In 2020, as for so many people, things shifted for Jessica Reed Kraus. A southern-California based lifestyle blogger who got her start writing about motherhood, Kraus felt dubious about COVID safety measures and vaccines, and disaffected from mainstream liberal politics.
With her photogenic world upended, she wanted to talk about natural immunity and her objection to “vax cards,” she later wrote, and how they would “eliminate portions of society from general aspects of life.” When she did, she wrote that she was branded “an anti-vax Qanon nutjob which made me overly defensive.”
Kraus has a million Instagram followers, and her Substack is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category.
The pandemic ushered in a new focus, a transition from posts about decorating her gorgeous Southern California home—once featured on Martha Stewart’s Instagram—and her Etsy business helping others make similarly tasteful purchases; the most popular items were canvas teepees for children. Instead, she grew both increasingly conspiratorial and, at the same time, more invested in carving out a niche where celebrity gossip met hard news. It “proved,” she has written on Instagram, “an accidental hit.”
Today, Kraus has a million followers on Instagram, and her Substack, House Inhabit, is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category, with some 380,000 subscribers, many of whom pay $7 a month for her paywalled posts. (By the Wall Street Journal‘s estimation, the site pulls in over one million dollars annually.) Over the the last year, she’s given more attention to a new set of boldface names, becoming a fixture in both the Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. universes, providing unstinting positive coverage of both men that she depicts as free from mainstream media bias.
During his now-suspended campaign and into his current Trump-surrogate phase, Kraus has provided a glossy view of Kennedy, depicting him as a handsome, breezy scion of his famous family. “My campaign coverage has provided a rare source of balanced insight,” she writes, “presenting an authentic interpretation of Kennedy and his messaging amid a storm of recycled, slanderous articles.” After she accompanied Kennedy, family members, and actress Alicia Silverstone on a hike, she described being allowed to linger in his office while he hurried off to a campaign event in ecstatic terms: “My dreams are manifesting now as reality,” she wrote. In this Polo catalogue vision, she also manages to brush off some of his strangest moments; in response to the revelation he’d once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, she noted that someone DMed her to it made them “like him more.”
“Maybe the series of strange scandals is working for him?” she wrote, rather hopefully.
Kraus’ depiction of Trump has been statesmanlike; she’s called him “a showstopper” and depicted him as a mesmerizing speaker whose supporters have been unfairly tarnished by the mainstream media for their abiding and patriotic love for him. Her Substack posts from the Republicans’ convention were as schmaltzy as they were high-flown, depicting a normal political gathering as a battle for the soul of a nation. “With every story and tear shed, it became clear that this was not just another convention,” she wrote. “It was a watershed moment, a fierce reclamation of a vision for America that many felt had been slipping away.”
This intense rhetoric—good versus evil, manful heroes facing off against the abyss of the Deep State—helps Kraus inject drama and glamour. “I kind of love the new challenge of making politics engaging again,” she told a Wall Street Journal interviewer.
But to see Kraus’ career as a tidy narrative—mommy blogger to political quasi-journalist—would elide the notably weird flavor of her politics and beliefs. Despite her protests about being called a “Qanon nutjub,” for years Kraus has been obsessed with Pizzagate-ish ideas about occult rituals among Hollywood celebrities, making claims that Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld festival, where ten people died in a concert stampede, was literally a demonic ritual. She and her occasional Substack co-author, Emilie Hagen, have hosted and platformed the work of New Age conspiracy Instagrammer Jennifer Carmody, who has claimed that celebrities like Elvis were victims of CIA mind control. She’s reposted comments by far-right conspiracist Liz Crokin asserting that “Israel can’t have the truth about Pizzagate coming out.” Whatever the most eyeball-grabbing news of the day—Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Diddy’s arrest—she’ll spin the event as a forerunner to a promised post that will blow the lid off a sprawling sexual abuse scandal.
Throughout Kennedy’s run, Kraus left it ambiguous about whether she was there as an affiliate of the campaign.
