It was a sumptuous evening in Washington DC in late 2024.

Donald Trump's acolytes were riding high ahead of his triumphant return to the White House.

Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Trump ally Lynn Patton and Republican strategist Ryan Coyne were joined by MAGA influencer Ashley St Clair and Jessica Reed Kraus, the social media phenomenon known as House Inhabit.

Conversation turned racy as they discussed an app called Mr Number, which is used to identify and block fraudulent calls or texts but is also used by escorts to share reviews of clients. 

The table was running searches on mutual acquaintances for fun - until someone suggested Kraus enter her husband Mike's cell.

There his number was with its own review.

'He's a white man safe to see and brought donation as agreed,' read the post from October 5, 2024.

Kraus became distraught and left the table, St Clair told the Daily Mail.

'I'll never forget watching your face as we read those reviews and you did the math and the review was while you were out of town,' St Clair recounted in a TikTok video last month.

St Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk's children, kept the incident secret for months but decided to tell all after Kraus torched her in a surprise social media outburst.

'She's f***ing insane,' St Clair told the Daily Mail, describing how she had always remained cordial with Kraus, someone she barely knew.

St Clair's offense?

She had posted a general criticism of political influencers taking money for content, not naming Kraus. But Kraus responded directly, calling St Clair a desperate MAGA outcast whose only relevance was giving birth to a billionaire's child.

Kraus did not deny the incident but disputed St Clair's characterization, telling the Daily Mail that her husband's number appeared on the app because, as a public political figure, her family is targeted by spammers.

'I was rightfully confused at the moment and that confusion fueled my emotion. I had no idea what this was,' Kraus told the Daily Mail.

'I also have photo evidence and plenty of guest witnesses to prove my husband was at a friend's wedding [when the alleged Mr Number post was written] - helping with setup all day and staying until midnight, accompanied by two of my sons.'

She branded St Clair's account 'inaccurate and designed to inflict harm and embarrassment on myself and my family.'

Meanwhile, her husband Mike Kraus told the Daily Mail that the number was his but that he was not certain how it ended up on the Mr Number app, suspecting it might be because he had recently taken custody of the cell number, or perhaps because he sells second-hand items online.

Jessica Kraus is, according to the Wall Street Journal, the 'Queen Bee of MAGA socialites.'

The mother-of-four from San Clemente, California, counts the White House, Mar-a-Lago and the Kennedy family among her sources, building a reported seven-figure media empire by making other people's private lives her business.

She began as a lifestyle blogger with a ranch-style home and a $7-a-month Substack, renting out a spare room during the pandemic to help pay the bills.

Then came the 2021 Ghislaine Maxwell trial, which she covered with a sympathy toward the defendant that alarmed some readers. 

Her husband quit his construction job to handle childcare while Kraus focused on the brand.

Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard followed, gaining her nationwide recognition and even a complimentary text message from Donald Trump Jr.

Then RFK Jr, whose presidential run she championed with missionary zeal and through whom she penetrated the inner circles of Trumpworld. 

Kraus opened up Trump's MAGA movement to an entirely new audience of millions - most of them women - drawn to her glamorous, gossip-filled coverage.

While Vogue and Harper's Bazaar dismissed Trump's cohort as unfashionable, Kraus cornered the market with wit and striking visuals: sun-drenched soirees at Mar-a-Lago, intimate gatherings at the Kennedy compound in Cape Cod, and black-tie evenings in Washington, DC.

Yet some former friends and employees told the Daily Mail her public persona masks a fiery private reality which reduced staff to tears and sparked an exodus as they claim she grew intoxicated by her success.

Kraus vehemently denies the allegations from 'disgruntled employees' who have sought to 'undermine my reputation and profit from this angle.'

'I never punished anyone or pitted them against one another. They were not on good terms [with each other] under me and I have the texts to prove it,' she told the Daily Mail, stating that she let the staff go because they were 'erratic, rude and entitled.'

She kept a tight inner circle of only around half a dozen staff - mainly young women in their thirties.

They were close, appearing more like a group of friends - staying in the same hotels, packing into cabs and dancing the night away at Mar-a-Lago.

