Disgraced former Democratic California Rep. Katie Hill is the victim of revenge porn.
She is also a bad person.
Hill is not, as members of the news media would have you believe, a blameless victim deserving of only pity and support. She is manipulative. She is a liar. She is remorseless. She is a predator. The former congresswoman is such an amoral dirtbag, in fact, that even the news media’s best efforts to rehabilitate her fall flat.
New York magazine this week became the umpteenth news organization since Hill resigned from Congress to offer her a platform to tell her version of the sex scandal that led to her downfall. Its first mistake was letting her speak.
“You know, honestly, it was one of those things where it was like, Well, I’ll just deny it,” Hill said of one of the illicit affairs that led to her downfall.
She continued, complaining that she is not the only member of Congress to sleep with aides.
“You know that so-and-so is banging their staff,” she said. “You know, it’s very common. Look, it’s not confirmed, so I can’t say. Whatever.”
Hill preyed on a campaign worker eight years her minor, taking full advantage of the natural power imbalance that exists in any sexual encounter between a powerful superior and a subordinate. Hill, who admits to having an affair with the aide, may have even misappropriated campaign funds to continue paying “consulting fees” to the younger woman as late as September 2019, nearly a full year after the former congresswoman won her election.
Worst of all, Hill is unrepentant.
“We joked about this a lot,” she told New York magazine. “[The aide] was way more my boss than I was hers because she got me to places on time. So yes, I recognize that I had power, but also, it just wasn’t like that at the time.”
Hill added, “I was a f—ing person that was a few years older than her, and we got wrapped up in this movement of trying to do something, and I happened to be the face of it. But to me, she was just as responsible for it, you know?” (Emphasis added.)
The affair left the campaign worker, whom Hill coaxed into a threesome relationship with Hill’s then-husband Kenny Heslep, in a state that the campaign worker herself described as a “mess.”
Never mind all that!
The way Hill sees it, she is every bit the selfless martyr the press has made her out to be following her abrupt exit from Congress in October 2019. She has embraced her role as victim after her nudes were leaked online amid separate allegations that she was also romantically involved with her legislative director, Graham Kelly. He was paid the highest bonus of any aide who worked on Hill’s 2018 campaign.
Hill, who denies engaging in a sexual relationship with Kelly, resigned from Congress before lawmakers could investigate the claim.
“Being out of office is so much easier than being in office,” she boasted in her New York magazine profile. “This year, I’m going to make a lot more money. I’m going to have a bunch of vacations. I’m going to have a lot of downtime.”
There are additional issues that come up in the article that point to Hill’s general awfulness as a human being, including that she repeatedly revises the number of times she claims to have been sexually abused and that she threatened the New York magazine reporter with self-harm when she learned the magazine would include unflattering details in the profile.
Remember: The New York magazine article represents one of the best and most focused efforts by the corporate media to refashion Hill into a feminist icon, and this was the best it could do. (In New York magazine’s defense, they did not have much to work with in the first place.)
Try as they may, from ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos to CNN’s Brian Stelter, members of the news media cannot simply erase the fact that Hill is not a good person. They can downplay her transgressions. They can obfuscate her obvious ethical shortcomings. But it all comes out eventually because Hill herself does nothing to hide them.
The really troubling thing about this prolonged effort to rehabilitate the disgraced congresswoman is that it makes one wonder whether all that #MeToo reporting was just for show. That is, it makes one wonder what the people who are trying to elevate Katie Hill really believe about abuse. Because the lesson we are getting now from the sustained campaign to revise the history of Hill’s fall from grace is this: Abuse by people in positions of power is bad … except for when it isn’t.
