A Star is Born
If 2026 is the “Year of the Citizen Journalist,” Kait Justice might end up being the world’s most important citizen researcher due to her exemplary research on the Epstein saga.
Author’s note: My keen interest in the Epstein case flows from my hypothesis that, if fully revealed, the scandal has the potential to be “thermo-nuclear,” a Truth Bomb that might belatedly force large swaths of the public to reconsider the true character of the world’s true leaders and leadership organizations. IMO The Great Purge of captured leaders needed to “save democracy” could follow from such a seismic mass epiphany.
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I also consider myself to be a “citizen journalist” and I’ve also written many dispatches on the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking (and blackmail) operation, which explains why I discovered the independent journalism of an American citizen named Kait Justice, who, in only three months, has rocketed up the charts of citizen journalists who have taken on a job professionals in corporate journalism have ignored for decades.
As my own research confirmed, the back story of Ms. Justice is just as compelling as the many exclusives she’s already uncovered on Epstein.
Just four months ago, nobody on Substack had heard of Kait Justice … because she hadn’t started a Substack newsletter yet. Today, she has 3,600 subscribers (with “hundreds” paid) and her work is already considered a “must read” for numerous other Substack influencers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. (Justice is now No. 36 on list of “New Bestsellers” and will probably crack the Top 10 in a few weeks).
By now, every powerful person or organization interested in keeping the true details of Epstein’s decades-long operation concealed must be acutely aware of the investigative work of a single, unemployed mother who overcame an impoverished background, suffered from extreme depression and myriad serious health issues and didn’t even graduate from high school.
Ms. Justice’s life story fascinates me for several reasons ..
In her quest to find and connect significant dots regarding the Epstein saga, Ms. Justice is far ahead of virtually every corporate investigative journalist being paid a salary to (allegedly) perform “watchdog” journalism.
Her intellect, resolve, persistence and impressive writing skills prove that it’s indeed possible for a regular citizen with no noteworthy professional or academic credentials to scoop the pros.
Her early Substack experience seems to prove it is possible for at least some citizen journalists to make enough revenue to make a living practicing citizen research, a result that was once common for “Covid Contrarians” in the early years of a pandemic … but - in a point I’ll develop later - a result that now seems possible only for writers exploiting the burgeoning “anti-Trump” market.
(Edit/Update: After posting this story, I received some nice feedback from Kait, who did correct one error I made. Her real name is NOT Kait Justice. Per Kait in a note message: “My name is Kaitlyn Pierce. Kait Justice is my pen name that kind of started as a bit of a joke actually!”)
In a an upcoming dispatch, I will summarize samples of eye-opening revelations Ms. Justice has uncovered in just a couple of months of pouring through all of the documents and files that have been released on Epstein in recent weeks. (See Addendum for subject topics of particular interest to myself).
With today’s article, I simply want to recount details I’ve learned about Ms. Justice’s life that explain how she burst onto the alternative-media scene.
Note: The following biographical details were gleaned from Ms. Justice’s own writing, which I found at her Substack site (“Downwind of Truth”), from posts she’d made on Substack’s “Notes,” from her website (www.kaitjustice.com) and from interviews she’s done on at least one podcast interview.
I was particularly interested in how a woman who’d previously been very interested in “environmental advocacy” and exposing the harm that could come to people living near “Superfund” sites transitioned to researching the dark/sinister themes of the Epstein saga - a “puzzle” or mystery whose unanswered questions intrigued Ms. Justice.
Her effort to answer as many of these questions as possible - and her effort to connect many dots - explains her burgeoning superstardom as a citizen journalist.
Who is Kait Justice?
As she forthrightly tells her readers, Kait Justice grew up in impoverished circumstances in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and is perhaps fortunate to still be alive to produce the explosive reports she’s sharing with increasing numbers of readers.
Writes Justice in one of her dispatches:
“I spent my childhood in government housing, watching my mother budget quarters for toothbrushes, watching the people around me cycle through survival and call it living.”
Several Justice posts suggest that in her adolescent years she either attempted suicide or was suicidal.
“… By the time I was a teenager, anxiety and depression had consumed me. School felt like a place designed to break me down, not build me up. At 15, after being dismissed and labeled a troubled kid, I nearly didn’t make it through. But I did …”
In several posts, Justice expresses amazement that so many people are now discovering her writing and, as she had in many posts, emphasizes her own life story to illustrate that its possible for someone without Ivy League credentials to make a difference.
For example, in a Note dispatch from yesterday, Justice reveals:
“On paper I have a GED.