She kept them hooked with details of chats with Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, and lewd stories about RFK Jr's 'incredible' Facetime sex sessions with Vanity Fair's then-West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi.

'She always had gossip. It was electrifying,' one staffer told the Daily Mail.

She told the aspiring journalists, 'stick with me and you'll hit it big.'

If she was angry with one of the women, former staffers said, she would make this apparent by taking another employee with her for the next assignment. They'd only realize once they spotted their co-worker on Kraus' Instagram on Capitol Hill or in Palm Beach. 

'She pits people against each other and she enjoys it,' the ex-employee told the Daily Mail.

Kraus, 45, had missed out on partying in her younger years, bringing up her kids as she and her husband struggled to make ends meet. But she is making up for it now.

'She definitely drinks, and she has manic episodes, and she has high highs and low lows, and she gets hungover and she gets cranky and she makes bad decisions,' the former staffer said.

'But I think more than being abusive with alcohol, she's abusive with power. Way worse than any of her drinking is how high she gets and how manic she gets off of her text messages.'

Kraus's alleged drinking in combination with her allegedly explosive temper was recounted by three other former staffers.

She dismissed the claims as 'nonsense', telling the Daily Mail that she only ever had 'cocktails in appropriate social settings.'

It was a rainy night in Los Angeles in March last year when Kraus's team finally imploded, according to multiple sources who attended.

She arrived at Musso and Frank Grill - Hollywood's oldest restaurant - for a Substack dinner thrown in her honor.

Sitting to her left was Olivia Nuzzi, the journalist she had spent months publicly savaging as 'big-boned Nuzzi,' characterizing her as a scheming seductress who had nearly destroyed RFK Jr's campaign through their torrid telephonic affair.

To the bafflement of Kraus's staff, Nuzzi joked that she was House Inhabit's 'muse' and 'ghost collaborator.'

The evening progressed without a hitch - until Denise Bovee, Kraus's longtime photographer and friend of 14 years, found that her camera had run out of battery.

Kraus was said to be furious as she had wanted Bovee to take paparazzi-style photos of Nuzzi finally 'breaking cover' in LA, which she would send to the New York Post 'to scare the s*** out of RFK,' sources familiar with the evening confirmed.

In the car ride home, Kraus allegedly turned around in the front seat to scream at Bovee, calling her a 'lazy loser' and listing every mistake she had made on the trip in front of the entire staff, as well as Bovee's 17-year-old daughter. 

Bovee and her daughter reportedly broke down in tears during Kraus's tirade.

She blocked Kraus the following morning and has not spoken to her since.

'It took me a long time to get to the enough is enough stage,' Bovee told a friend afterwards. 'Once she did it in front of my kid, I was like - you crossed the line.'

Other employees drifted away in the months that followed.

As they did, Kraus's husband Mike began texting some of the departed employees.

What he wrote, in messages seen by the Daily Mail, painted an unexpected picture of life inside the House Inhabit empire.

'Ever since Olivia came around, something's changed,' he wrote.

'I've called Jessica out a couple of times about it. She gets really defensive, straight to fight mode in seconds... I'm just watching and observing right now. Something's not right.'

He described his daily routine: up before the family, cooking breakfast, cleaning the house, doing the laundry.

'[Jessica] tells me I'm lazy all the time,' he wrote. 'I've worked two to three jobs most of my life... She criticizes me all the time.'

'I've never seen Jessica apologize to anyone in my life,' he continued. 'I mean, I watched her walk away from a relationship with her mom and brother without hesitating or remorse.'

He signed off with a request. 'Let Denise know I'm actually extremely sad about their friendship ending. Thanks for talking. I'm going to delete this thread.'

Mike Kraus said that he 'just wanted everyone to get along' and was 'hoping that I could fix it.'

'But every time I reached out to somebody they would just use my texts against me,' he told the Daily Mail, stating that the former staffers would publish the messages online as evidence that he agreed with them to target his wife.

'After everybody betrayed everybody, our photographer and the other writer, I was just trying to help - they were burning me pretty hard,' Mike said. 'I'm on your side, but I'm also on my wife's side - can't everybody just come to a mutual agreement.'

Nuzzi declined to comment.