THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020 ST 7tearing them down. (Ms. Hill said
the tattoo, which she got after a
sexual assault when she was a
teenager, had long since been cov-
ered over.)
Shortly after her resignation,
Ms. Hill prepared to move out of
the apartment she shared with an-
other congresswoman. In spite of
everything, she said, she was ex-
cited about living on her own.
But before she could move into
her new spot, her mother, a
trauma nurse in Los Angeles, was
hospitalized. She needed to have
urgent brain surgery.
Ms. Hill flew home immedi-
ately.
The surgery was on a Thursday.
On a Friday, Ms. Hill, her sister
Kristin Sterling, 29, and her
brother Danny Bennett, 20, got to
see their mother, who was doing
well. Ms. Hill and Mr. Bennett,
who was training to become a
Navy SEAL, stayed up late talk-
ing. They were extremely close,
she said.
The next morning, when she
came downstairs from her bed-
room at her mother’s home, she
found him unresponsive. He had
died of a drug overdose: cocainelaced with fentanyl, according to
the coroner’s report.
“I was by myself when I found
him; I did CPR, 911 came and ev-
erything,” Ms. Hill said, fidgeting
anxiously with her hair. “They
tried to resuscitate him for almost
an hour. The time of death that
they ended up giving was 20 min-
utes before I found him.” She be-
gan to cry. “I have not even come
close to dealing with the guilt I
have around that,” she said.
A little over two weeks later, Ms.
Hill found herself back on a plane
to attend President Trump’s State
of the Union address. It was the
last time she would see most of
her colleagues. “It felt important
for me to be there, just to be like,
‘I’m not going to go hide away,’ ”
she said. “I know I have so much
that I just have not touched
around the Danny stuff that I ha-
ven’t been able to, because I have
other things I have had to get
through.”
That sharp focus has mostly
worked in Ms. Hill’s professional
favor.
“She is extremely driven,” said
her friend Nicole Brener-Schmitz,
a political strategist who is work-ing with Ms. Hill on her PAC.
From the time she was 12, Ms.
Hill said, she worked: at a horse
ranch, babysitting, as a dog
groomer. She grew up in Rosa-
mond, Calif., just north of Los An-
geles County, and then Santa Cla-
rita, near Six Flags Magic Moun-
tain, shuttling between her di-
vorced parents.
She graduated from high school
a year early, and met Mr. Heslep
shortly after, when she was 16 and
he was 21. By 23, she had graduat-
ed from college, was married and
working full-time at People As-
sisting the Homeless, a nonprofit.
By 27, she had earned a master’s
degree and been promoted to ex-
ecutive director. “And then I went
straight to running for Congress,”
she said.
These past two months have
been the longest period of uninter-
rupted time Ms. Hill can remem-
ber without a deadline, a cam-
paign, a school assignment or a
job. “This is the most sleep I’ve
gotten maybe in my whole life,”
she said.
“It’s weird, I had this whole sort
of young person’s life envisioned
when I moved in here,” she said,
looking around her apartment. “I
never really had that. But obvi-
ously when you’re 33 it looks dif-
ferent from when you’re 23.”A Double Standard
Women seem to have a harder
time recovering from scandal, at
least in the political world where
they were so long outnumbered. It
took Monica Lewinsky two dec-
ades to redefine herself on her
own terms. Paula Broadwell, a
once promising military scholar,
struggled to find her footing in the
wake of her explosive affair with
David H. Petraeus.
A rare exception is Helen Chen-
oweth, a former congresswoman
from Idaho, who in the 1990s, after
denouncing President Bill Clin-
ton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky a
“sordid spectacle,” admitted that
she, too, had had an affair, albeit
when she was a private citizen.
She won re-election that year.
Ms. Hill is amused by that story,
and less so by the plentiful recent
examples of men being forgiven,
like Alcee Hastings, whose dec-
ades-long relationship with an
aide prompted an investigation in
the wake of Ms. Hill’s resignation,
but was dropped after he revealed
he had married the aide. (House
rules bar relationships with
staffers but allow the employment
of a spouse.)
Or Joe Barton, former chair-
man of the Energy and CommerceCommittee, who, after nude pho-
tos and explicit text messages
sent to a constituent appeared on
social media, said he would not
seek re-election at the end of his
term. He was the longest-serving
Texan in Congress.
“He retired, but nobody ran him
off his seat,” said Representative
Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida.
Mr. Gaetz served on the House
Armed Services Committee with
Ms. Hill, a fellow millennial, and
was one of few people who de-
fended her publicly when the pho-
tos were released. “I still wish she
would have stayed,” Mr. Gaetz
said.
And then there is Chuck Rocha,
a former adviser to Bernie Sand-
ers, who was convicted of union
embezzling, and, Ms. Hill grum-
bles, is now promoting a new
book. “Nobody cares, apparently,”
she said.
