Part 1 of my two-part series on the downfall of Jessica Kent, an addiction recovery and prison reform YouTuber with over one million followers. This is a wild ride.
Jessica recounting one of her most popular stories. Some observers have suggested that her facial expressions tend toward the theatrical and that there are strange gaps in her cadence that indicate emotional dishonesty. (Okay, it's me. I'm "some observers.")
Part I: The Rise
At the height of her fame as a YouTuber, Jessica Kent was riding a wave of peripatetic praise the likes of which few human beings will ever know.
After a troubled childhood and years of opioid and methamphetamine addiction that resulted in several stints in jail and prison, Jessica had finally turned things around.
She had given birth to her first daughter in shackles, which was the story that made her famous. But Jessica had served her time, been released, and then jumped through hoop after hoop to regain custody of her daughter.
As she rebuilt her life with two pairs of shoes, no refrigerator, and a mattress on the ground, she met a fellow recovering addict named Judd (aka Reece), an Iraqi War veteran. The two of them dated, became engaged, and added another daughter to their family. Jessica devoted herself to being a mother and enrolled in online college to study prisoner support services and psychology.
The image of this heavily tattooed, waifish ex-con with the crooked teeth attending PTA meetings beside blonde, buxom, pearl-clutching Midwestern Marys was YouTube dynamite.
Jessica spoke with refreshing candor. She often concluded stories about her past mistakes with a statement along the lines of "I just wasn't a very good person in those days, guys."
Her girlish giggling as she shared tales of prison purses and prison suitcases* was punctuated by downcast glances; she discussed her institutional PTSD and periodic depression.
*Men have only a prison suitcase, whereas women have both a prison purse and a prison suitcase. I hope that you can figure it out from there.
When things got too dark, Reece's Midwestern Everyman mellowness balanced Jessica's depressive streak.
Jessica was interviewed on daytime talk shows. She gained hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and other platforms. She became a spokeswoman for Groups Recover Together and was featured in Inked Magazine.
Jessica appeared to be a paragon of addiction recovery, and it seemed like she had it all.
Part II: The Reality
Except that Jessica wasn't in recovery. At least, not fully. Although most of her video intros included a statement affirming that she was "a person in long-term recovery," it eventually came out that she had long been drinking a glass or two of wine along with dinner.
No big deal, right? Jessica had been stable for several years. Clearly, she had her stuff together.
Later on, Jessica shared that her after-dinner glass of wine sometimes devolved into day drinking and binge drinking. Still, she didn't intend to stop because "alcohol wasn't her problem" and because it was her stress over Reece's relapse that was driving her to drink.
She also mentioned using THC for her anxiety and depression. We subsequently found out that she was also taking gabapentin and prescription amphetamine salts (Adderall).*
*One of Jessica's drugs of choice was methamphetamine, so her taking Adderall was like a heroin addict taking morphine.
Anyone in recovery knows where this story goes. At some point, Jessica progressed into full-blown relapse.
Part III: Jessica's League of Extraordinary Gentleman
One of a score of videos in which Jessica denounced Reece (Judd), an Iraqi War veteran who she diagnosed as a covert narcissist and an abuser.
At least Jessica had Reece to support her, right?
Well, yes and no. It turned out that Jessica had been carrying on a yearslong affair with a federal inmate named Jason, a member of the Spanish Cobras gang who she had met during her incarceration in Arkansas.
Wondering how we found out? Well, from Jason himself. We'll get there.
"Uncle Jason" moved in with Jessica and her girls after his release on federal parole. This was shortly after Jessica and Reece had separated, following which Jessica decried Reece as a covert narcissist and abuser.
Jessica released a video in which Reece screamed at her as she cried and cowered. When viewers questioned why her phone happened to be recording at such a convenient angle at exactly this moment, Jessica wondered how anyone could ever question a victim of domestic abuse.
When it later came to light that Jessica had punched Jason in the face because he had left rehab (where he was because he had relapsed on meth while at Jessica's house), Jessica described this as "reactive abuse from a single mother victim of intergenerational trauma and institutional PTSD against my covert narcissist abuser ex who manipulated me into loving him with all my heart and intending to marry him six months ago".*
*I'm altering her words slightly here to make a point, but trust me - you wouldn't believe just how close they are to verbatim.
