42 new york | march 2–15, 2020She went all in on women’s empowerment; after all, maybe for
the first time ever, being a young, female candidate was an asset
rather than a detriment. She denounced the appointment of Brett
Kavanaugh and stood publicly with local GOP consultant Jennifer
Van Laar, retweeting an interview in which Van Laar said she had
been sexually harassed by a Republican assembly candidate who’d
defeated Van Laar’s candidate in a primary. “Believe Women,” Hill
tweeted. “#TimesUp.”
In defeating Knight, Hill became part of the historic group of
women who flipped the House from red to blue in 2018, and
only the second openly bisexual woman ever to serve in Con-
gress. She seemed like the future, and quickly became a power
player in Washington. Hill’s freshman House colleagues elected
her to represent them at the Democratic-leadership table, a role
that would groom her for even more prominent positions. She
was also named vice-chair of the prestigious House Oversight
Committee and had the ear of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Former
members of Hill’s staff tell me they’d eagerly hitched their wag-
ons to her star, figuring their career paths were set for the next
ten, 20, maybe even 30 years. Hill might be a senator one day,
they thought, or House Speaker.H
ill and morgan first met at a community event
early in the fall of 2017. As Hill tells it, they got into a
conversation about politics, and she mentioned her
campaign was looking to hire someone to manage
her schedule and help with fund-raising.
Morgan (who declined to be interviewed) accepted
the offer as the campaign’s third employee. “She was
hired as my body person, my person who was literally
with me all the time,” said Hill. “Part of it was talking. We both iden-
tified as bi, right? That was one of the things that drew her to the
campaign. And she was also younger than me and hadn’t had as
much experience being a bi woman. I ended up revealing that I’d
had a [three-person] relationship before.”
“I can only account for my feelings, but we fell in love. I don’t think
there’s any way for it not to come off as bad,” Hill said. “But whatever.
We developed feelings for each other, and even from day one, it was
like, ‘No, we shouldn’t do this; this is a bad idea.’ But [we] did any-
way, and hoped that it was just not going to come out.”
Hill said she’d been unhappy in her marriage for a long time
but didn’t recognize Heslep’s controlling behavior—like listen-
ing in on her phone calls—as abusive. Stevenson expressed
concern but says Hill would pull away when she did. “It was
devastating to watch our daughter fall into this pattern with
him,” she says. The marriage wasn’t open, so a relationship
with Morgan required bringing Heslep into the fold. The three
of them hung out together rock- climbing, watching Breaking
Bad, playing video games. They told their families about the
relationship. They spent holidays together.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 fucking person
that was a few years older than her, and we got
wrapped up in this movement of trying to do some-
thing, and I happened to be the face of it. But to me,
she was just as responsible for it, you know?”
Early in their relationship, Hill, Heslep, and Mor-
gan traveled to Alaska together, where Heslep took
the photo of Hill nude, brushing Morgan’s hair. In the
picture, Hill is staring down and Morgan is looking
toward the lens. Hill said she didn’t know he was tak-
ing the shot, which appears to be candid. There is
another photo of Hill and Morgan, also in the hotel,
both clothed and smiling at the camera. She said she
knew about that one but not another image that
appears to have been taken just moments before or
after, in which the two women are kissing. “I don’t
think I would have been okay with that,” she said.
“Well, I definitely wouldn’t have been okay with that.”
While only a few senior campaign staffers officially
knew about the relationship, “it started to become
more and more of an open secret,” according to one
former team member. “People started to connect two
and two together: [Morgan] is not a senior staff mem-
ber; why is she at Katie’s house?”
As Hill became a viable candidate, there was a
discussion about whether Morgan should step away.
Hill said she doesn’t remember who initiated those
talks, just that Morgan was invested in the cam-
paign and didn’t want to leave. But Hill was also
heavily leaning on their relationship, calling Mor-
gan “a vital, vital support ... There’s so much about
having survived that last year and a half of my marriage and hav-
ing survived through the campaign that I don’t know what I
would have done if she weren’t in the picture,” she said.
During this time, Hill said, Heslep’s controlling behaviors
escalated, a reaction to her not being around very much. While
working at path, she’d been home most nights for dinner and
rarely traveled. The campaign created a new reality—long hours,
often seven days a week. The Vice series depicts a tight-knit
group cranking out fund-raising calls, liquor bottles lined
up on a shelf in the closet, and Hill joking with staffers. She
suddenly had an entire life separate from her husband.
“There were fights where Kenny was kind of like, ‘Choose
me or the campaign,’ ” she said.
According to Hill, Morgan pointed out Heslep’s abusive
behaviors. “One of the things I feel guiltiest about was, even
then, I was like, ‘No, no, no, this is fine, this is normal,’ ” she
said, adding that Heslep eventually began verbally berating
Morgan, too. “Sometimes I told him, ‘You can’t fucking do
that to her.’ ” By October 2018, Hill said, her relationship with
Heslep had become unbearable. “For hours and hours and
hours, he would just scream at me. He wouldn’t let me sleep.”
The smallest trigger could set off an explosion—if Hill didn’t
text Heslep enough throughout the day, if she forgot to bring PHOTOGRAPH: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES“ To me, she wasjust as responsiblefor it, you know?”