Jessica Reed Kraus (House InHabit) Unplugged

How has she done it? "I had nothing to lose"

My second guest for the new vodcast series, Failing Up! (Sari, my former producer at Audible tells me that’s what this is called, rather than a podcast) is a woman who is no stranger to her hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Substack.

Jessica Reed Kraus, whose handle is House Inhabit , is the epitome of success in the new media landscape. She makes seven figures off her Substack and Instagram. Wired listed her as one of the key influencers in the 2024 election along with Tucker Carolson and Elon Musk. She has been profiled in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Elle and Mother Jones. Yet only a few years ago Jess was a mommy blogger in Orange County, California (where she lives with husband, Mike, and their four children).

For those who don’t know, during the pandemic, Jessica, 44, decided she wanted to cover things she thought weren’t getting enough attention - or the right sort of attention in the media. I met her in the winter of 2021 - on the steps of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where each morning, before dawn, we lined up to gain admission to the tiny courtroom (made even more diminutive thanks to Covid restrictions) in which Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial for abusing and trafficking minors. Every lunchtime we ate the crappy food in the cafeteria together with a couple of other friends. We gossiped about what we’d seen and how we thought the trial was going (initially not well for the government) and then we went home and wrote it all up. Only to get up at 4am and repeat it all over again, day after day, week after week.

It was an endurance test. I know that by the end I was so exhausted I could barely see straight. Sheer adrenaline and uncertainty got us through. I remember right until closing arguments we wondered about the strength of the government’s case. But the closing argument for the prosecution, delivered by James Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was one of the most unforgettable and powerful performances in a courtroom I’ve ever seen. Apparently, the jury agreed. They convicted Maxwell on all counts of sexual abuse and trafficking. Adding to the stress was that it took place in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Neither of us saw much, if anything, of our families.

But the thing about covering trials is that once you start, you feel locked in - or you do if the proceedings are not being televised, and the responsibility on the shoulders of the conduits to the public hangs heavy. It’s like becoming an actor in a play, not simply a spectator. I started grading the lawyers for each of their performances in my Substack and suddenly I found that various of their parents were writing in my comments box.

Jess was unafraid to say exactly what she saw. Which was that the woman in front of us had a distinct magnetism when she turned to look at us, even when wearing her mask and standing silent. “I didn’t think the trial told the whole story,” she says in our interview below. Jess found Maxwell intriguing, possibly even sympathetic. That was not and is not the “narrative” around Maxwell. But Jess points out she “had nothing to lose.”

From there she covered the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial. Her husband Mike told her that “no one is interested”. Thankfully, he was wrong. Again, she took a contrarian position, but it was the one that felt authentic to her sitting in the courtroom. As the proceedings unfolded, she began to feel sympathetic towards Depp - who then phoned her out of the blue. She put the details of that phone call behind a paywall. Her earnings took off.

Even so, it wasn’t this coverage that catapulted her on to the pages of the mainstream media. No, what put her there was her foray into politics. “No one talks about politics in the way women talk about politics…we talk about what they [politicians] are wearing, how their marriages are and so on,” she says in our vodcast interview below. A year ago she decided to cover RFK Jr’s presidential campaign. Why? Because, she explains, no one else was. RFK Jr. reached out to her after her initial interview was cancelled and she had written about its cancellation her Substack. He read it and texted her, inviting her to join him for a hike and later to stay at his house in Hyannis Port and to immerse herself in his world 24/7 like a fly-on-the-wall. She opened his cupboards, went through his books and brought her family along to join in Kennedy clan sails. Your conventional New York Times coverage, it was not. But, arguably she gave her followers a much closer close-up than anyone else.

And then, of course, thanks to RFK Jr.’s political trajectory, she was subsequently welcomed into the Trump campaign and the hurly-burly glitz of Mar-a-Lago. Jessica focused on what, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene was wearing as much as what MTG said. Perhaps more, truth be told. The result? The Wall Street Journal profiled her, noting that she had way more access to the Trump campaign than pretty much everyone else in main stream media.

