Original subtitles

You don't look like most people in Congress.

Right. We've got to change the face of politics.

She was the first openly bisexual individual elected

to the House of Representatives in California,

and it was a big deal.

Katie! Katie! Katie! Katie! Katie! Katie!

I'm very excited to get there and start working.

This was going to be a big change

in terms of the powers that be in Congress.

But how do you prepare for your husband to betray you?

Hill had a relationship with one of her staffers.

She had found their dating profile--

looking for another woman.

Hill says that all of this is pain

being inflicted from a divorce.

I thought that my ex was just playing on his phone.

And suddenly they were everywhere.

Was this famous case of revenge porn.

I'm leaving because of a misogynistic culture.

The level of harm people can do on the internet

is so much greater than anybody could have imagined.

There was not even a day of break

of the relentless attacks on her.

What you have now is every dirty bastard in the world

trying to steal that image,

put it on the internet because they make money.

A major hacking scandal

has rocked the entertainment industry

after nude photos of celebrities were posted online.

Jennifer Lawrence, after "The Fappening,"

she told "Vanity Fair" it wasn't a scandal.

It was a sex crime.

I think that quote shifted culture.

People call it free speech when, really, it's abuse.

Now we're just carrying around a computer in our pockets.

This is just the revolution of GPS

and geolocation apps and all that stuff.

It just basically made the entire world accessible

and, you know, people's sex lives.

Most people, especially most young people,

have a camera in their pocket at all times.

So, people use this new technology

to do one of the things that people like to do,

which is for sexy purposes,

they take naked pictures of themselves

and they send them to one another.

Sometimes they use their cameras

to film themselves having sex,

and they send that to one another.

The nude photo starts to become

a much more common technology than it was before.

We've all taken pictures

that we don't want people to see,

but we all have an expectation,

if that's on our phone, and it's private

or it's printed out in our house,

that nobody's gonna come into our house

and take our family photo off the wall.

John Manley. I'm an attorney.

I represent survivors of sexual abuse, and I advised

celebrities who were involved in the 2014 hack.

A major hacking scandal

has rocked the entertainment industry

after nude photos of celebrities were posted online.

Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Victoria Justice

were among a slew of female celebrities.

Where did these photos originate?

Celebgate--It was probably one

of the biggest internet stories of the year.

So, the way that this sort of came through, right, was

somebody posted to this online message board.

This was in a particular kind of forum for it,

saying that they had celebrity nudes

and that they would post them in exchange for Bitcoin.

The images went up. People started spreading them.

These photos were being posted links to them at least

to Reddit and Twitter pretty much immediately, right?

So, I probably would have heard about it

within 24 hours of this happening.

Because it was viral, because it involved

celebrities, theft, nude images,

because it involved platform policy.

There is no legal protection

against news sources publishing those photos

once the thief uploads them or distributes them,

and that strikes me as insane.

The online storm hit Fever Pitch

when it was given a name-- "The Fappening."

The term "The Fappening" was being used primarily

on Reddit to describe this, and it's a gross term

that focuses on the reaction that certain men

are going to have to viewing these photos.

The term that I used was "Celebgate,"

which was sort of a general term

in the "gate" format of this is some sort of...

scandalous thing that has happened.

I don't think it's a perfect term because

it's not a scandal. It's a theft.

But it was better than "The Fappening."

"The Fappening" was a big news story,

and the photos were mostly like stills

they took of themselves in the mirror,

but you couldn't avoid them.

I wasn't even trying to see them.

If you were on social media, they just appeared in your feed.

They were upsetting in a way that other things hadn't

because they clearly looked like you shouldn't be seeing them.

Even with the greatest examples

of things that we know

to be stolen footage, whose participants,

at least one of them, says, "I don't want you to watch this.

I don't want you to see this,"

if it's out there, it's out there.

It was these two camps.

There was the correct messaging, which was like,

"Do not look for these photos. If you come across them,

make sure that you report that tweet."

"Girls" star Lena Dunham tweeting,

"The way in which you share your body must be a choice.

Support these women and do not look at these pictures."

And then there were obviously the people who were going out

and seeking them and not thinking about that at all.

But that other side, the side that was talking about consent,

is far, far, far more vocal than it was in the early aughts.

And so you get a lot more of that, which is great.