Kraus’ oeuvre is a window into a world of exceedingly rich and privileged women enmeshed in conspiracy theories, especially those involving allegations of elite occult sexual abuse. Her celebrity coverage, combined with the aspirational lifestyle she presents, has helped her amass a large, devoted, and heavily female fanbase, who seem to want to emulate her and other wealthy women in her circles. Last summer, I spoke to one Kraus fan, an exceedingly polished and fit mom of teenage children, for hours at a tony Oregon hot spring spa, who struck up a hot tub conversation by asking what I knew about aliens and told me House Inhabit was the only media source she trusted. Kraus appears to be friendly on social media with Lady Victoria Hervey, an English model and socialite (and former girlfriend of Prince Andrew) who now posts Instagram musings about “Hollywood’s dark Satanic cults” and “plandemics,” both posts that Kraus has liked. (Hervey responded to a request for comment by writing, “Let me check with Jessica on this.” She didn’t reply to followup messages.)
Throughout Kennedy’s campaign, Kraus took on the role of an observer-participant, leaving it ambiguous about whether she was there as an affiliate of the campaign or on her own. This week, Kraus denied “being paid by a campaign,” as she put it on Instagram, while disclosing that that American Values 2024, a PAC promoting Kennedy had “offered me a hotel room” during the Democratic National Convention and threw her a pizza and wine party while there. Hours later, she said that was incorrect, and that she’d paid for her own hotel but that American Values spent $1,140 on merch from her site: hats reading “Make Speech Free Again” for supporters to wear around the convention.
Kennedy’s political team, which did not respond to a request for comment, has been happy to reward and promote her positive coverage, making her the moderator of a September 12 conversation between Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in Arizona. His campaign even auctioned off a Zoom conversation with her during a fundraiser. (It went for $500.) She was also briefly named as the “director of social media” for a fizzled birthday party fundraiser that would have been hosted by another Kennedy-backing super-PAC. Her efforts to get close to the Trump campaign haven’t been as successful, though there have been some inroads: in August, Donald Trump Jr. showed up at a backyard meetup for Kraus’ followers in Jupiter, Florida. “Sitting fireside, in front of a group of strangers, he shared funny stories about his father,” Kraus wrote on Instagram.
After Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed the former president, she posted a photo to Instagram of the two men sharing a stage. “You know I fought hard for this,” she wrote, adding a weeping emoji and telling her readers the endorsement was “significant and deeply emotional, built of Shakespearean bones.”
Since then, she’s filmed herself backstage at several Trump campaign events, standing next to personalities who have endorsed the former president, like Roseanne Barr. She also shows signs of becoming a more regular feature in Republican circles, especially Kennedy-adjacent ones: she was spotted at a D.C. book party in May for Gabbard. She also posted a beaming photo of herself backstage at one of Tucker Carlson’s recent live events, wedged into frame with him and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
Spokesperson Steven Cheung did not respond to emails asking about Kraus’s access or role with Trump’s campaign. And Kraus herself, after initially agreeing to speak but twice canceling by citing lunch dates that ran long, ultimately declined my interview requests. “I sense the angle. And I’m just too busy with everything springing up without warning,” she wrote, adding that she was about to catch a flight to a Trump event. She also declined to respond to emailed questions.
Kraus was raised in Corona, a midsize town at the intersection of two freeways in Riverside County. As a child, she has written on Instagram, “I adored all the top 90s gossip columnists. I could not think of a more fabulous existence.” She’s said that her father died by suicide when she was 6, and that she experienced a period of “elective mutism” in the aftermath. The Journal piece also noted that she is estranged from her mother.
After becoming pregnant with her first child in 2005 with her then-boyfriend, Mike, Kraus got her start in the public eye with a carefully curated, Goop-esque form of lifestyle blogging and ruminations about motherhood. (The couple later married and now have four boys in all.) Early posts, where she went by the name Mrs. Habit, tend to fall flat; you can feel her boredom with the genre and its limitations leaking through the screen. “I know I’ve had a really tough time keeping up on posts,” she admitted in a 2011 update.
In 2014, while pregnant with her youngest, Kraus launched The Ma Books, a literary-minded blog which billed itself as an “online haven for women with brains and a budget.” It was born, she has written, out of a disgust with overly-curated mommy blogs. “They want you to believe they do it all, and much better and more fashionable than you too,” she wrote. But despite any suggestion it might counter-program the space’s typically too-polished images, visually, it was quite similar: a beautiful and more upscale vision of motherhood than what Kraus saw from other mommy chroniclers on Blogger.
In 2016, Kraus backed Hillary Clinton on Instagram and created a hashtag for women to flaunt voting day outfits.