She developed a habit of using a weird word salad of sympathetic psychological terms to justify her actions.
Jessica released a recording of a phone call from a time when she had an acquaintance who Reece didn't know "go to check on him" in his new apartment. Reece threatened this man with a gun and allegedly fired this gun into the air outside his apartment building, which resulted in criminal charges.
Again, astute observers questioned whether the suspiciously edited phone call was really evidence of Jessica trying to provoke a PTSD episode in Reece, thereby instigating him to doing something regrettable. This, in turn, would sway the court and public opinion in her favor, of course.
Before the end of this 12- to 18-month saga, there would be visits from at least two more men, including Jessica's former drug runner, Robbie, who she also slept with.
How do we know this? From Robbie and his ex-girlfriend, who Jessica mocked for living in low-income housing.
Jessica is currently with Berner 420, a Tik Tok creator and alleged hobosexual who arrived on her porch in Chicago to make content right after Jason returned to prison, then never left. Jessica and Berner 420 have relocated* to Utah, where she is now celebrating the state's permissive attitude toward firearms.
*Some would say fled rather than relocated, although their current location is unconfirmed. CPS had been called on Jessica by well-intentioned and likely not-so-well-intentioned viewers. During CPS' first visit to her home in Chicago, which was at the beginning of the Mindy Scorpio saga discussed below, there is evidence to suggest that Jessica intentionally diluted her urine to foil the drug test that she was required to submit to; Jessica herself admitted that the test had to be redone.
Boy, that's a lot of new uncles for two young girls, isn't it?
It also came to light that Jessica was spending time with another prison reform content creator who had been charged with domestic violence; she released a video of her daughters doing the hair and makeup of this pretty hard-looking dude, which under other circumstances might have been sweet.
Part IV: The Hangers-On
At least Jessica had her friends to support her, right?
Well, not exactly.
The crap really hit the fan when Mindy Scorpio, another addiction and prison reform content creator, came to visit Jessica outside Chicago. This was shortly after Jessica's separation from Reece, when Jason was frequently staying with Jessica as well.
Mindy was honest with Jessica about having relapsed and needing to get away from her life in Kansas City while she cleaned herself up.
During her visit, Mindy got to know the people who Jessica surrounded herself with. This colorful cast included a gay man named Vern, who Mindy described as a sort of Platonic ideal of a tweaker. Vern frequently brought his disabled son* with him to Jessica's house, where he helped watch her daughters and ran errands for her.
*Used in the street kid sense. So, not really a son.
During her visit, Mindy smoked meth with Jason in Jessica's basement, then helpfully texted him to let him know that his glass d*ck was back in his shoe.
She took Jessica up on her offer to ask Jason to get Mindy Xanax, which is another one of Mindy's drugs of choice. On another occasion, Mindy asked for an Ambien from Jason, though it turned out that he couldn't find the pills.
By now, Jessica was apparently drinking to the point of blackout and next-morning debilitation. She confessed to Mindy that she had taken a hit of meth "while riding Jason" because she thought it was "hot".*
*Jason got a tattoo of a sexy Jessica smoking a meth pipe during this period. Jessica still hasn't admitted to meth use, so this was pure fantasy, I'm sure.
Mindy later alleged that Jessica had been taking amphetamine salts (Adderall) without a prescription, which Mindy herself might have helped to procure.
How do we know all of this? Well, it turned out that Mindy was a bit of a burn-the-house-down-with-yourself-in-it kind of gal.*
*As people who strongly identify with the Scorpio sign are wont to be, I have realized. I am one of them, after all.
Mindy and Jessica argued toward the end of her visit because Mindy was continuing to use despite having come to visit on the pretense of wanting to get herself back together. At some point, Jessica refused to continue to enable Mindy.
The problem was that Jessica knew that Mindy was pissed and that she had seen some shady goings-on during her visit. Jessica told Mindy that she would only help to pay her way back home if Mindy showed her that she had deleted all of their text messages and signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)*.
