Clout Chasing Will Be the Death of Us All
by Jennie Rose Halperin
The New Yorker’s Clare Malone recently published a long profile of Jessica Reed Kraus, the QAnon-adjacent mommy blogger who played an instrumental role in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s successful bid to become the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kraus has 500,000 subscribers on Substack and 1.3 million Instagram followers. She nets $1.5 million per year from her Substack alone by posting “gossip and quality conspiracy” for “middle-aged moms with cash to burn.”
Before her role in RFK Jr.’s rise to the country’s highest public health position, Kraus’s best-known achievement was a series of incendiary blog posts in support of Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, as well as sympathetic courtroom coverage in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, in which Kraus painted the convicted sex trafficker as having unjustly taken the blame for Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But these defenses of accused abusers were delivered with an old-fashioned Hollywood tabloid swoon.
“On the other end of the line the greeting that booms through the phone is a vibration that needs no introduction,” she wrote in 2022. “Johnny Depp, voice bathed in slow southern charm, greets me with ‘hello.’”
The starstruck Kraus went on to gush over Depp’s love of books and bemoan his “tendency to trust the wrong people.” But Depp allegedly told Kraus that he trusted her, Insider reported. Kraus quoted the exchange: “‘I don’t know you’ he says, ‘but I know, just by the words you use and the aesthetic in your work, that I trust you.’”
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