44 new york | march 2–15, 2020
PHOTOGRAPH: TOM WILLIAMS/GETTY IMAGESknew I needed to get out with Kenny. I think one of the things that
Morgan is probably—in fact, I know one of the things she’s most
upset by—is that by the end, Kenny was also taking out a lot on her,
right? I left her in a really bad situation.”
By mid-2019, Hill was thriving in her new role in Congress.
She’d begun a romantic relationship with Alex Thomas, a political
writer she met in D.C. In August, they went on a beach vacation
together. “There was this overwhelming sense then that, like, this
is perfect,” she said. “I feel so happy and I feel like I’ve accom-
plished so much and I’m doing this important work. And, like, it
can’t really get better than this, and maybe this is the point that
I should just check out, right?” She said she stared at the ocean
and thought of The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, a feminist novel
from the turn of the 20th century in which a dissatisfied wife and
mother commits suicide by drowning.
Hill said Morgan eventually broke up with Heslep but
remained on the campaign team in California. “It’s not like
I could fire Morgan,” Hill said. “That’s part of why it’s problem-
atic, right? You can’t promote somebody without it being a prob-
lem. You can’t give them a raise. You can’t fire them.”
Heslep had filed for divorce in July, and tensions were
heightening around the issue of alimony. “I knew he had
everything he needed to ruin me,” said Hill. “The rela-
tionship with Morgan alone was enough.”
According to screen grabs of private Facebook messages
sent to Santa Clarita news podcaster Stephen Daniels, Hes-
lep had been shopping around what he called “the whole
story” about Hill very early in the morning on September
- Daniels, who had hosted Hill on his show, declined it.
“I assumed he just wanted to air dirty laundry about the
divorce,” he says.
Heslep sent Daniels a long response that ping-ponged
between smiley-face and sobbing emoji, in which he
accused Hill of “fighting even basic spousal support”
and of draining their accounts. Next, Heslep posted on
Facebook an accusation about Hill having a sexual rela-
tionship with her legislative director, Kelly. On October
10, a writer for the conservative political blog RedState,
published a story based on Heslep’s claim. Local politi-
cal operatives soon had their hands on information
about Hill that they were sharing internally.
Seven days later, conservative radio host Joe Mes-
sina—a self-described “Right-wing, Bible-thumping, White guy”
and former campaign adviser for Steve Knight—wrote on his
blog that he’d received “over 700 images, pictures, texts, and
notes on the escapades of one Katie Hill” and that he’d seen
photos of her “in sexual situations” with a female campaign
staffer. The next day, Van Laar—the GOP consultant Hill had
supported in her Me Too accusations, now a writer for Red
State—published the first article to include intimate photos of
Hill as well as her private texts.
Hill and her staff used feminist messaging. “The fact is I am
going through a divorce from an abusive husband who seems
determined to try to humiliate me,” she said in a statement. “I am
disgusted that my opponents would seek to exploit such a private
matter for political gain.” While Heslep has not talked to the press
about the photos, his father, Fred, told BuzzFeed that his son says
he was hacked and that he denies playing a role in disseminating
the photos. Hill said Heslep also issued her a warning: “He was
like, ‘You’re going to want to stop with this abusive-husband stuff,
because that’s not going to age we
Initially, Hill said she would coop th the Ethics Committee
and forge ahead with her work in Congress. RedState was a right-
wing blog with a relatively small readership. But on the morning of
October 24, she woke up to news that the British tabloid the Daily
Mail, one of the most-read news outlets in the world, had published
a story featuring additional explicit photographs. Hill turned to
Thomas and said, “It’s over.”hill went into crisis mode, calling her chief of staff, lawyers
from the high-powered firm Perkins Coie, and consultants who’d
worked on her campaign—including Lindsay Bubar, who’d been a
senior adviser, and Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary for
President Obama.
Alone in her D.C. apartment, Hill opened a bottle of wine. She
started reading articles about herself and “just got more and
more depressed,” she told me. She ran a bath and lit candles. As
she soaked in the water, she said, “I had this wave of I just want
this to be done.” She got out of the tub to find a box cutter, then
settled for a knife. Back in the tub, she held the knife up to her
wrist but then thought about what it would mean for her family.
“And then I thought about, well, what if I try and somebody
stops it—[if Thomas] comes in and he’s worried and he has the
super open [the apartment] for a wellness check, and then I get5150-ed [involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility] and
go to the fucking hospital and my family has to fly across the
country?,” she said. “So I was just like,I can’t do it. I can’t do it.
And I stopped and put the knife away.”
As Hill told it, shortly after, Thomas pounded on her apartment
door. (He says the door was open and he walked in to find her in the
bathtub. There are multiple inconsistencies in their details of the
night.) He’d been out with friends, watching the Nationals play in
the World Series. “I guess I’d been texting in a way that had him
worried,” Hill told me. Thomas says he grabbed the knife from the
edge of the tub; she’d scraped her wrists with it. After hiding the
knife in a closet and putting on “some inane TV show,” he says he
went out to get junk food. “I thought,What do you get someone to
eat after they just tried to kill themselves?,” he says.
Thomas called a member of Hill’s staff, relayed the situation and
said that Hill needed to step down. “My emotional bandwidth was
fried,” he says. (Thomas later published information about the dis-
semination of the photos on his personal newsletter, unaffiliated
with any of the outlets he writes for, and tweeted about his investiga-
tion on the matter. He didn’t reveal his relationship with Hill.) Hill
soon started writing her resignation speech. She sent her finished
draft to Bubar, who Hill said edited out the long list of apologies she
planned to issue. Hill put them back in.At the 2020 State of the Union address.