Watson tweeted,

"Even worse than seeing women's privacy violated on social media

is reading the accompanying comments

that show such a lack of empathy."

Gervais's comment is sort of pretty classic victim blaming.

It's the abstinence-only method.

You know, the "Me Too" movement didn't come out of nowhere.

There already was a growing wind that there was

people predating on each other without consenting,

and so consent was in the winds as an issue.

It is very jarring to watch something

go through the motions of viral culture

when the thing that is being spread is stolen photos

that are being shared non-consensually

in order to perpetuate some sort of misogynistic joy

from seeing and distributing these.

Explicit photos of Lawrence

went viral within minutes of being posted.

Her representatives responded by saying,

"This is a flagrant violation of privacy.

The authorities have been contacted

and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos."

The pictures were so candid,

you could feel the vulnerability.

Jennifer Lawrence, after "The Fappening,"

she told "Vanity Fair,"

it wasn't a scandal. it was a sex crime.

I think that quote shifted culture.

I think that celebrities are able to bring awareness

to certain things that people on the ground aren't.

Imagine your genitals being exposed for everybody to see.

It's body shaming, fat shaming.

I don't think most people want that to happen.

In most states, it's not a serious crime,

and it should be.

In my view, it--it's no different than a sexual assault.

It is an assault by a different means,

and the law should reflect

the damage it does, and the law doesn't.

You know? Then it becomes the responsibility of the viewer

as to whether or not you wanna partake in that

and watching that,

then it's your own personal responsibility.

I think that's the shift.

You know, you have a bit of personal responsibility,

and I think that is clearer today than it was then.

A lot more people were realizing

what was going on in certain spaces online

for the first time.

Like, maybe this is the first time

that a lot of people heard about 4chan,

even though they'd been around

and had been doing stuff for a while.

There are a lot of really vile, really cruel things said

on social media,

but when you get to places like Reddit

and to 4chan message boards, really kind of anything goes.

You can say whatever you want about people.

You can be nasty, you can be hateful,

you can be misogynistic,

and you'll be protected by other people

who are invested in your right

to express yourself in such a way.

At the time that this happened, I was a breaking news reporter.

I started really digging into this when

we started to learn more

about how this happened and who did it.

Hello. My name's Dale Beran. I'm a writer and a journalist,

uh, and I'm here to guide you

into the worst places on the Internet.

4chan began in October of 2003,

started by a 15-year-old boy,

and it started as a way for him and his teenage friends

to share jokes and talk about anime and things like that,

up until about 2007,

when the trolling collectives became a little notorious,

and then, uh, people noticed internet memes,

and they wanted to monetize them immediately.

And so at first, sort of memes were associated with 4chan,

and they're like,

"Oh, 4chan has given us this wonderful thing called memes."

And that was at the start of social media.

So, there was sort of this moment where they're like,

"Oh, maybe 4chan will be like Facebook, right?

So 4chan was always about powerless young men

and nerdy men exerting power

in any way they could, usually in virtual spaces.

So, if they could hack someone, if they could humiliate someone,

that was always celebrated in the culture.

By 2014, 4chan had become a place for toxic young men.

And so a lot of them--surprise--

didn't have girlfriends, didn't have romantic partners,

and many of the early incel communities were on 4chan.

"Incels," which is short for "involuntary celibate,"

are men who hold

very disturbing ideas about women and relationships.

They harbor strong anti-woman biases,

and some of them have even

committed acts of violence against women

in the name of this incel identity.

They tend to be into, like, the same things culturally,

and they have these gathering places, like on the dark web,

where they can further all of their bad ideas.

Tonight, Apple revealing it was not a breach

in any of their systems, including iCloud,

but instead a very targeted attack

on certain celebrity accounts, including

their usernames, passwords, and security questions.

My understanding is that they used a rather simple hack,

what's known as spear phishing.

So, they pretended to be someone in charge at Apple

and texted these celebrities and said,

"Hey, I'm, you know, Apple security,

Apple tech support.

Will you just give me your password to verify?"

So, that's essentially just tricking someone

into giving their credentials over.

And once that happened, then they could get

into the iCloud accounts

and root around for whatever they wanted to look for,

which was naked pictures that the celebrities had taken

of themselves a lot of the time and stuff like that.