The Ma Books continued until 2019, as Kraus grew her personal Instagram, sharing photos of her husband’s extensive DIY renovations, her family’s travels, and wistful photos of her children playing on the beach, surfing, and getting ready for camp, often laid over with sepia-tinted filters. As an Instagram influencer, she was modestly successful, and the family got plenty of approving writeups in magazines and lifestyle and design blogs, as Kraus described herself as a “stay at home mom” who did a little writing on the side. While there was some mild and anodyne Democratic-leaning political content—in 2016, Ma Books posted a Hillary Clinton endorsement on Instagram, and created a hashtag for its readers to flaunt the stylish outfits they wore to the polls—what she churned out felt tuned to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of women online.
All of that changed with COVID, and Kraus’ newly out-loud viewpoints. “My income, at that point, depended on the sellable nature of my ‘brand,’ which was liberal-leaning & sans controversy,” she wrote on Instagram last year, reflecting on that time. “During the lockdown, though, I grew bitter and resentful over my own silent surrender and increasing censorship online. We couldn’t question anything.”
“This is how the pop culture stories started—as a way to house my passion for truth in a volatile online environment, without sacrificing my beliefs,” she wrote. Kraus has said she fell under the spell of 2021’s Maxwell trial, watching obsessively from home until Mike suggested she simply go to New York and see it herself. In her coverage from the courtroom, Kraus developed what seems to be a queasy kind of sympathy for Maxwell—describing her “uncomfortable magnetism” and “electric presence,” as she depicted Jeffrey Epstein’s enabler as taking the fall for more powerful male abusers.
During the 2022 defamation trial between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, New York’s Choire Sicha wrote about how influencers—Kraus first among them—were, to Depp’s benefit, “shaping the general public’s understanding” far more than many mainstream reporters. Kraus, he wrote, became “a trial-obsessed Instagrammer” and “a chief instigator of the anti-Heard story line.” While covering the proceedings, she also became a minor character, reporting that she spoke to Depp by phone in advance of the proceedings, a conversation in which he denounced the failings of the mainstream media. When her Instagram account was suspended during the trial, she intimated a conspiracy: “The whole thing feels very calculated. I feel like I’m siting here with my hands tied, paying a hefty price for seeking truth.” (The account was quickly restored.)
“Completely false. I have never even heard that.”
There have only been a few moments that Kraus doesn’t seem proud of. For one, she has deleted her Astroworld claims. While Catherine, the Princess of Wales, was being treated for an undisclosed illness, she claimed to have spoken to “an individual connected to hospital staff.” She deleted that phrase, replacing it with the more ambiguous “an individual connected to recovery.” (She also claimed that the princess had had bowel surgery and was wearing a temporary stoma bag; royal spokespeople have said she had abdominal surgery and chemotherapy for an undisclosed form of cancer.) Other, wilder stories remain on her platforms, like one purporting Amber Heard presided over sex parties with “Satanic themes” and “lesbian orgies.” She wrote that Elon Musk not only attended, but is also the father of Heard’s young daughter. Kraus later wrote on Instagram that Elon Musk and Amber Heard had teamed up to file a potential lawsuit against her. “Completely false,” says Heard attorney Elaine Bredehoft. “I have never even heard that.”
Kraus also made false claims about an actual journalist during Depp and Heard’s trial, saying that NBC reporter Kat Tenbarge was working for Heard’s legal team. “Any idiot would know that is not true,” Tenbarge wrote on Twitter recently, “and I reached out to her and told her it wasn’t, and she blocked me.”
Kraus is fascinated by legacies, famous people, and power. She’s written at length on Maxwell’s tony upbringing, on the royal family, and is clearly more than a little attracted by what the Kennedys represent. A key part of her appeal to readers are claims to have inside sources and tipsters close to the nerve centers of politics and entertainment alike.
But as Kraus continues her particular blend of access journalism and campaign boosterism, some close to Kennedy and Trump describe her as little short of a political social-climber. “Donald has no clue who the fuck she is,” one person familiar with the situation told me. As for Kennedy, the same person added, “She’s saying she’s a friend of Kennedy’s. She’s not. She doesn’t know any of Kennedys’ friends. She’s just been stalking him all over.” Indeed, Kraus told more than one person that she temporarily lost her Kennedy campaign access after an argument of some kind with one of his children.