*Favored legal instrument of lascivious American Presidents, assistant-abusing celebrities, and assorted scumbags.
Safe in the knowledge that Mindy didn't have receipts and that she couldn't legally speak about what had happened at Jessica's house anyway, Jessica preemptively attacked. She warned her hundreds of thousands of followers not to buy from Mindy Scorpio's online store because it would only fuel her relapse.
Except that it turned out that there was a new iPhone update that meant that Mindy's messages could be recovered. It also turned out that Mindy didn't give a rat's behind about an NDA.
So, the messages between Jessica and Mindy were released. Jessica's house started to seem a lot more like a sordid trap-house than a quaint little home in the Chicago suburbs.*
*Oh yeah; I remembered the blow, but I forgot the hookers. It turned out that a prostitute who Reece had slept with was hanging out in Jessica's basement on at least one occasion; to her credit, Jessica didn't hold this against her. I think that she might even have offered her some pizza, judging from the text messages.
Part V: The Hubris
Watch this video. Seriously. With no extraneous commentary and minimal overlaid content, using purely her own unedited words, it does a better job than I ever could to show just how extensive and brazen Jessica's lies and manipulations became. It contains screenshots of the text messages and other receipts for many of the assertions in this article. It is in its own way one of the most shocking videos that I have ever seen on social media, a stunning indictment of how easy it can be to deceive an audience of hundreds of thousands.
Jessica could have saved herself a world of grief and likely a small fortune by simply taking a break from social media as soon as she and Reece had separated.
She needn't have confessed to relapse. A simple "The girls and I are dealing with a lot now, and I'm not myself; I'll come back when I've got my feet back under me" would have sufficed.
Instead, she launched into her series of videos about Reece's abusive behavior, which prompted many viewers to question her decision to put all of this information online, where it was readily discoverable by her daughters' friends, classmates, teachers.
Jessica just could not stop herself from trying to prove that she was in the right.
At one point, viewers brought up a past video in which Jessica had admitted to being diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) by a prison psychologist. Instead of ignoring the comments and questions about this, she doubled down and insisted that this was a misdiagnosis because the psychologist in question had misinterpreted a statement that she had made about remorselessness for her crimes.*
*I highly doubt that expressed remorse was the scales-tipping diagnostic factor, but that's beside the point. Remember that I'm not being a hypocrite in using Cluster B terminology to describe Jessica because she was officially diagnosed under creditable circumstances (see my article on the misuse of these terms here).
As the controversy grew and commentary channels began to cover it, viewers revisited Jessica's old videos. They discovered that some aspects of her story, including the amount of time that she served, changed significantly from one telling to another.
One prison reform content creator filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get to the bottom of things.
She uncovered paperwork that allegedly contained evidence of Jessica turning state's witness ("becoming a rat").
Jessica threatened some of the people questioning her story with legal action. Intellectual property infringement strikes were endlessly initiated against the creators who were bringing these inconsistencies to light.
In her lying, Machiavellian maneuvering, end-justifies-the-means attitude, and arrogant refusal to believe that her viewers had brains, of course, Jessica was acting remarkably like someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Overall, my reaction to all of this was a mortified "Earth, swallow me whole!" But there were some lighter moments, too.
On YouTube, Jessica had presented herself as responsible, reformed, and chastened. However, as her fame ballooned and her YouTube audience grew suspicious of her, Jessica built a following on Tik Tok, where she cultivated a bad kid / cool mom vibe.
In one video, for instance, she reenacted a conversation with a high school teacher who was praising her for focusing on her work for once. Jessica shared with her audience of young people that she had actually been completing another person's college coursework for money.
Imagine the schadenfreude, then, when Jason released the Corrlinks / Trulincs* copies of their amorous correspondence, which included phrases like "choak me in heels."
*Electronic communication system used by federal inmates.
Jessica termed her detractors "vial" and called a mutual acquaintance of her and Jason a f*g - proving that, like so many other parts of her story and personality, her LGBT allyship was performative.
In a megalomaniacal message to Reece at one point when they seemed to be reconciling, Jessica gloated that "I'd forgotten how much my name means on the streets."
"Do you need me to get some guys there?" She offered. "I'm the queen of them all..."