A Pennsylvania man agreed to plead guilty yesterday

for his part in the nude photo hacking scandal.

So the five men responsible for "The Fappening"

were prosecuted and imprisoned for their actions.

These people weren't working together.

Like a lot of things on 4chan,

once there started to be, like, a culture

around the existence of these photos

and trading them and getting money for them,

they all kind of became part of the same circle.

The first person who was convicted was Ryan Collins.

Authorities said that Ryan Collins

accessed at least 50 Apple iCloud accounts.

He pled guilty. The second was Edward Majerczyk.

Edward Majerczyk of Chicago

admitted to sending emails to victims

and asking for usernames and passwords to iCloud accounts.

Served nine months.

There was Emilio Herrera, and he served 16 months in jail.

So, then there was George Garofano,

sentenced to eight months in prison.

The last person charged was Christopher Brannan,

who was a Virginia teacher.

He was accused not just of illegally accessing

these accounts, but also of identity theft.

So, that led to a longer sentence.

He was sentenced to 34 months in jail.

It took a leak of this magnitude to see serious consequences

for a form of revenge porn,

which is something that has not always been

taken very seriously by the law.

The fact that these hackers

got prosecuted for this is pretty rare.

I think that was a big cultural turning point.

The media did a better job.

They realized that the victims were the celebrities

and that if you contrast that with, say, years ago,

something very different was happening.

The media, and it seemed like popular culture

and people in general celebrated taking women down a peg.

I think that, like, the attention

that celebrities could bring to this stuff

probably was instrumental in getting these laws passed.

That said, this was footage that you were never meant to see.

And there are laws. There are revenge porn laws.

There are privacy laws. There are copyright laws

that are all applied to these cases, and yet you could still,

within 10 seconds, be watching it right now if you Googled it.

We wanna see celebrities so much as a society.

We wanna literally see every ounce of them.

But looking at somebody's naked image,

somebody having sex,

an image that was never intended for you

and that was obtained illegally,

it's wrong, and it's voyeuristic.

I think people were excited at first,

and then they were shamed.

And that's maybe like a good use of shame,

'cause we weren't individually shamed.

We were shamed as a society.

If you stood outside the celebrity's window

and watched them do this,

you'd be arrested and hauled off to jail,

and everyone would call you a pervert and a stalker.

If you watch it in the privacy of your own home

and the image is stolen, nobody does anything.

It's a normal act.

I know the sentences were ridiculously light.

I think that, frankly,

the sentences have to be much stronger,

and the--the consequences

to anybody who would promote this material financially

would be a strong disincentive to--to do it.

When an angry ex posts

nude photos of somebody online,

whose responsibility is it to take that down?

Who is at fault for it?

This is exactly what happened to Katie Hill.

California congresswoman, Katie hill,

vice chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee,

is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

It was this famous case of revenge porn.

Katie Hill is--She's cool, she's charismatic, she's fun,

and she's very approachable and kind.

She's also had a tough life. She hasn't had it easy.

She had personal struggles that kind of shaped her

into this very real person, and when you interact with her,

that's what you see.

Here in the Angeles National Forest

heading to Texas Canyon to go climbing

for some team bonding. It's gonna be great.

She is a born leader since we were kids.

You know, she always was the director of our plays

that we put together on the street.

And she always was really clear on what she wanted

and always pushed through whatever obstacles

were in her way to get there.

When she first announced her decision to run,

she was just 30 years old, so very young.

And I think at the time, you know,

there was a lot of questioning around, is she fit for office?

Does she have enough experience?

Is this job going to be too big for her?

You don't look like most people in Congress.

Right.

We've got to change the face

of politics if we want to really get people engaged.

I'm Katie Hill, former member of Congress

from California's 25th Congressional District,

one of the youngest women ever elected to Congress,

and I was forced to resign due to image-based sexual abuse.

We're children of divorce, so when I was about 7,

my parents got divorced, and we moved to Santa Clarita.

I graduated high school early.

I was 16 when I graduated, and the reason I graduated early

is that I thought I was a lot older than I was, you know?

But I, you know, I have a history of sexual trauma.

It was early in my 16th year.

I snuck out of the house, and I went to a party and I got drunk.

I was sexually assaulted,

and I felt that was still at the time when

it was your fault for letting yourself get drunk.

And, you know, I was called a slut.

And in the guy's bathroom, they had written, like,

"Call Katie for a good time," whatever.

I didn't know what to do about it.

I didn't think about it at that point as sexual assault.

I just thought, well, I was-- I should have known better.

It was only a few months later that I met Kenny.

I got a job at Barnes & Noble,

and Kenny was working there, too.

He was older than I was. He was 20.

That definitely played a big part in why I latched onto him.

He felt like a safe space, I guess.

And at that point, it was great

to get the kind of attention that I was getting from him,

and it felt secure.

Things moved pretty fast,

and I was living with him pretty fast.

I remember naively thinking

it was cool that someone so much older was interested.

But very quickly, we started to see a shift in Katie,

and concerns were raised.

The flags were there. I just didn't see 'em.

She'd be hanging out with us, and she'd get a call,

and "I have to go right now."

Why? It's not like you're hanging out with random guys.

It's not like you're hanging out with even friends.

Like, you're talking your family.

She was always on speakerphone. Always.

God forbid somebody had a conversation

without him being involved in it.

I witnessed a few fights between them

where he stormed off, screaming matches.

I really put my foot down and said, "Something is very off.

I don't like how controlling Kenny is."

My sister just doubled-downed

and said, "No, I'm happy.

I'm in love. You're misreading it."

And we learned to just support her

rather than try to fight her,

because she needed to figure things out on her own.

A coworker at the time

brought up that she had found their dating profile,

looking for another woman to join their relationship.

I knew my sister was bi at that point.

I came out about it when I was about 18,

and it basically led to, like,

he said, "Okay, if you wanna have relationships with women,

that's fine, but I wanna be part of it."

And I think at the time,

I sort of saw it as him being supportive.

But I do think that it's hard to navigate for anyone who's bi,

but in a relationship with the-- the same sex or different sex,

like, you have to pick one.

We'd lived together and had been together for six years.

So, I was 22 when we got married,

and, you know, my parents had gotten married really young.

His parents had gotten married really young.

And it felt like since we'd been together for so long, like,

okay, this is what you do, you know?

My thoughts were, well, this is permanent.

And again, you really--you hope they are.

You hope she's telling the truth.

You hope that there's a happily ever after.

But the concern never left.

So...

You just hope for the best.

But how do you prepare for your husband

to betray you?

Whoever you're electing, you're electing to be a leader,

and we have not nearly enough leadership in Congress.

I was never planning on going into politics.

That wasn't my dream or anything like that.

I had actually worked in the nonprofit sector

for my whole career.

I was the chief operating officer

and executive director

of the largest homeless services nonprofit in California

called PATH, People Assisting the Homeless.

And then Donald Trump was elected president.

USA! USA! USA! USA!

I believe that as a country,

we are better than this.

We say fight back!

The next day, I had my staff coming into my office crying,

"What does this mean for us? What are we gonna do?"

So, I felt like I needed to do something about it.

Figured out that one of the most competitive districts

in California and, in fact, across the country,

was my district where I'd spent my whole life.

I think it was at my mom's dinner table that she's like,

"I think I might run for Congress.

And I was like, "What?"

She's like, "Yeah, there's an opening,"

and there's not a strong Democratic candidate"

and duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

And then she became that candidate.

Hi. This is Katie Hill.

I'm calling because I'm running for Congress.

In California's 25th District.

One of the key things to know is

Republicans had held that seat

for two decades prior to her running.

I had no political experience whatsoever.

I had no money.

It started off with just a completely grassroots

with my friends and family, and it grew and grew,

and started to really kind of pick up steam.

But we all know that public figures are torn apart.

We know the stress of it, and we're committing

to actually having a politician in the family.

Thank you so much. I'm sure I'll see you again soon.

Becoming a public figure is a wild experience.

I think you are the most interesting and intriguing

and brilliant candidates... - Oh. Thank you.

...running in these midterm elections.

Thank you.

- For everyone who doesn't know-- - Thank you.

It's a tremendous amount of pressure.

Katie was in the news constantly...

Democrat Katie Hill...

This is about people showing up.

...from the sheer volume of funding

from her grassroots campaign to the fact that she's so young.

Yes.

You know, we talked about... it coming out,

that they were in a polyamorous relationship.

It was kind of met with, "That won't happen."

