as a mommy blogger, Kraus is now raking in so much money from Substack and Instagram that her husband was able to quit his job two years ago. He stays at home with their sons, while she’s out on the campaign trail, boating with the Trumps and going on falconry outings with the Kennedys. “This is like a dream come true,” she says at the end of our interview. “I feel bad that people are paying me to do it.”
Laura Bassett is a freelance journalist, political columnist, and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel. She writes the Substack newsletter Nightcap, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, New York magazine, Elle and GQ.