“I was incredibly sick as a child to the point I went to elementary school with an IV port in my arm for the antibiotics I had to go get after school. I was sick enough to need IV antibiotics and still forced to attend. We lived in public housing. I also had severe mental health struggles, and I almost didn’t make it out of year 14.
“I was advised by my school counselor to drop out and get a GED. So I did the day I turned 16.”
With her GED, Justice was able to attend a community college, but fell three or four courses short of earning a degree.
However, Justice taught herself web design and seemed to have a talent for using social media to advance the goals of clients, skills that got her jobs in this field without a high school or college degree.
Writes Justice: “I taught myself photography and web design in my late teens and early 20s and developed social media skills as it all took shape in the early 2000s, which helped me land my first jobs in PR and marketing with no degree or experience.”
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In 2016 or 2017, she started a small “web design” and “marketing” firm, which she ran for seven years.
Per the timeline I’ve put together, in 2023, another firm in the same industry “recruited” her and offered her a “great job,” which she decided to accept and, thus, closed her own business.
As Justice has shared with her growing number of readers, “I was so proud of myself. This girl who taught her father how to read and was convinced I was never going to be good enough to do anything right got a real job. Because of my brain.
“But I found myself in a world of old money that I didn’t even know existed around me. That’s when the heavy masking started that I’ve been trying to undo recently.”
However, in the spring of 2025, the firm that had aggressively recruited her terminated her employment and Justice found herself without a job or income.
While still looking for a full-time job, she continued to pursue her passion to expose companies she believes produced toxic chemicals that were harming local citizens, one of whom she believes might have been herself. (General Electric operates a plant in her hometown, a plant Justice believes produced harmful PCBs.)
As Justice shares with readers, she made many posts on the Internet site Threads (a social media site owned by Meta that is similar to Twitter/X). At first, these posts were viewed by very few people, but in a short period of time she had “more than 35,000 followers” on Threads.
As links she has provided reveal, she also routinely posted videos on TikTok. (A screenshot from one video shows one of her TikTok videos produced almost one million “likes.”)
In her posts, Justice asked viewers to contact her if they had suspicions about harms that might trace to chemical toxins. When her followers kept sharing similar anecdotes, she ended up posting stories on many other SuperFund sites in the country.
Wrote Ms. Justice in a December 27, 2025 Substack Note:
“My whole heart has been in exposing the harm caused to the millions living in Superfund sites all over the country.”
In a post at her webpage in September 2024, Justice wrote:
“Most people assume that if their home, school, or community posed a serious risk to their health, someone would tell them. They assume the government agencies tasked with public safety are doing their job. They assume the laws meant to protect them are working. I used to believe that too.”
If no one else is doing this work …
Justice repeatedly shares anecdotes from her own life, such as …
“I grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—home to one of the most toxic Superfund sites in the country, courtesy of General Electric.
“… When I started posting, I wasn’t trying to become anything. I was trying to get answers.”
The short answer of why or how Justice became a citizen journalist seems to be that she did this because no one else was.
“When I started digging deeper into the truth about PCBs in Pittsfield, it wasn’t because anyone handed me the information. It was because no one would. So I found it myself. I pieced together the documents, the studies, the missing answers. I realized how long people had been kept in the dark, and how many are still being hurt by the silence.
“… I started sharing what I was learning, and I did it in plain English. With receipts. With Google Earth. With a little sarcasm. With a lot of grief. And something happened that no EPA outreach or “community listening session” ever managed to do.
“People paid attention. People started commenting:“This sounds like where I grew up … My whole family has cancer. Could this be why? … I’ve lived here my whole life and I had no idea.”
“And then the messages came. And the DMs. And the stories that had never been told ..”
One lesson quickly resonated with Justice:
“You don’t have to be a lawyer or a journalist to call this out. You don’t need permission to demand protection. And you don’t need a degree to recognize when your health is being traded for someone else’s profit.”
A post from several months ago tells readers when a long-time area of interest became a full-time job.
“So if you’re just finding me: welcome.
If you’ve been here: thank you.
And if anyone’s ever called you “too much” for caring— then maybe you belong here too. Because I probably just needed a hug.
Instead, I made this my job.”
Another excerpt encapsulates what probably became Justice’s philosophy of life.
“… And somewhere in that aftermath, I realized I had a choice. I could either accept the version of life I was being sold, or I could start asking why the hell things had to be this way.
“I chose to ask. I chose to dig deeper.
“That choice didn’t magically fix anything. It just gave me permission to question everything. To see that most people are trapped not because they want to be, but because no one ever shows them how to break the cycle.
“The system depends on people like me not asking questions. It depends on a community trusting that the bare minimum is enough.
“In August 2024, I decided to start asking questions.”
