New York Magazine - 02.03.2020

38 new york | march 2–15, 2020 Photograph by Jeff Brown

ny chance you could grab us

a bottle of wine or something? Lol,”

former California congresswoman

Katie Hill texted. We settled on rosé.

Hill and I had never met, but she

was in the midst of a professional

and personal crisis. It was 4:30 in

the afternoon, and she would be

going live on air with MSNBC’s

Chris Hayes that night. “rough d a y,”

she wrote. I brought wine as well as

a bag of pretzels to Hill’s Manhattan

hotel room. Wearing leggings and a hoodie, she took the

wine and glanced down at her phone. An editor at the

New York Times had questions about an op-ed the

32-year-old Hill wrote about contemplating suicide, one

that’s set to publish the next day; they’d been going back

and forth for hours.

This was in early December as Hill scrambled to

form a new life after photos of her—some of which she

said were taken without her consent—were published

online in mid-October. One shows Hill nude, brushing

the hair of a junior female campaign staffer, Morgan

(referred to here only by first name), in a hotel room.

In others, there is Hill naked, holding a bong, with a

tattoo of an iron cross—a Nazi-associated symbol used

by white supremacists—near her groin; Hill and Mor-

gan kissing. The articles accompanying them include

private text messages among Hill, Morgan, and Hill’s

estranged husband, Kenneth Heslep, detailing a three-

way romantic relationship, as well as a claim by Heslep

from a since-deleted Facebook post that Hill had had an

affair with her male legislative director, Graham Kelly.

Hill released a statement denying the relationship with

Kelly and accusing Heslep of spreading the rumor. The

House Ethics Committee soon announced it would inves-

tigate the allegation related to Kelly (who also denied the

relationship). If true, a relationship with Kelly would have

violated a Me Too–era rule prohibiting members from

having sexual relations with congressional staffers. Imme-

diately after, Hill then released another statement admit-

ting to an inappropriate relationship with Morgan. “I had

to admit that, yes, I had this relationship with a campaign

staffer,” Hill told me. “So, you know, I’ve admitted to that.

And once you’ve admitted to that one thing, then it brings

everything else into question.”

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. But some of

the same aspects of Hill’s personality that propelled

her as a candidate—the risk-taking, the unfilteredness—

were now at the center of a scandal that felt both ultra-

modern and like the oldest story ever told.

It was nine days from the publication of the first

photos to Hill’s announcement of her resignation—

she’d heard there was a Google drive with roughly 700

images being passed around by political operatives.

She was afraid that the photos would be released drip

by drip. “I knew so much was still coming,” she said.

“The ethics thing, it was going to pull our office in, and

The Congress woman

From California

Katie Hill’s rise

heralded the arrival

of a new and modern

political generation.

And then the

pictures leaked.

By caitlin moscatello