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.
asserted
billionaire → confront → Lanai
Guests included Demi Moore and Tobey Maguire.
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Guests → include → Moore
It was the sort of thing that delights the entertainment media, even if you won’t often read about it in this column.
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you → delight → column
But this meltdown didn’t break on Vanity Fair or TMZ.
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meltdown → break → Fair
Instead, New York and LA society discreetly tuned in to the Instagrammer known as KatyinKC, who cited “multiple” sources at the wedding.
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who → tune → 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.
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figures → write → 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.
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who → work → 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.
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Hoffman → become → Amarillo
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.
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Hoffman → unmask → 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.
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who → listen → Bush
Social convention dictates that you not be caught liking Hoffman’s posts or following her yourself.
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you → dictate → her
But she is “the internet version of Nancy Grace,” Jolie Hunt, the CEO of a New York marketing and communications consultancy, told me.
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Hunt → tell → me
Hoffman’s videos across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram offer regular glimpses of her own life.
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videos → offer → life
Sometimes she dances.
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she → dance → ?
Once she defended a local pizza joint from another influencer’s criticism.
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she → defend → criticism
Her home is on display, too, a well-kept place with a wood-paneled den you’d immediately rip out in the Hamptons.
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you → keep → Hamptons
She doesn’t, one person I spoke to noted, seem like the sort of person who would be found on Lanai.
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who → speak → 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.
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she → call → course
Hoffman got on the video call Friday wearing a T-shirt featuring the lovers in the TV show Heated Rivalry.
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Hoffman → get → show
She had just dyed her blond hair red.
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She → dye → hair
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.
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she → grow → world
She attended Iowa State, where she put her energy into her sorority and personal training (and certainly not journalism).
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she → attend → sorority
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.
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that → move → records
“I’m just a nosy lady,” she told me.
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she → ’m → me
She’d be the one to tell her friends that the neighbor down the street had a lien on his house.
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neighbor → tell → 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.
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she → recall → 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.
uncertain
she → follow → 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?
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Who → post → Fun
But Hoffman had long harbored this generation’s great American dream — to be a “content creator.”
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Hoffman → harbor → dream
She had experimented with posting recipes and talking about her professional expertise, nutrition.
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She → experiment → expertise
One TikTok about Ariana Grande has 7.2 million views.
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TikTok → have → views
But she also edged into original reporting.
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she → edge → 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.
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news → arrest → them
She became one of a pack of traveling social media analysts and partisans, attending hearings in New York in January and April.
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She → become → January
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.
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she → thrust → journalism
“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.
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she → figure → documents
She said she felt “intimidated” by the professional journalists who have started calling her up to swap notes.
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who → say → notes
Ben’s view
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.
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who → work → crime
Her rise has echoes of podcaster Ashley Flowers and blogger Jessica Red Krauss — media outsiders who tapped into deep veins of public interest.
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who → have → 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.
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focus → ’ → politics
…and 10 more, not listed.
The Aporia