She was very open

around the fact that she was bisexual

and was a bisexual running for Congress.

And she really embraced the fact that, no,

this is the generation that she is a part of.

And I think it was viewed as a bit of a reset

or a fresh start to what Washington looks like.

And at the same time,

I had a lot going on in my personal life.

I'd been in a relationship with my ex

since I was 16 years old, and it was not a good one.

And that deteriorated and got worse and worse

as the campaign went forward.

So the bigger it got, the worse things got at home.

He said, "I don't want her running."

Her career has always been very important to her,

and her drive and her success has always been important.

So, I think that was one... part that he couldn't control.

But at the same time, I think the behavior did escalate

as he started to feel me pulling away.

So, he--he became more controlling and paranoid,

accusatory.

And my own awareness of, like, I can live without him.

There is a--There is a life outside of this

and a life that I wanna have outside of this.

I think that was in October of right before the election,

literally the month before the election.

I actually moved out of my house.

I was very aware of how...

...how precarious things were.

She actually packed up and moved out.

And she took a decent amount of her things

to my mom's house, and we really thought it was the end.

And I stayed away for a couple weeks,

And he said, "If you leave, I'll ruin you."

And I didn't know what it was, right?

Like, I didn't know what he might do,

but I knew that it could be very damaging,

and I knew that he was so... vengeful at that point,

and I couldn't-- I couldn't risk that.

I know she felt a lot of pressure to win.

Truly, like, it genuinely felt like

control of Congress comes down to this one seat,

and what if I can't win because I decided

to leave my husband in the middle of a campaign?

So, I went back.

Katie Hill wins.

Katie! Katie! Katie!

She wins the 25th District in California,

and she heads to Washington.

I'm very excited to get there and start working.

The day that I was sworn in,

yeah, my ex-husband was there,

and he... refused to wear a tie.

If you zoom in on that picture and look at his shoes,

they're, like, hiking shoes.

I was furious.

Here, her whole world is opening up.

You know, new avenues, new people, new experiences.

I was pretty high profile.

I was the vice chair of Oversight.

I was the freshman representative to leadership.

There had been an article in "The L.A. Times," like,

"Is she the next Nancy Pelosi?"

This chapter with her husband, Kenny Heslep,

that she wanted to close.

And I was afraid of what would happen afterwards.

He did try to convince me, but I was set at that point.

You know, I left in June.

That was, like, the happiest I had ever been

that I could remember.

I took my little rest period during summer recess,

and then I was in a staff meeting,

and then all of a sudden,

my comms director came running in and is like,

"Oh, my God, you have to see this."

Conservative outlets and tabloids

publishing nude pictures of Hill online.

Hill says the nude photos sparked thousands

of threatening emails, calls, and texts.

I was like... holy [bleep].

Congresswoman Katie Hill in the face

of an investigation stemming from allegations

she had an inappropriate sexual relationship

with one of her congressional staffers.

Hill admits to a relationship with a member of her campaign,

calling it inappropriate but consensual.

The closeness of the campaign and all the things

that are going on, like, led to it.

But I ended up having a relationship

with somebody who worked for me.

She engaged in an inappropriate relationship

with a young campaign staffer.

I didn't understand the power dynamics then.

I never once felt like,

"I'm trying to get her to do something."

Didn't even cross my mind.

I thought that he would tell people about the relationship

that I had with the person who worked for me.

And I also thought that he cared about her enough

that he wouldn't want to do that to her.

Her ex-husband was aware

of that relationship at the time and was part of it,

and as such, had documentation

that later was believed to have been potentially leaked by him.

I was in a staff meeting with my chief of staff,

and I think my legislative director.

And then all of a sudden, my comms director

came running in

and is like, "Oh, my God, you have to see this."

Staff showed them to me, like, "Is this real? Is this..."

You know? I'm like, that's me,

and I didn't know that these photos existed, but, um,

and you can see in-- in most of the photos

I'm not looking at the camera.

Everybody knew.

These photos-- some of them depicted her

in various states of undress. A lot of them, she was nude.

And they also showed her interacting with the individual

that she was tied to, uh, who worked on her campaign.

And again, you know, they were nude

in some of these photos or various states of undress.

I did not know he had the images that he had.

Those were taken without my knowledge.