ASIDE - my own dot-connecting
One characteristic of Justice’s writing that impresses me is her ability to connect dots. In thinking about key events in Justice’s own career, I can’t help but wonder if she was terminated from her previous job (in the Spring of 2025) because she was making too much progress stirring things up via her “side” passion of investigating big chemical companies and SuperFund sites.
From the above biographical info, we learn that Justice started to “ask questions” in August 2024 … and was terminated from her salaried job at a PR firm about seven months later. (If a goal was to silence a citizen muckraker by firing her, this result obviously backfired.)
With no job or income, Ms. Justice simply kept pursuing her passion.
At her website, Ms. Justice describes who she is now …
“I’m a Buddhist. A mother. An entrepreneur. A writer. An advocate. I’m someone who refuses to stay quiet when I see people being harmed by the very systems that are supposed to protect them.”
So how did Justice become interested in the Epstein case?
In recent posts, she answers this question.
“I like puzzles and finding patterns and quickly realized this Epstein case tied into my goal of fighting for government transparency.
According to her own posts, “about three months ago,” she began “digging into the Epstein case” …trying to understand how a college dropout built an operation with this much protection and why nobody has been held accountable.”
Elsewhere she writes: “I began writing about Epstein in the beginning of fall and quickly realized how connected to my goal of accountability and transparency this was. So I kept writing. Now, I have no idea where this will take me but it feels right.”
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Last week, Ms. Justice appeared on a podcast with Zev Shalev and Ellie Leonard, a Substack author with more than 560,000 subscribers (50,000 more than Paul Krugman and far more than any “Covid Contrarian” author.)
In the podcast episode, Ms. Justice noted that that the “lack of transparency in corporate and government spaces” disturbs her at a core level.
As she and her podcast hosts agreed, “a lot of people have a stake in not letting these details out.”
While Justice had been very active on Trends and TikTok and had started her own website, she didn’t start a Substack newsletter until October 6, 2025. Justice’s first Substack dispatch on Epstein reporting generated only “five likes,” no reader comments and one cross-post.
Rapid growth of Substack Newsletter …
To illustrate the rapid growth in her audience, a report she filed less than three months later on December 29 (showing parallels between the Epstein saga and the movie “Eyes Wide Shut”) generated 2,207 “likes” and was cross-posted or re-stacked 809 times).
In recent days, Ms. Justice has written that “Things are moving faster than I expected them to move, and I think what matters most about this moment isn’t what I’ve found but what I represent in this space. I represent the idea that average informed citizens can do this work. That you don’t need permission or credentials to examine publicly available documents and think carefully about what they prove.”
In yet another recent Note, Justice writes:
“I have a feeling 2026 will be the year of independent reporting and journalism.”
Since Justice has never mentioned she is married, I assume she is a single mother raising at least two “kids” (plural). She seems gobsmacked and sincerely grateful that her hard work and focus on Epstein is allowing her to, perhaps, fulfill a dream.
“Thank you to everyone cheering for me and supporting me. If I’m being honest, this is a hard time financially for me and writing has sort of found me. So the idea that a world exists where I can both write and pay my bills is exciting. Thank you for giving me hope and support!”
The timing of Justice joining Substack was fortuitous …
In one sense, the story of Kait Justice represents a glowing testimony to what’s possible thanks to Substack, which was created to benefit independent citizen journalists like Ms. Justice.
As I’ve written in previous Substack articles (and will highlight again in future dispatches), the distinguishing characteristics of the successful Substack citizen journalist has changed dramatically.
To myself, it seems clear that the main reason articles focussing on the Epstein files are extremely popular with today’s corpus of Substack readers is the widely-held expectation that full exposure of the Epstein operation could result in the ruination and disgrace of President Donald Trump.
Per my assessment of Kait Justice’s many Epstein articles, this writer is definitely not a fan of Donald Trump. However, it seems to me Justice’s overriding objective is for the full truths surrounding Epstein’s operation to be revealed. I have noted that her writings have already implicated many titans of the political Left, including former President Bill Clinton.
Whether she appreciates this or not, Kait Justice has tapped into a large (and potentially lucrative) market of American citizens who didn’t seem remotely interested in exposing the Epstein scandal when Joe Biden was “president” from 2020-2024.
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The reason I’m a fan of Justice’s investigative work is because it’s so thorough and because she is highlighting numerous details that have been ignored by government officials and corporate journalists.
IMO, it will be a smart and principled citizen journalists like Kait Justice who might put all the puzzle pieces together and give the public a more accurate picture of a scandal that is 10,000 times more disturbing and sinister than Watergate.
