How a Kansas City vlogger captivated New York society - Semafor

On Oct. 10, an unhappy billionaire, Amy Griffin, confronted a former Today host, Billy Bush, at a celebrity wedding on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Guests included Demi Moore and Tobey Maguire. It was the sort of thing that delights the entertainment media, even if you won’t often read about it in this column.

But this meltdown didn’t break on Vanity Fair or TMZ. Instead, New York and LA society discreetly tuned in to the Instagrammer known as KatyinKC, who cited “multiple” sources at the wedding.

When I wrote about Griffin, the wife of a hedge-funder and author of a bestselling memoir, last week, I repeatedly heard that the wealthy and powerful figures in her social world are obsessed with KatyinKC. Her name is Katy Hoffman, and she is a 33-year-old registered dietitian and mother of two toddlers who works from the sofa in her comfortable Midwestern home.

Over the course of this year, Hoffman has become the chief inquisitor of Griffin’s story of abuse during a superficially perfect childhood in Amarillo, Texas. Hoffman has unmasked pseudonymous characters from her book, discovered key audio files, and given a hard-edged voice to the skepticism about Griffin’s account first raised by The New York Times.

Hoffman’s Instagram account is the thing “women in the ballrooms and the Upper East Side and the Palisades and Brentwood are listening to, but not following,” said Bush, who was fired from Today in 2016 for a 2005 hot mic exchange with Donald Trump on Access Hollywood, and who now hosts the podcast Hot Mics with Billy Bush.

Social convention dictates that you not be caught liking Hoffman’s posts or following her yourself. But she is “the internet version of Nancy Grace,” Jolie Hunt, the CEO of a New York marketing and communications consultancy, told me.

Hoffman’s videos across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram offer regular glimpses of her own life. Sometimes she dances. Once she defended a local pizza joint from another influencer’s criticism. Her home is on display, too, a well-kept place with a wood-paneled den you’d immediately rip out in the Hamptons. She doesn’t, one person I spoke to noted, seem like the sort of person who would be found on Lanai.

I called up Hoffman Friday to ask how she’d become part of a new generation of social media sleuths, why she was so focused on Griffin, and, of course, her decor.

Hoffman got on the video call Friday wearing a T-shirt featuring the lovers in the TV show Heated Rivalry. She had just dyed her blond hair red. She grew up in the well-off suburbs of Des Moines — her family loves to travel and she’s been all over the world, if not Hawaii. She attended Iowa State, where she put her energy into her sorority and personal training (and certainly not journalism). She moved to Kansas City to start her career counseling people with eating disorders, but also developed a set of hobbies that, along with fishing and hunting, includes poking around public records.

“I’m just a nosy lady,” she told me. She’d be the one to tell her friends that the neighbor down the street had a lien on his house. She recalled being in a nutrition office at a local hospital where colleagues were talking about local radio personalities’ messy public divorce, and she looked up the court documents. She also closely followed the messy drama between the actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni; like many on social media, she grew skeptical of Lively’s well-publicized claims and was persuaded by Baldoni’s responses. She posted to a tiny audience about them, and was briefly featured in an Atlantic article last April that asked: Who Reads Entire Lawsuits for Fun?

But Hoffman had long harbored this generation’s great American dream — to be a “content creator.” She had experimented with posting recipes and talking about her professional expertise, nutrition. One TikTok about Ariana Grande has 7.2 million views.

But she also edged into original reporting. When a process server in the Lively-Baldoni case was arrested trying to get into Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce’s property to reach his wife, Taylor Swift, Hoffman drove to the nearby police station to get court records, posted them online, and watched the news spread. She became one of a pack of traveling social media analysts and partisans, attending hearings in New York in January and April.

The Griffin case, however, has been Hoffman’s breakout moment, and it has thrust her a little closer to the world of professional journalism than she expected.

“It wasn’t until this case that I’ve really figured out being an investigative journalist a bit without any of the training or whatever,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure how to feel when she noticed New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporters sign up for the Patreon where she distributes the court documents she’s turned up. She said she felt “intimidated” by the professional journalists who have started calling her up to swap notes.

Hoffman, who sometimes works from a small swivel chair in her children’s room, has followed a path from social video into the center of the swirling news cycles of true crime and celebrity. Her rise has echoes of podcaster Ashley Flowers and blogger Jessica Red Krauss — media outsiders who tapped into deep veins of public interest. But she’s also an obsessive researcher whose focus and work ethic remind me a bit of CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, were his focus celebrities rather than politics.

She has gone to elaborate lengths to follow hints in Griffin’s book through high school yearbooks and long-forgotten high school sporting events. Hoffman also noticed a link in a legal filing to a redacted audio recording of Griffin’s 2021 call to the Amarillo police department and posted it; later, she posted the unredacted audio, but wouldn’t tell me how she’d obtained that.

In other ways, she is pure social media. In one recent short video, Hoffman dances to a pop song, Nina Nox’s Good Without You, and closes by giving a middle finger to the camera and lip-syncing.

It’s been a disorienting year, she said. She’s made enough money from her content to pay for court documents and a little travel, but her day job and her husband’s (he’s an engineer) still pay the bills.

“I don’t know what to do with it, I’m kind of stuck in this crossroads,” Hoffman said. “I can see how someone can grow and build this — but do I want to do that?”

She was amused to hear that New York’s elite were making fun of her Midwestern life.

“Put their direct quotes about what they think about me so I can rip them apart,” she suggested.

My New York interlocutors, sadly, declined to go on the record — though one asked that I stress that any class-inflected mockery was delivered “with love.”