On September 13, Kraus published a fawning Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi, which seemed calibrated to showcase her closeness to New York magazine’s star political correspondent. Kraus described how they had developed a “valued friendship,” dubbing her an “inspirational force” and “the last of the real ones.”
But a little more than a week later, shortly after Nuzzi was reported to have exchanged “personal” text messages with Kennedy—later reported to have included intimate photos—Kraus made an abrupt pivot. “As I reflect, my overall take is that I was a pawn,” Kraus wrote in a new post that assailed Nuzzi as an amoral fake and seductress, reflecting on how she was taken by a “phony connection.” Notably, it also quoted Gavin de Becker, Kennedy’s “security expert,” claiming that Kennedy planed to file “civil litigation” as well as make “potential criminal referrals” against Nuzzi. De Becker claimed to Kraus that Kennedy was hounded by Nuzzi sending him nudes, saying, “This had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.” These Kraus-reported remarks were widely repeated in the mainstream press—without much context about the media figure who relayed them or her relationship with the campaign.
A second Trump White House could see Kraus take up a perch at Mar-a-Lago.
Nuzzi claimed in court in the process of obtaining a protection order against her ex-fiance, Politico journalist Ryan Lizza, that he shared information about her communications with Kennedy with the news media to hurt her. Nuzzi—who, like many people in journalism, I’ve been casually friendly with for years—declined to comment. Kraus has announced plans to mine ten months of text messages between herself and Nuzzi to write about Nuzzi’s relationship with Lizza, and make the story available first to paid subscribers.
Whatever Kraus feels about Nuzzi, she seemed furious with Kennedy over his part in the relationship. After the New York Times reported that Kennedy knocked down conversations this summer about becoming Trump’s running mate—Kennedy has said that his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, was uncomfortable with him even endorsing Trump—Kraus complained on Instagram that he was willing to “risk [his] marriage for big boned Olivia Nuzzi” but not for the VP slot “to save America.” She followed up with a series of other cryptic messages, including, “JOHNNY DEPP TRIAL ENERGY RISING AGAIN,” and, more ominously, “I’M DONE BEING NICE.”
The posts seem to illustrate the dangers of keeping a gossip influencer close enough that she might feel personally wounded by campaign decisions. But any estrangement didn’t seem to last long: in early October, Kraus Instagrammed herself aboard a yacht with Kennedy and a handful of other supporters, including Sopranos actress Drea De Matteo. (“Am I the only one wondering if it’s awkward?” a commenter wrote, seemingly referring to Kraus’ apparent anger over Kennedy and Nuzzi.) Soon after, Kraus jetted to Trump’s marquee rally in Butler, the site of July’s assassination attempt, where she provided rapturous play-by-play coverage from somewhere extremely close to the stage.
What Kraus is doing here—a sometimes queasy blend of journalism and fluffery—is certainly not new. Conspiracy influencers cosplaying as journalists have been a regular feature of the last few election cycles. Men’s rights activist, Pizzagate promoter, and all-purpose alt-right troll Mike Cernovich began pivoting to a form of hyper-partisan journalism during the Trump administration, with posts that suggested sourcing in the White House and on the National Security Council. Jack Posobiec, who could be described using many of the same terms as Cernovich, also got a White House press pass. Far-right figure and Trump-confidant Laura Loomer wields similar tools and affects, traipsing with cameras in tow to migrant camps and promising up inside knowledge.
There’s some overlap between Kraus and this earlier generation. “In addition to riveting insight about dirty secrets and filthy politicians,” Kraus has written of Loomer, “she is funny and fearless in her approach and comes stocked with receipts to back her theories and conspiracies.” The two met for lunch to discuss a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift has been “activated by the left” and may have “made a deal with George and Alex Soros to regain the rights to her music in exchange for getting fans registered to vote Democrat,” as Kraus wrote. Loomer has not presented any compelling evidence to this effect.
But campaign season only goes so long, which raises the question of what Kraus will do next. She clearly has ambitions to extend her brand, recently placing an enormous billboard promoting her site on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. In the event of a second Trump White House, you could see her taking up a perch at Mar-a-Lago. But even if he wins, she could end up on the margins, chasing celebrity gossip and Satanic shadows.
“She thinks it will go on and on and on,” her detractor, who’s familiar with the Trump world, said dismissively. “No. After the election, it’s over and bloggers like her are invited nowhere.”
