Bill Rice, Jr.: 01-04-2026, 
Ellie Leonard, with 566,000 subscribers, is an example of a liberal Substack author who has experienced eye-opening subscriber growth by focussing on the Epstein files. Ms. Leonard has hundreds of thousands of more subscribers than the best-known “Contrarian” Substack authors.
The Substack metric case study of Kait Justice’s newsletter is too interesting to me to not provide an update for readers, some of whom might also be intrigued by whatever these numbers might be telling us.
For those who missed my Jan. 11th feature story on this new Substack star, Kait Justice (real name Kaitlyn Pierce) published her first Substack newsletter less than six months ago on October 6, 2025.
Kait became a rising star due to her deep dive into the Epstein files and rapidly became one of the most significant and impressive “citizen researchers” on Substack.
On January 11th – in a little over 3 months – Kait’s subscription numbers had increased from zero to more than 3,600. At the time, my newsletter actually had 4,300 more subscribers than Ms. Justice’s (7,906 compared to her 3,600).
My predictions are sometimes prescient because I correctly predicted that Kait’s subscriber numbers would soon blow past my newsletter, which I’d started four years earlier.
About three weeks later, Kait had indeed surpassed my numbers and today, her newsletter has more than 17,000 subscribers – 2.2X more than my newsletter.
I also predicted Kat’s newsletter would probably reach the Top 10 of the fastest-rising newsletters on Substack’s “Politics” leaderboard.