Katie’s Unforgivable Sin

Aurolyn Luykx
Nov 1 · 5 min read

Maybe, like me, you’re just now learning who Katie Hill is. I learned she was bisexual before I learned that her 2018 election to Congress, in which she defeated incumbent Republican Steve Knight, flipped California’s 25th district blue for the first time in 28 years. Hill was part of the “blue wave” of younger female Democrats who surged into the House of Representatives during the 2018 midterms; she was California’s first openly bisexual state-wide elected official; and she was only 31 years old.

Hill resigned this week after accusations that, while married, she had a sexual relationship with a former campaign staffer (female) and, later on, with her legislative director Graham Kelly (male). Hill, who came out as bisexual after high school, acknowledges the first relationship; in fact, there are suggestions that Hill, her aide, and her husband Kenny Heslep formed a consensual “throuple” — at least until Hill and Heslep’s marriage turned sour and, she claims, abusive. For a certain segment of Internet spectators, the prospect of a bisexual legislator in a consensual polyamorous relationship seems more scandalous — and certainly more titillating — than the prospect of an adulterous heterosexual affair. This latter allegation — the only one that actually constitutes a violation of House rules — Hill vehemently denies.

The real brouhaha isn’t so much the alleged affairs, though. What really made the Internet swoon — and gasp, and reach for their smelling salts, and probably (in some corners) jerk off — were the pictures: intimate photos of Congresswoman Hill that were circulated (and, she claims, taken) without her consent. Hill’s estranged husband, the apparent source of the photos, now says he was “hacked” — although weeks before they were released, he was reaching out to tabloids asking if they wanted “the whole story.”

Since the appearance of the photos and the accompanying allegations, Hill has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, which strikes me as right and proper for a sitting member of Congress accused of an improper relationship with a staffer. But that investigation seems to be the least of her problems. If you’ve ever been through hell with an abusive ex, try combining that with having your nude photos circulated on the Internet, a year into the most important job of your life — a job lived through the media, in the public gaze. Add on to that literally thousands of death threats over the course of a week. The weaponization of Hill’s sexuality by her political enemies constitutes the most spectacular instance of revenge porn the nation has ever seen.

Of course, the photos were red meat to the less reputable conservative websites. Now that Hill has resigned, Knight has said that he is “absolutely considering” running to retake the seat. Interestingly, the main authors of the articles that first revealed the existence of the photos turned out to be the defeated Steve Knight’s former campaign advisors.

Hill’s resignation speech was both somber and rousing. She took responsibility for her misdeeds more forthrightly than I can recall any of her male colleagues doing. She portrayed herself as a flawed vessel of her constituents’ will: “I wanted to show young people, queer people, working people, imperfect people that they belonged here, because this is the people’s House.” But once the apologies were out of the way, she dedicated the rest of her speech to calling out the “gutter politics” and the misogynist double standard that hounded her out of the halls of power before any formal investigation could be concluded.

After Hill announced her resignation, my husband groused: “The Democrats need to just remain in their seats after a sex scandal, like the Republicans do.” Hill herself noted in her speech the multiple men “who have been credibly accused of intentional acts of sexual violence and remain in boardrooms, on the Supreme Court, in this very body and worst of all, in the Oval Office.” While acknowledging her admitted errors, Hill blamed her downfall on how “the forces of revenge by a bitter jealous man, cyber exploitation and sexual shaming that target our gender… have combined to push a young woman out of power and say that she doesn’t belong here.”

The sexist double standard is evident not only in the characterization of her alleged misdeed, but in what a slice of the public seems to regard as Hill’s deserved punishment. Hill was publicly humiliated, harassed, stalked and threatened with death and worse. Not just the legal but the sexual nature of the allegations was always key (and no doubt provided vivid source material for the threats). It was clear that Hill’s concern for her own safety, not to mention that of her family, friends, and staff, contributed to her decision. She was afraid, as her harassers intended; in that sense, the terrorists won.

Nonetheless, Hill was defiant, not of Congress’s rebuke, but of GOP operatives and garden-variety rightist trolls who made clear that they would not be constrained by any rules of law or decency. Her resignation mercifully cuts short an investigation that would have churned the Internet precisely while Congress prepares for public impeachment hearings. Though I imagine Hill was relieved at that, she was also compelling in her claim that “I am leaving because there is only one investigation that deserves the attention of this country and that’s the one that we voted on today.” There is also some satisfaction in knowing that her last vote in Congress was to move forward on a formal impeachment hearing against the most openly misogynist (not to mention adulterous) president in recent memory.

Whether or not Hill broke House rules, that is not what ended (at least for now) her political career. Rather, it was a coordinated wave of violations of her privacy, sexual harassment, and threats of violence. As Jennifer Lawrence emphasized when stolen nudes of her circulated on the Internet: “It is not a scandal, it is a sex crime.In short, a sex crime was committed against (not by) Katie Hill — multiple crimes, if you include the threats — and as a result she was forced to resign. The political agenda was to target Hill for fear and humiliation. Mission accomplished.

At least, for the moment. Hill made clear that, while the misogynist trolls that serve as the GOP’s online shock troops may have won this battle, the ugliness of their tactics reveals their panic at being on the losing side of the larger culture war. Her farewell speech was delivered with such eloquence and power, that it may well be getting as much internet traffic as her naked pictures are. She left both her supporters and her adversaries with both a message and a promise: “I yield the balance of my time for now, but not forever.”