“I mean, probably if we’ve
learned anything from Trump and
some of these others is that a scan-
dal isn’t a death sentence,” she
said later. “But we have not seen
women re-emerge from scandal —
from political scandal — yet.”
Many in her own party were
stunned when Ms. Hill stepped
down, after she had vowed not to.
Why not simply apologize and
hold her head high? Wouldn’t
withdrawing before the ethics in-
vestigation was complete just
make her look like she had some-
thing to hide? In her resignation
speech, she decried a “double
standard” — but wasn’t she, in
part, allowing it to stand?
Christine Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s
daughter and the chairwoman of
the Woman’s Caucus for Califor-
nia Democrats, said: “I was
among those who texted her say-
ing, ‘Don’t quit, don’t quit.’ Go to
therapy, go to something, get
yourself into recovery. But she
chose the path that she chose.”
In her book, Ms. Hill describes it
as a spiral.“I was completely over-
whelmed by everything — how
many people had seen my naked
body, the comments, the articles,
the millions of opinions, the texts,
the calls, the threats,” she writes.
“I would start shaking, crying,
throwing up.”
“It felt insurmountable at that
moment,” she said.
“She wasn’t in a mental space to
keep going on,” said Mr. Burton,
the podcast guest.
Who would she let down by
staying? she wondered. By leav-
ing? What kind of liability would
she become to members of her
party? To the legacy of the his-
tory-making freshman class?
And wouldn’t staying in office —
after speaking in support of
#MeToo, and calling for Al Frank-
en to step down from the Senate
after he was accused of groping
women he’d worked with — make
her the worst kind of hypocrite?
“It was a clear error in judg-
ment,” Ms. Hill said of her rela-
tionship with the young woman.
“That was my most crucial mis-
take, failing on setting the bound-
aries between my staff and my-
self.”
And so, she did what she
thought would minimize the harm
done.
“If I didn’t have a responsibility
to other people, including my con-
stituents and people who cared
about me.... ” She trailed off. “I
don’t know. I just don’t know.”
In some ways, she is freer now.
There is no re-election to worry
about. No party leaders to offend.
She can see whom she wants, date
whom she wants and the Covid-19-
era mask has the nice perk of al-
lowing her to blend in.
“My marriage lasted twice as
long as the Confederacy, and I’ve
already taken down all the monu-
ments,” she recently tweeted.
Another: “Yes we all know
about the naked pictures of me.
Hence the joke.”
“I grew up with cop humor and
E.R. nurse humor,” Ms. Hill said,
recounting how her mother, days
after her resignation, joked: “So
when are you going to start your
hairbrush line?”
“It’s dark, you know?”
And yet guilt, she said, still
lingers.
Guilt for the young woman she
said she loved, and to whom she
has apologized “so many times.”
“She doesn’t want to hear from me
now, and I get that,” Ms. Hill said.
Guilt for what she has put her
family through, and her former
staff members, some of whom lost
their jobs.Ms. Hill feels the most guilt, she
said, for her district, which flipped
Republican again in the special
election to replace her.
With her therapist, she said, she
has been working on self-compas-
sion — and that Brené Brown the-
ory “where you might have done
something bad, but you’re not a
bad person.”
“That’s one of the repeating
questions I struggle with. ‘Am I a
bad person?’ And I guess I’ve had
to decide, I don’t think I am a bad
person.”
Not that being a good person is
a prerequisite for a political ca-
reer. Or for rebuilding one.
“Right now it’s hard for me to
imagine running again,” Ms. Hill
said of a potential future in poli-
tics. “But that doesn’t mean
there’s not a scenario where
things line up.”
And she has not entirely re-
treated.
During a recent muggy evening
in Washington, she and Ms.
Brener-Schmitz sat outside at the
National Democratic Club, a
dingy watering hole near the Cap-
itol where members of Congress
hang out after hours.
Ms. Hill ran into Brendan Boyle,
her former congressional office
neighbor, and exchanged num-
bers with an aide to Speaker
Pelosi.
“Is that Tim?” she said, as Rep-
resentative Tim Ryan, Democrat
of Ohio, passed by in a T-shirt and
flip-flops.
“Joe, it’s Katie Hill,” she called
to Joe Courtney, Democrat of Con-
necticut, with whom she had
served on a committee. “So, you in
town?” Representative Courtney
said.
“Yeah, I live here now!”
Walking away from the Capitol
afterward, trying to find a restau-
rant with outdoor seating, she ac-
cidentally turned toward her old
office.
“Whoops,” she said, laughing.mocratic House colleagues Jahana Hayes, left, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ms. Hill at home, recording the first episode of her new podcast.TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSJUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES