Seated on a grey couch entangled in a plaid blanket next to her partner, Alex Thomas, in the Washington, D.C., apartment the couple shares, there is a deflated air to Katie Hill. Two years after the former California congresswoman was engulfed in a scandal that rocked a city that seemed inured to it in the time of Donald Trump, she is still struggling with the fallout. The attention of the Beltway hinges upon power, and when Hill stepped down, she also stepped into a new state of irrelevance. This was, in many ways, the point. But it also affected a situation in which many of the magpies in Washington, D.C., saw shoddily redacted images of Hill’s naked body but have not tuned in since. On this Tuesday night at the tail end of September, it is clear that Hill still struggles with this reality. “It fucks you up to have everybody have seen these horrible naked photos of you,” Hill deadpanned. She still runs through the what-ifs. What if she had served longer? What if she were a man? What if her relationship hadn’t been with a woman? What if she wasn’t bisexual? “I know I have my own responsibility…. I don’t ever want to take away from that,” Hill said. “I also felt like there was a fundamental injustice here that happened and could only happen to a woman.”
Hill is now ready to take control of her narrative. When she resigned from Congress, her final speech on the House floor served as an amalgam: part apology, part battle cry. Her pledge was to keep fighting. Without a congressional pin on her chest, Hill has inherently cast a narrower silhouette since. But she has been fighting. She has also been losing. Over the past two years, she was granted a restraining order against her ex-husband, Kenneth Heslep; she and Heslep divorced; her brother died of a drug overdose; and she lost a lawsuit she brought against two media outlets and three individuals, including her ex-husband, over the distribution of her nude images. But she and Thomas are ready to start a new chapter together: parenthood.
The relationship between Hill and Thomas, a former Playboy reporter turned novelist, was something of a sideshow to the broader scandal. Specifically, Hill’s relationship with a campaign staffer. But for Hill’s opponents, it was further ammo. While Hill and Thomas had previously interacted in hallway scrums, typical between reporters and lawmakers, the two had their first real interaction at the congressional softball game in June 2019. It was just weeks after Hill left her ex-husband, and even she will joke that she saw the ensuing flirtation as a “rebound” at first. But Hill will also say that Thomas has been her “rock” over the course of the last two years. He was there the night she contemplated suicide as her nude images flooded the ether. Following her resignation, they holed up at Thomas’s family home in Delaware. After Hill attempted to give her brother CPR following his overdose and was waiting for the paramedics to arrive, she called Thomas, who caught a flight to Los Angeles that day. As our conversation unfolds, Thomas’s presence over the past two years is reflected in his contributions; he helped guide Hill through her story, which is clearly also his story. To use their characterization, they are “trauma-bonded.”
As for the pregnancy, the couple is taking it as something of a sign from the universe. For years, Hill—who has openly discussed her battle with endometriosis, which has left her with one ovary—was told that she likely would not be able to have children without IVF. “My life is still clearly disheveled. I don’t have a clear plan…. Planning for having a kid was not there,” Hill said. “But it’s also something where I’m 34 years old, it was clearly, like, a miracle baby.” A visibly pregnant Hill characterized her current mindset as, “I need to find a way of kind of moving forward with my life, having this baby.”
Politics doesn’t lend itself to nuance, and so the circumstances of Hill’s resignation can be hard to tell. Yes, Hill engaged in an inappropriate, arguably exploitative, relationship with a campaign staffer. But she was also a victim. In October 2019, the conservative website RedState and the British tabloid The Daily Mail had published intimate photos of the then lawmaker, including nudes. Hill’s decision to sue the individuals and outlets she viewed as most instrumental in the dissemination of her nudes was an effort to disentangle the political tendrils of the scandal from the legal ones. “It is a fucking crime,” she said of the nonconsensual dissemination of photos, or revenge porn. “It is on the books as a crime in both the state of California and the District of Columbia.” She felt a sense of obligation to use her experience to set an example. “I was the first very big public case of a public official who had this happen and especially weaponized politically. And I think that for me, it was like, Oh, my God, there are so many people who this could happen to. It’s going to stop women, especially young women, from running for office,” Hill said. “I knew from the beginning that there was a chance I could be on the hook for all of that, but I felt like I had to do something to try and fight it.”
Hill had been fighting long before she was elected to Congress. When she was 16 she met Heslep, who was four years her senior. Despite the age difference, they began dating and six years later were married. In her declaration as part of her lawsuit and in her book, She Will Rise, Hill describes a relationship that grew increasingly abusive over time, escalating during her congressional run. “Heslep was abusive throughout our relationship and marriage. He was physically, sexually, verbally, and emotionally abusive. He also abused our pets, resulting even in the unfortunate death of animals in our care,” Hill said under oath. “During the course of our relationship, Heslep took nude photographs of me, sometimes without my consent.”
In or around August 2018, according to Hill’s declaration, Heslep threatened that he would “go nuclear” or “blow up” her congressional campaign. Less than a year later, in early June 2019, Hill left him. Five weeks later Heslep filed for divorce from Hill, at which point, she says, the threats escalated. By mid-October, photos of Hill, including a poorly redacted “explicit” photo of Hill showing her naked brushing the hair of the campaign staffer in question, were on the internet. (Heslep has denied allegations of abuse and wrongdoing. Heslep’s father, Fred Heslep, previously said Hill’s ex-husband had been hacked and denied disseminating the images, which Hill had accused him of doing.)
As the scandal unfurled, Hill highlighted the public support from a handful of her colleagues, particularly from the Squad—representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. “There was a ton of support for me, but that support is different from public support,” she said. “I couldn’t expect that.” Within a week of the publication of an article in The Daily Mail, Hill resigned. It was the same day she voted to formalize the impeachment proceedings against Trump, one of her final votes as a member of Congress. She cites her desire not to distract from the impeachment proceedings, as well as a contention that she believed California’s 25th District had firmly flipped from red to blue, as the motivating factor behind her decision to step down.