There's one that I was looking, but I thought

that my ex was just playing on his phone,

and so I was just, like, kind of being silly or whatever,

but I didn't have any idea that he was taking a picture.

And so when they came out, I was like, holy [bleep].

The "journalist" who published them in "RedState,"

which is a right wing blog, had previously been

a campaign manager for my Republican opponent.

I guess what took me by surprise the most with--

when the photos actually came out

was I knew that Kenny was still so vengeful at that point,

but I didn't think

that a publication would actually give that traction,

and, um, and, uh, they sure did.

You kinda go-- you go into crisis mode

of, like, damage control

and trying to figure out what to do.

They were in a relationship.

She was allowed to be in our family.

We all did say it was a bad idea.

Especially since it was a "position of power"

and such a taboo thing like a polyamorous relationship.

I just had a feeling that it could blow up,

and despite it being fully consensual

and a committed relationship and everything else,

I just knew it wouldn't be perceived well.

I am deeply regretful for what she's been through

because of this and how she was exposed during the scandal.

Hill claims she is a victim of a smear campaign

launched by her ex-husband.

They are in the middle of a divorce.

Kenny was liberal, too, definitely.

He was--and he-- he genuinely, like,

I think, believed in a lot of the same things that I did.

So, I guess I didn't really expect him

to collaborate with and he--

and--and to be clear, he still denies this. He's...

He--He does, um, but I know. I know what happened.

It became very quickly, like, I'm not leaving my apartment.

And then it's trying to figure out,

like, what do you-- what do you do from here?

Like, I really didn't wanna resign at first,

and it just got darker and darker for me,

and it became... too much.

She had no idea these photos were being taken,

which should, to the public, be even more of a red flag,

but it was completely ignored.

It was wild, and yeah, she was horribly embarrassed.

We all know that everyone we know has seen her naked.

My dad--he was a lieutenant at the time, became a captain.

All of his co-workers saw her naked.

Everyone you know has seen your daughter naked. Like...

I can't fathom that.

The photos of Katie Hill were first released

in about mid-October of 2019.

So, that's roughly about 10 months into her tenure

in the House of Representatives.

And suddenly, once they had been published, they were everywhere.

They were all over Twitter. They were all over social media.

And it's like a wildfire.

It breaks my heart that

nobody took into consideration that she was going

through a horrible professional and public humiliation.

And the internet was still so cruel.

There was not even a day of break

of the relentless attacks on her, and it just--

it makes you want to ask, how, as a society,

have we just allowed ourselves to become so cruel?

It's traumatic for everyone involved,

not just the person that goes through it.

I was genuinely suicidal, and after that,

I decided I needed to step down. Like, I just--this wasn't

something that I could continue to go through, and, um,

so I called Nancy Pelosi to tell her first,

and she tried to talk me out of it.

And she even called me back a little later and said,

"Even if you just--

if--if you just decide not to run for re-election,

you just stay on for the rest of the term,"

but she--she--she really didn't,

you know, she didn't want me to step down.

Freshman Katie Hill just announced she is resigning

amid a bizarre scandal involving racy photos

and an alleged affair.

They said that there were hundreds of photos,

and basically they were just gonna keep releasing stuff

until I stepped down.

It was important to me to give a meaningful resignation speech,

and so I--it kind of took everything I had to--

to write that I wanted to write it myself.

I no longer wanna be used as a bargaining chip.

I'm leaving because I didn't want to be peddled

by papers and blogs and websites used by shameless operatives

for the dirtiest gutter politics that I've ever seen.

And I am proud of the fact that I was able to stand up

on the House floor and give that last speech.

I'm 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.

Hill has threatened legal action

over the publication of nude pictures,

also racy text messages published by a tabloid,

and a spread on conservative websites.

After talking to lawyers,

I decided that I needed to file something.

If we don't do anything about it,

like, we're just saying it's okay.

We're saying it's okay to do this to people,

so I used personal money. I raised money to pay for it.

Uh, and I knew that it wasn't without risk.

Forget about me, all the other people.

And the case basically had to do

with the balancing of the free press against privacy.

I personally am more on the side of she gets to decide

what images of herself are disseminated.

The other side of the argument is that she is a public figure.

As a public figure,

it is understood that there is an interest in this story.

