40 new york | march 2–15, 2020specifically my staff in, in a really fucked-up way.” And then there
was the political risk to other House Democrats; she was confi-
dent that the scandal would be used against vulnerable col-
leagues running for reelection.
Hill recognized from the beginning that her relationship with
Morgan, 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 per-
sonal 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. “Mor-
gan 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.T
here is a story Hill’s mother, Rachel Stevenson,
likes to tell about her daughter. When Hill was a
toddler, “I would ask her if she wanted to do things
the hard way or the easy way, and she would look
straight at me and say, ‘The hard way,’ ” Stevenson
says. Hill later told me the same story, not knowing
I’d already heard it, and it became clear that this
anecdote wasn’t simply family lore but a point of
pride—a foundation on which she had constructed both her per-
sonal sense of self and her public image as an underdog.
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.
Hill credited her parents with allowing
her to be independent: “They really did
foster in me ... that confidence in knowing
I was able to do anything I set my mind to
and being willing to take a risk. The risk
piece is a big element of this.”
She was seemingly always on the fast
track. “As a freshman, I was like, High school
is dumb, and my closest friends were older
than me,” she continued. It pained her to
think of being left behind, so she took extra
courses in her sophomore and junior years
in order to graduate by age 16. “I looked
down on people who had to study,” she said.
Looking back, Hill said she was perhaps
too eager to rush through childhood. “If I
were to say I have regrets, it would be that I
was trying to grow up so fast,” she told me.
Behind the façade of the brilliant self-starter
was a young woman with depression, a fractured family, and the
aftermath of what she described as many sexual assaults. (The pre-
cise number changes. In two separate interviews in December, Hill
recounted to me being sexually assaulted three times. In February,
at the Makers Conference in Los Angeles, she told another reporter
she’d been sexually assaulted four times “before I even graduated
high school.”)
Hill told me the first assault happened when she was 8 years old.
“It was child on child,” she explained, adding that she later found out
the other girl, slightly older than she, had herself been molested. Hill
didn’t tell her parents. “I thought I would be in trouble for having a
sexual kind of thing too young,” she said. She can’t remember if that’swhen the depression kicked in or if it was more around the time her
parents divorced, a year later. Hill’s mother remarried relatively
quickly—which meant moving an hour away and transferring
schools. Hill cried at the wedding, sitting with a female friend whom
she now thought of as her first love.
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. “Later he came into the tent and got on top of
me ... We were able to unzip another zipper [on the tent] while I was
fighting him off, and we ran.” A year later, Hill said, she was sexually
assaulted at a party she attended with people she knew from an
after-school job. At the time, she perceived it as a consensual
encounter, even though she was 16 and she said her attacker was in
his early 20s. “I was blackout drunk, and he was a lot older, too, and
yeah. It’s funny because I say ‘we’ had sex, but I guess it’s not—” Her
voice trailed off. Hill told me that the fourth assault also occurred
when she was 16, just months before the incident with her co-
worker. She was taking an EMT class after school, and, she said, the
20-something-year-old teacher’s assistant touched and kissed her
by the lockers. She ran away and said she was so shaken up that she
got into a car accident afterward.
Later that same year, she went to Cancún with a friend, and they
decided to get tattoos. Hill chose what she thought was a symbol of
independence—a thick black cross that looked like the logo for the
skater brand Independent Truck Company—and had the tattoo art-
ist drill the symbol into her groin. “I was just stupid, drunk, and
traumatized,” she said. “There was a self-harm element to it that was,
you know, marking this as my space.”
Shortly after returning from the trip, she
took a job at a Barnes & Noble, where she
met Heslep, who was then 20. Even though
Hill was going off to college soon and Hes-
lep’s future was more of a question mark,
they fell in love. His dad was also a cop, and
he and Hill bonded over their mutual love of
books. (Heslep did not respond to multiple
interview requests.)
At the end of the summer, she started col-
lege at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los
Angeles, where she had been accepted to
study nursing. One night, she was volunteer-
ing at a hospital when a teen gunshot victim
was rushed in. “I ended up holding his hand
while he died and comforting his sister after-
ward,” said Hill. As she recalled it, the
moment shook her into realizing that there
were social problems she couldn’t tackle as a
nurse; it’s a story she would eventually tell
often on the campaign trail. Hill took a
semester off to work, enrolled in a commu-
nity college, and later transferred to nearby California State Univer-
sity, Northridge, where she earned a bachelor’s in English and a
master’s in public administration.
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 three-
somes. “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. Not long after
exchanging vows, Hill and Heslep entered their first three-person,
long-term relationship with a woman they’d met on OkCupid. Hes- PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY HILL (2013); MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES (OPPOSITE,TOP); CLIFF OWEN/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK (OPPOSITE, BOTTOM).In Santa Clarita in 2013.