In her resignation speech, Hill said she was leaving because of a “double standard” and because she “no longer want[ed] to be used as a bargaining chip.” And, she said, “I am leaving because of a misogynistic culture that gleefully consumed my naked pictures, capitalized on my sexuality, and enabled my abusive ex to continue that abuse, this time with the entire country watching.” Today, she says, “I probably could have withstood it, [but] I think the part that people really need to understand is that it’s that abusive element of it that made it so impossible to feel like you could just stand and take it.”
A criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. into the dissemination of Hill’s nude images remains open. She also sued two media outlets—the parent companies of RedState.com and of The Daily Mail—and three individuals, including her ex-husband, in civil court over the dissemination of the nude images. Despite a California law that makes it illegal to share such images when “the person distributing the image knows or should know that distribution of the image will cause serious emotional distress, and the person depicted suffers that distress,” the judge threw out the case very early, arguing that the defendants were protected by so-called anti-SLAPP legislation, a California statute often used by members of the media to protect their right to free speech against allegations of defamation. “It was a big disappointment,” Hill says. Under the provisions of that statute, she says she has also been ordered to cover the legal fees of her opposition in the lawsuit to the tune of roughly $400,000. Now, Hill—broke and without a steady paycheck—is considering bankruptcy.
“Civil revenge porn lawsuits are very, very new. There are just about a dozen states that even have a civil remedy, California is one, and there’s very little case law about it,” Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights lawyer who represented Hill, told me. “It’s a really novel set of facts because Katie’s pictures were not just put up on Facebook or a revenge porn website. They were published by the mainstream media—if we want to call the Daily Mail that. They were published by online platforms that had a reach of millions, if not hundreds of millions.” Goldberg stressed that Hill was not suing over the publication of content, rather the sharing of the photos. She argued that the use of the nude images of Hill was not only gratuitous but unnecessary as the outlets could have made the same point by posting screenshots of text messages and other content, specifically highlighting Hill’s relationship with her campaign staffer.
“There’s no question that Katie was harmed by these images going around the world. That was completely humiliating. It caused her so much distress,” Goldberg said. “Bringing the lawsuit, as risky as it was, was the most combative thing that Katie could have done under the circumstances to sort of set an example for other young women who could become victims. The lawsuit was gutsy and powerful and it will always stay that way, even though it was ultimately unsuccessful.”
“She is an unstoppable person,” Goldberg said. “She has people that hate her just because it’s fun and political rivals that will continue to stop at nothing to try to take her down, even though she’s no longer even in Congress.” She added, “There’s no shortage of people that see somebody like Katie who just can basically take the punches and does. That’s very threatening to people.”
Despite her resignation and her loss in the courts, Hill is still pushing to change the law, working behind the scenes to shepherd legislation that would make the sharing of non-consensual pornography a federal crime. She has worked with her former colleagues to get the SHIELD Act into the the Violence Against Women Act, which passed the House and is now waiting for action in the Senate. “This law, it’s not about me,” Hill said. It’s about something that’s much more prevalent than that.” Without consent, the law would make it illegal to disseminate such images, full stop.
“It’s really clear that Katie is a leader,” said Rep. Lauren Underwood, who was in the same Congressional class as Hill and was her roommate at the time of Hill’s resignation. “She has an incredible capacity to drive change in our country. We saw it in Congress where she was like a bright star among a class of stars—let’s be clear. And so when she left that ability that she has, [didn’t] go away.”
“Katie is continuing to use her experience—as horrific and traumatizing as it has been—to protect women and other people across the country,” Underwood said. “And I think it’s just remarkable. She’s setting out to change the law and usually it would be like some massive entity with unlimited resources doing this. And instead it’s Katie Hill. Who is a regular person who served in Congress for 10 months and is going to get it done.”
After the past two years of tumult, it is unsurprising that both Hill and Thomas carry a certain degree of cynicism. “You grow up thinking like the good guys win, like in every movie you ever see because good guys win. Like Rocky wins; Luke Skywalker wins…. When we’ve been talking a couple of times after the hard moments, it’s just like, that’s not how the world works,” Thomas told me. At times, “Things go like dynamically wrong; the universe frowns upon you.” But he added, “I always try to say, you gotta look at the long scale. These battles, these long fucking battles take a lot of time to win. And like people in everything, every time somebody tries to make society better, they lose a shit ton at the beginning of it.”
Now that she is 21 weeks pregnant, Hill still carries that worry. “What else can happen?” But, she added, “You still have to have that hope that things are gonna work out. And I think I’m choosing to read it as a positive sign that I got pregnant when I wasn’t supposed to be able to and that this can be kind of that next chapter of my life. Right now, all I want is a healthy baby….Other things would be icing on the cake.” She carries the death of her brother, which occurred in January 2020, with her. “You are never ‘safe’ as a parent,” she said. “You are never out of the dark.”
And yet, despite the continued blows, Hill makes it clear that she is not done yet. “I know what it takes to run for office. I know the personal sacrifice that it requires and what that would mean with a kid is very different from what it means if you don’t have a kid. So deciding to run again would be a lot harder, especially when he’s little,” she said, citing conversations she had with Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar after her resignation, in which the senators encouraged her to reflect on all the possible professional avenues she could still explore—from activism to joining an administration to running again. For now she intends to focus on her PAC, Her Time, which aims to elect and reelect women to office.
“That’s what’s going to get me through the next year. It’s not going to be trying to run my own campaign or do anything like that. It’s just going to be like, these women need to stay in office and I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “Then I guess by November, next year, after the midterms, I can kind of take stock again.”
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