In the liberal mind, victimhood is currency. It’s very valuable to the libs. The more of it you have, the higher your position in their hierarchy. That’s why, when Katie Hill got caught violating the Me Too Congress Act by having sex with her staffers, it was crucial to immediately brand herself as a victim. Sure, she made mistakes, but that wasn’t why she resigned from Congress. It was because her enemies had hundreds of nude photographs of her (which still haven’t gone public, months later), and she wanted to spare her party and her colleagues the embarrassment. She wasn’t being pushed out by Nancy Pelosi, you see. She was being selfless. She was behaving nobly and honorably. That was her story, and she stuck to it.
And now that the taxpayers are no longer paying her bills, Hill is faced with two choices: convince people to pay her for being an ex-congresswoman and confirmed sexual abuser, or find a real job. The latter doesn’t appeal to her, apparently, because now she’s trying to rehabilitate her image.
Fortunately, she’s got plenty of allies in the liberal media. A couple of weeks ago George Stephanopoulos gave her the softball interview of all softball interviews, and last week she announced she’s publishing a book about her experiences, to be titled She Will Rise.
It’s good to be a Democrat, huh? Can you imagine any Republican, man or woman, who would get this kind of treatment after a sex scandal?
Now Katie Hill’s media rehab tour is continuing with a New York magazine profile:
Katie Hill’s rise heralded the arrival of a new and modern political generation. And then the pictures leaked. @caitmosc reports https://t.co/W8vovHfKEn
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) March 2, 2020
By defeating Republican Steve Knight, Hill became part of the historic group of women who flipped the House in 2018, and only the second openly bisexual woman ever to serve in Congress. She seemed like the future, and became a power player in Washington https://t.co/rfHO6XemxI
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) March 2, 2020
When nude photos of Hill were published online, some of the same aspects of Hill’s personality that propelled her as a candidate — the risk-taking, the unfilteredness — were at the center of a scandal https://t.co/rfHO6XemxI
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) March 2, 2020
“Risk-taking.” Yeah, having sex with your employees is a risk.
Here’s my favorite part of the 8,000-word Hill profile, written by Caitlin Moscatello (emphasis mine):
Hill recognized from the beginning that her relationship with Morgan [Desjardins], which spanned the majority of the campaign and her first months in office, could be problematic in her new role. Yet she did little to protect herself, failing to tell her chief of staff about the indiscretion. The photos and what they revealed about her personal life would have been damning for any politician but had the potential to be especially harmful to someone like Hill — young, female, openly bisexual. Having no plan in place put her at an immediate disadvantage. “You know, honestly, it was one of those things where it was like, Well, I’ll just deny it,” Hill told me. “Morgan is not accusing me of anything. She doesn’t want it to come out any more than I do.” Plenty of politicians lie, but it’s rare for one to tell a reporter it was her game plan.
In other words: Katie Hill is refreshingly honest about being a liar!
And then there’s this gem, in which Hill literally blames the victim:
A tenet of the Me Too movement is that a person can’t fully consent, not really, anyway, to someone who wields power over him or her. During her campaign, Hill often tweeted about Me Too issues of harassment and abuse. As the candidate, she was inarguably at the top rung of her campaign team. Yet she said she didn’t feel like she was in charge, not when she was barely 30 and most staffers were in their 20s. “We joked about this a lot. Morgan was way more my boss than I was hers,” said Hill, “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 … I was a f*cking 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?”
No, Hill’s victim was not in any way responsible for Hill’s misdeeds. No, the imbalance of power doesn’t go away just because Hill claims she didn’t feel powerful.
Incidentally, Hill is now dating a Playboy “reporter” who wrote about her — and falsely claimed the NRCC was shopping around nude photos of her — without disclosing the relationship. Oh, and Hill has been hanging out at book parties with Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy of CNN. Not bad for a downtrodden victim of the patriarchy.
I would’ve been fine with Katie Hill just going back to private life. Plenty of politicians have messed up, washed out, and gone on to make something useful of their lives instead. She could’ve been one of them. I’d never even heard of her before she destroyed her own political career. But if her media allies insist on parading her around like this, I’m going to keep pointing out the truth they’d rather we forgot.
Katie Hill is not a victim. She sexually exploited her subordinates on the taxpayer’s dime, she abused her power, and she resigned rather than face the consequences. If Nancy Pelosi had wanted her to stay, she would’ve stayed. Anybody who presents Hill as anything but an abuser is making the #MeToo movement look bad.
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