If or when confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, such a scandal might produce thermo-nuclear fallout, a result I believe is needed to convince the public of the “truth” that all important truth-seeking organizations are, in fact, completely captured.
For example, the majority of American citizens may come to the conclusion that a system this corrupt, this replete with so many proven liars and master cover-up artists might also be able to easily pull off a hoax pandemic that produced crimes against humanity.
I still doubt the real truth on the Epstein saga will ever be revealed for the simple reason that - just like Covid - too many guilty accomplices exist to prosecute and expose even a small number of the guilty.
Still, I feel better knowing citizen journalists like Kait Justice appear to be sincere in trying to expose the real and full truth, which, according to Ms. Justice’s early reporting, seems to strongly suggest that the government of Israel - and billionaire “philanthropists” who support Israel - were the real backers of Jeffrey Epstein, a fact that had to be well-known to every important figure in the U.S. government - Democrats and Republicans.
To those who profess to want the full truth of the Epstein scandal and whose main interest in this topic might be the humiliation, impeachment or prosecution of Donald Trump, the adage “be careful what you wish for” might apply.
Citizen journalists who think like myself strongly believe the entire global swamp would be exposed if the real Epstein scandal was, somehow, ever exposed.
The known knowable, however, is that all the organizations that are supposed to be searching for the truth will continue to work overtime trying to conceal it.
Still, it would be a story for the ages if a journalist who never graduated from high school and never worked for one magazine or newspaper broke one of the great scandals of the century.
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Addendum - Sample of Kait Justice Epstein Exclusives …
A highly-recommended starting point - or primer - on Ms. Justice’s Epstein research would be the Part I expose’ she published on her website (see link here).
In future articles, I will summarize her articles showing three nations that Epstein was in close contact with (especially Israel), and an article about how Lynn Forester deRothschild seems to be a central figure in many key Epstein events.
Her research also shows that three major banks - JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and the Deutsche Bank - processed more than $1.4 billion in Epstein payments and all banks obviously knew that Epstein was trafficking hundreds of girls and young women … for decades.
Another exclusive finding of Ms. Justice reveals an email that shows federal officials told New Mexico investigators to not investigate possible sex-trafficking at Epstein’s Zorro “ranch” in the same state. (For example, the ranch was never searched by any law enforcement agency.)
Yet another fascinating and original report documents the efforts that were undertaken to scrub (or de-emphasize) Epstein’s sex offender status from the Internet. The man who was in charge of this project was the husband of one of Ghislaine Maxwell’s sisters. This man later “committed suicide” under very odd circumstances.
As mentioned in my article, among writers on the Left, the predicate explaining the great interest in the “Epstein files” is clearly an interest to (finally) “get” Donald Trump.
For her part, Kait Justice has explored (although not in great detail) two theories that would involve Trump. Her first theory is that Epstein and Trump were long-time great friends and Trump might have always known about Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and, perhaps, even facilitated it.
The second theory she seems to be investigating is that Trump was a TARGET of Epstein and whatever intelligence agencies might have recruited Epstein to head up a massive blackmail or “intelligence” operation.
The second theory would postulate that Trump had indeed been compromised or “captured” - probably by Mossad and the government of Israel. It would flow from this case theory that Trump’s possible interest in spiking the release of the Epstein files is an effort to not expose the nefarious and thermo-nuclear clandestine activities of America’s close ally and friend, Israel.
In thinking about this second theory, it seems to me that if Donald Trump was indeed captured and effectively controlled by the government of Israel, the last thing this nation would want is for Donald Trump to be removed from office.
In other words, this nation would seem to have the ideal president to advance the interests of Israel (like, for example, defeating its enemy, Iran, and ensuring it can continue its military operations in Gaza.) Per this logic, Israel or those who support Israel causes might be leading the effort to get liberal groups to leave Donald Trump alone.
Instead, almost the entire Leftist establishment is as motivated as ever to remove Trump from office.
Both Israel (and also Saudi Arabia) seem to have a great supporter leading the U.S. government - a man who once campaigned against neocon policies, but now seems to support a very active military that favors multiple regime-change operations.
Anyway, I find it odd that a press dominated by Jewish owners and editors is leading the effort to remove and disgrace a man who seems willing to advance any proposal put forward by Benjamin Netanyahu or billionaire supporters of the nation of Israel.
I was wondering why this story produced no Reader Comments .... Then I realized the settings were set to allow comments for paid subscribers only. That was an accident on my part. I always allow comments for everyone. (The default of Substack is for only paid subscribers to be allowed to comment. You have to manually change this setting before you send a story and I forgot to do this with this piece. Anyway, I've now changed it so that anyone in the whole wide world who would like to make a comment now can.)