Katie Hill’s rise heralded the arrival of a new and modern political generation. And then the pictures leaked. caitmosc reports
Katie Hill in her new apartment in February. Photo: Jeff Brown This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
When Hill decided to run for office in early 2017, she was part of a surge of first-time candidates who felt a new and urgent pull toward politics. Her ascent in particular was a great American story: Daughter of a cop and a nurse wins long-shot congressional race, becoming unlikely star in Washington.
Hill spent most of her childhood in Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita, a mostly middle-class enclave just north of Los Angeles. She told me she had a happy childhood, one spent riding bikes with her younger sister and other kids in the neighborhood, who sometimes pushed one another down hills in barrels.
At 15, Hill said, she was assaulted during a trip to France, by a man more than ten years her senior, while she was camping in a park with a friend. “[He] started making out with me and stuff like that. I was drunk, I was kind of like, whatever. But then he got much more handsy, and the other girl who was with me pulled me out of that situation,” she said.
In 2010, Hill and Heslep married. They’d already been active on websites for people seeking alternative relationships, and Hill said Heslep years before had introduced the idea of engaging in threesomes. “I was like, Well, if I’m in this committed relationship that I might be in for the rest of my life, like, how else am I going to be able to [be with a woman]? It never seemed like an option to me to have a separate relationship with a woman,” said Hill.
Even in the earliest weeks of her campaign, Hill proved to be a charismatic natural, able to position herself as both progressive enough for the resistance and palatable enough for moderates and independents. She was openly bisexual but married to a man. She supported gun-safety legislation but owned a gun herself. Hill sold herself as a “pragmatic progressive,” the scrappy daughter of a Republican who would cut through the bullshit in Washington and work across the aisle.
But such missteps were overshadowed by the campaign’s strong fund-raising and ground game. Hill began building an army of volunteers and came close to matching both her primary opponent and Knight in early fund-raising. From there, excitement around what she called the “most millennial campaign ever” snowballed. She earned endorsements from major groups like Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood as well as support from celebrities and politicians .
Morgan accepted the offer as the campaign’s third employee. “She was hired as my body person, my person who was literally with me all the time,” said Hill. “Part of it was talking. We both identified as bi, right? That was one of the things that drew her to the campaign. And she was also younger than me and hadn’t had as much experience being a bi woman. I ended up revealing that I’d had a [three-person] relationship before.
Early in their relationship, Hill, Heslep, and Morgan traveled to Alaska together, where Heslep took the photo of Hill nude, brushing Morgan’s hair. In the picture, Hill is staring down and Morgan is looking toward the lens. Hill said she didn’t know he was taking the shot, which appears to be candid. There is another photo of Hill and Morgan, also in the hotel, both clothed and smiling at the camera.
According to Hill, Morgan pointed out Heslep’s abusive behaviors. “One of the things I feel guiltiest about was, even then, I was like, ‘No, no, no, this is fine, this is normal,’ ” she said, adding that Heslep eventually began verbally berating Morgan, too. “Sometimes I told him, ‘You can’t fucking do that to her.’ ” By October 2018, Hill said, her relationship with Heslep had become unbearable. “For hours and hours and hours, he would just scream at me. He wouldn’t let me sleep.
Heslep sent flowers and cards, and a couple of weeks before the election, Hill went back to him. It was easier to pretend things were okay. “I knew at that point I was going to leave. It was just a matter of time,” she said. Heslep had filed for divorce in July, and tensions were heightening around the issue of alimony. “I knew he had everything he needed to ruin me,” said Hill. “The relationship with Morgan alone was enough.”
Hill and her staff used feminist messaging. “The fact is I am going through a divorce from an abusive husband who seems determined to try to humiliate me,” she said in a statement. “I am disgusted that my opponents would seek to exploit such a private matter for political gain.” While Heslep has not talked to the press about the photos, his father, Fred, told BuzzFeed that his son says he was hacked and that he denies playing a role in disseminating the photos.
As Hill told it, shortly after, Thomas pounded on her apartment door. He’d been out with friends, watching the Nationals play in the World Series. “I guess I’d been texting in a way that had him worried,” Hill told me. Thomas says he grabbed the knife from the edge of the tub; she’d scraped her wrists with it. After hiding the knife in a closet and putting on “some inane TV show,” he says he went out to get junk food.
Many of Hill’s Democratic colleagues remained silent. But plenty of those who didn’t publicly stand by Hill did so privately, attending a farewell party Underwood threw on the roof of their apartment building. Until then, the silence on social media had been excruciating. “As a fellow politician, I understand why this is messy, and you can’t explain it in 280 characters, and everyone from your comms team is telling you, ‘Don’t touch this.
When I ask Pressley if she agrees with Hill that a double standard was at play, she emphatically says yes. There’s a long pause before she speaks again. “Are you kidding me?” Hill said she feared that what happened to her will deter other young women from running for office, and her experience has shaken some of her former colleagues. Underwood, at 33 the youngest black woman ever to serve in Congress, tells me, “There is extreme risk in me doing this interview with you right now.” “There is an entire political party armed with millions of dollars willing and ready to spend to clip these quotes that I’m giving you right now to be used for my political peril.
Hill flew out to D.C. for the State of the Union address, just over two weeks after her brother’s death . Wearing suffragette white, as she had the year before, as well as her congressional pin, she walked down the halls of the Capitol with her former colleagues, passing reporters on the way. This seemed to have been the point. Hill was highly aware that her new path hinged on remaining relevant. “The easier thing is definitely not showing up, right?,” she told me the next day.
Only hours after Hill appeared on The View on February 21, happily tweeting a photo of herself in a pink blazer outside the green room, news broke that the FBI had arrested a hacker connected to her campaign: Arthur Dam, who is married to Hill’s campaign fund-raiser and later district director, Kelsey O’Hara, was tied to a series of cyberattacks that had temporarily shut down the website of one of Hill’s Democratic opponents in the lead-up to the 2018 primary, just before the start of an...
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