It if an argument can be made that the pictures

are an essential element of the story

and there is a First Amendment right,

I understand that argument.

They had the full right to say,

"We have seen images

that show that she's in a relationship with this person.

We've talked to witnesses,"

or there were images that were not explicit

that could have shown the exact same thing,

if you're saying that this is my liability

or this is my offense, and that's not what they did.

Judge has dismissed former Congresswoman Katie Hill's

lawsuit against the "Daily Mail."

The judge cited First Amendment grounds

in the ruling yesterday.

I lost, and I lost on the grounds

that I was a public figure, and those were journalists,

and the images were widely spread.

After these photos were released,

I was able to write stories or "Vanity Fair"

or these other outlets, "The New York Times," CNN,

"Washington Post"-- pick an outlet.

We were able to write about the allegations

without showing any of these photos,

and that's what it comes back to.

The question becomes, okay, what are we trying to achieve here?

Do you need to release those photos to tell this story

and to raise questions as to whether this person should

or should not hold an office in the House of Representatives?

It's almost like we need, like, a supreme internet judge

sitting there saying, uh, "I will look at your story.

I will look at what happened,

and I will decide if this is all right."

Uh, I actually would support that.

I mean, it'd be easier than the way we do it right now,

which is hire a bunch of lawyers,

pay an offensive amount of money, go to court, have a judge

who probably doesn't even know how to turn his computer on,

and he's sitting there deciding internet law for us.

In my case, you are responsible

for the legal fees of the people that you sued.

And in my case, that was several hundred thousand dollars,

and I had to declare bankruptcy because of it.

I can't say that bankruptcy has been easy,

and I just finished it, am finally clear of it.

I am taking personal responsibility

by stepping down and by trying to prevent

what I did from harming other people in the caucus.

But it's still wrong, and it's an example of how

the system is still so deeply misogynistic

and does things to women that it doesn't do to men.

I think the fact that Katie Hill was a woman,

that she was a politician,

that she was a bisexual politician,

had a lot to do with the outcome of that trial.

Male politicians are held to a different standard than women.

I think a lot of people expect them to have

scandals somewhere in their past

or perhaps in their present-day lives.

But women politicians are expected to

occupy a different standard.

They're supposed to be moral and upstanding and buttoned up,

and the less we know about their sexual lives, the better.

The unfortunate thing about the Katie Hill thing is

she was a Democrat in a highly contested seat, um,

so her political opponents took advantage of it.

But I think we really need to think about as a country

and as a society, where does privacy fit in?

We do need to talk about the ways in which

we can regulate these platforms

to prevent against these crimes, which are crimes.

It is a crime to release, you know,

non-consensual pornography, aka revenge porn.

Something positive has to come out of this,

and so I started a PAC called HER Time.

My fight right now with HER Time,

the organization I founded, is to pass the SHIELD Act.

We don't have a federal law at all

that prevents people from committing these acts

of non-consensual, intimate image distribution.

We as a society have to say that this isn't okay.

And if you don't have a law in the book saying so,

there's no reason to believe that that's the case.

I wish that people knew that I, um, I never entered politics

because I wanted power or because I thought

that I should be a member of Congress.

I did it because I genuinely felt like

I needed to try and improve our country.

I've gone through a great deal of loss and trauma,

and I'm a person that at 35, I'm a mom.

I'm so happy to be a mom. I love my family.

I'm still trying to figure out what my part is to play

in this quest to search for a better future.

We will not stand down.

We will not be broken.

We will not be silenced.

We will rise, and we will make tomorrow better than today.

Thank you, and I yield the balance of my time for now,

but not forever.

It's really hard to say what a sex tape is like

in the age of OnlyFans.

If you have a big social media following and you turn 18,

you're contemplating whether you're gonna be a porn star.

You might recognize me from shows like "Boy Meets World."

Hey, do you guys have any toothpaste that I could borrow?

I'm a former Disney Channel celebrity

turned adult entertainer.

That's a thing.

Celebrities are taking to OnlyFans,

I think because there's an ease of usage,

there's less of a stigma about doing OnlyFans.

People are crazy. They screen grab.

They screenshot. It's going to live forever.

I've had a lot of time to fully comprehend

that this is gonna have long-lasting repercussions

on the rest of my life.

The decisions I'm making today will affect me forever.