She also shared that calming down violent men on meth was her superpower.
I can relate, as this is what I told my second-grade teacher when she asked me what superpower I'd choose if I could have any. It sure beats flying or mind-reading.
Part VI: The Denouement
Things have finally calmed down.
As I mentioned above, Jessica and Berner 420 have supposedly relocated to the Southwest.
Jessica made a series of videos called "The Truth Never Dies," which she promised would vindicate her.
They did no such thing. They were mostly focused on supporting her narrative that she was a victim of narcissistic domestic abuse, although she did provide some documentation about the specifics of the time that she served and clarify that she was never an informant.
At one point in the final video in this series, Jessica did acknowledge that she had lost sight of her larger responsibilities in the midst of the fracas. There seemed to be some sincerity to this, but for many viewers, this acknowledgment was the proverbial band aid for a bullet hole.
Jessica has acknowledged that her reputation has been damaged and that she has lost substantial views over this "drama."
She also mentioned having had mental health crises during this period; I am not surprised, and I do feel for her for this.
The YouTube commentator Radiant Britt used a brilliant analogy to describe Jessica's way of "getting honest": That of the magician with the endless series of scarves up her sleeve; every time you think that you're about to see the last of it, another scarf emerges.
Even now, I am tempted to forgive most of Jessica's behavior because the lying, the messiness, even the self-delusion and ridiculous arrogance, can all be part of relapse into active addiction.
However, the thing that doesn't fit is the meta-narrative that Jessica was so committed to and clever about crafting in the midst of her chaos. She dedicated great energy to deceiving her audience, silencing her detractors by abusing intellectual property regulations and other aspects of the legal system, and obtaining evidence of the abuse directed at her by Reece and Jason.
In my experience, someone in the throes of relapse will not have the premeditation, lucidity, or even the energy to do all of the above. There is no "meta" during relapse; addiction is a desperate and animalian affair.
The overall picture is, however, consistent with a Cluster B personality using abuse and addiction as shields against responsibility for her actions.
I don't doubt that Jessica is the victim of abuse, and I condemn Reece if he did in fact get physical*; I am, however, highly suspicious that Jessica is an abuser of others.
*Jason admitted to getting physical on one occasion, though he said it was after Jessica had punched him in the face for leaving rehab (not that this changes the morality of hitting a woman).
I think that Jessica could have a spectacularly interesting story to tell if she could get honest. At one point, her personality disorder was at least quiescent. Although she says that she was secretly suicidal during many of her years as a stay-at-home mom of two daughters who was engaged to Reece, she was also stable and responsible.
Social media brings out the worst in all of us sometimes. It would be refreshing and powerful to have someone admit how it went to their head, how they got caught up in their own myth, how this made superpowers of their character faults and ultimately destroyed them.
That's if she can get honest. And that's a big if.
In Part 2 of this series, I discuss what Jessica Kent's debacle meant to me as a longtime fan / follower. I reflect on what it says about the e-recovery community and what those of us who make recovery-related content can learn from it.
If you enjoyed this content, then you might want to check out my review of Cat Marnell's autobiography How to Murder Your Life and my piece on the Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel.
A footnote: There was a dedicated team of Redditors active on the original Jessica Kent sub-Reddit who investigated much of this Gordian knot of drama, undertook the tremendously difficult task of unknotting it, and then provided receipts for all of the above. This sub-Reddit was eventually shut down, and it has fragmented into at least two descendent sub-Reddits, which still contain many of the original text messages, e-mails, and so on.
I discovered the original Reddit community by Googling "Jessica Kent lies" after becoming suspicious of her. These folks did a tremendous service by investigating Jessica's claims, organizing and presenting the evidence against her, and making more of Jessica's viewers aware of her lies. Though some members' snarking eventually got too intense and hateful, in my opinion, most of them were well-intentioned former fans, many of whom are in recovery.
I owe them a great debt. I also owe Jessica, Reece, Mindy, and some of the others involved a thank-you. Had they not turned on each other and then reconciled unstably and repeatedly, it would never have been possible to triangulate the truth. Thanks to their ill-advised disclosures, we have primary receipts for all of the above claims.