HOUSE OF CARDS

Katie Zacharia’s Résumé Takes Another Bizarre Turn

The new White House press secretary’s history involves a stint pushing supplements.

Katie Zacharia spent time shilling for a health supplement company as part of a “sort of pyramid scheme,” she admitted Thursday.

Zacharia, 41, who has been called out for claiming to be an attorney when she hasn’t passed the bar exam, was a surprise appointment that rocked the president’s inner circle.

But before she was selling Donald Trump as president she took a role as an affiliate of Beachbody—a fitness company that ran a multi-level marketing operation, she said Thursday.

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The role, she told WIRED, was part of “some sort of pyramid scheme,” selling supplement shakes.

Popping up on right-wing cable news channels since getting a start at NewsMax in 2024, Zacharia’s resume has a significant gap between 2013 and 2023.

Zacharia, who moved to China in 2011, returning two years later in the summer of 2013, said she remembered being brought into the multi-level marketing scheme (or MLM as they are more commonly known) by a friend.

She was promoting what was then called Beachbody’s ‘Shakeology’ product, which is billed as a “superfood nutrition shake.”

She stopped using and promoting the product because of its vitamin A content, which became a concern for her while pregnant, she told WIRED.

Beachbody became BODi in 2023, in a pivot from health and fitness to “health esteem.”

The company has a long history of legal issues, including being accused of making false or misleading income promises to contractors, like those in the role Zacharia once held.

The company confirmed to WIRED that Zacharia had been one of 300,000 “independent Team Beachbody distributors” in 2013, but did not specify for how long.

Her eldest child is 12, and Zacharia has said she was a stay-at-home mom between 2014 and 2020.

Zacharia has three sons and a daughter with husband Tyler, and her family is planning to relocate from California to Washington, D.C.

Her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, resigned from the White House to focus on her own young family in August, and it took Trump, 80, almost two months to fill the role.

Zacharia’s appointment was met with surprise and consternation by some of the president’s inner circle, including Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Zacharia and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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