A one-time liberal she found herself seduced by the glamor and the fun of Trump’s Palm Beach world - and she wasn’t afraid to say so. She was intrigued by the cult of personality of the owner of Mar-a-Lago. "The staff catch him polishing the bronze statues” she says. It was the opposite of the carefree bikes-strewn-everywhere style of the Kennedys, but just as compelling. She wrote about what she saw and how it made her feel: un-jaded. “It made be believe in America again,” she says. She also wrote that she’d started talking to the conservatives around her, and found that they were just as human and likable as most everyone else - and again, she wrote this down. You can imagine how this went over with some of her liberal followers. 95% of her readers are women - and yet the critics remained, for the most part, loyal followers because Jess sells something all too rare: she sells honesty, regardless of who might be offended.

But what gets overlooked in the now many profiles of Jess’s fabulous career trajectory is the back-breaking never-ending work. The doubts. The questions. The reminders from RFK Jr. - whose wife, Mary, committed suicide - of the suicide of her own father, an addict, when she was six: “It made me have to deal with a lot of things I put away for a long time,” she says. The huge amount of time away from her kids. The conversations with her husband, Mike, who worked in construction, and quit his job to look after them.

And the loneliness as a reporter who is not part of a pack. I know all too well what it’s like when you are on the road reporting on a culture that’s alien but gripping. You engage in it at 110%. And then you collapse in pockets of time, by yourself in a strange hotel rooms, where you are reminded that you are here as an outsider and all this is absorbing but temporary.

In our conversation Jess says she was ignored by other journalists covering Trump’s campaign and often condescended to by legacy media journalists who only really relate to one aspect of her career: the money. “That’s the part they understand,” she says.

I think that what Jessica writes is compelling precisely because it isn’t fact-checked or edited. Sometimes it’s rushed because she wants it to be timely (I particularly relate to that as I bang this out late for a birthday dinner of a very close family friend ), but it’s what she truly sees and feels - not what she thinks she’s supposed to see and feel. Interestingly Jess doesn’t believe that what she does should replace traditional media. There’s a need for fact-checkers and editors, she says. But if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that it’s no bad thing to engage with your followers, understand your audience, and talk with them and not at them.

Honesty like that is rare. And I’m glad there is a very high market-value on it.

The vodcast below is edited in places to move it along!

Helpful Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction + the professional risks Jessica took pivoting from mommy blogger to Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard courtroom coverage

4:50 - What was it about the Depp/Heard case that spoke to Jessica?

6:10 - Jessica’s daily schedule covering the Depp/Heard trial vs. her duties as a mom + the virality of her coverage

7:30 - Starting the House Inhabit newsletter

8:20 - Jessica’s phone call with Johnny Depp, the mass appeal of the trial, and internet trolls

11:36 - Vicky and Jessica compare notes on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial + Jessica’s controversial acknowledgement of Maxwell’s magnetism

14:48 - On people still following Jessica despite controversy and trolls

15:55 - The “endurance test” of covering the Maxwell trial

18:00 - The courtroom camaraderie amongst the reporters

19:33 - The moment Jessica realized she would make her career shift from blogging

23:52 - Why Jessica switched from Hollywood to political coverage

25:40 - RFK Jr. inviting Jessica into his life and covering his campaign

30:10 - Gaining access to Trump and establishment media snubbing Jessica

33:28 - Jessica’s “secret sauce” to success

36:00 - The magnitude of Jessica’s influence

37:06 - Mar-a-Lago vs. Hyannis Port

38:23 - Balancing the excitement of news coverage with family responsibilities

43:07 - Jessica’s next career move?

44:04 - The newfound authority of new media

48:18 - How has Jessica’s day-to-day life changed since her rise in popularity

51:00 - Jessica’s connection to Vicky’s upcoming book on the University of Idaho murders