Its hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk with me, zeinab badawi. Politics is a tough business. It puts you in the limelight, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. My guest is katie hill. She was seen as a rising star for the us democrats, but she resigned last year as a congresswoman, barely 12 months in office. She claims she was the victim of sexual double standards after she admitted an inappropriate relationship with a Campaign Staff member and after nude photos of her were published in the media. What does her case tell us about american politics in the metoo era . Katie hill in washington, welcome to hardtalk. You made headlines in november 2018 when you flipped a seat in california from the republicans to the democrats. Young woman, early 30s, rising star and all the rest of it. A year later, you resign. What went wrong . Well, the basics of what went wrong is that i had a relationship preceding my swearing in as a congressional member. And after i left my husband, which was about in the middle of my time in congress, those photos. There were photos that were leaked that i didnt even know had been taken. They were nude photos. They were ones that were compromising, and it led to a series of articles, and the photos were published in the daily mail and in another publication called redstate, and they were all over the internet, and it ultimately led to my resignation. And, you know, everything went south very quickly. Some democrats urged you to just slug it out. So, you basically resigned because of embarrassment . I think that it was more than that. I didnt want to be a liability to my colleagues. The amount of, uh. Pressure and stress that it was putting me and my family and my staff through, the. You know, it was. Its hard to describe what youre going through with public shaming. Its something that i think when, you know, when you havent experienced it yet, you dont. You dont know how dark and how deep that can go. The feeling of being completely overwhelmed, knowing that millions of people have seen your naked pictures. Thats a completely different experience than anything else, and, in fact, what happened to me is called revenge porn or cyber exploitation, and half of the people who have been victims of that describe having suicidal. Seriously contemplating suicide or attempting suicide. Did you . Did you contemplate suicide . It was a very bleak time in your life. Your younger brother died of a drugs overdose. How deep was your depression . Idid. I contemplated it right in the period of my resignation, and thats, i think, part of what led me to it, was knowing that, you know, i wasnt going to be able to serve in the best capacity possible because of, you know, what i was going through. I was in the middle of this divorce that had suddenly entered the National Spotlight the interNational Spotlight and it was something that i was. That was not going to be able to allow my constituents to move on. I knew that it was going to be a distraction while we were in the middle of impeaching donald trump, and i didnt feel like it was in the best interest of so many people around me as well as myself. So, how did you feel, by the way, when your seat, after you resigned, flipped back to the republicans . That was one of the worst feelings that i had. It was very shortly after my brother had passed away, and it was probably the moment that i regre. That i truly felt regret for resigning and wondered if i had made the right call. Because when i did resign, i felt very confident that the seat was going to remain in democratic hands. We flipped it by nine points, and so i didnt think that i needed to worry about that part. I thought that we were safe, so now i really. I do believe that in the president ial election in november were going to be able to flip it back, but it was. That was pretty devastating. After the metoo campaign, the American Congress introduced new rules prohibiting sexual relations between congressional members and members of their staff, so the House Ethics Committee in october last year launches an investigation into allegations of an affair between you and a congressional legislative director both of you married. Both of you deny that. However, you had also admitted to what you describe in your new book she will rise to an inappropriate relationship with a young female Campaign Member while you were running for office, which made it fall outside of the scope of that congressional investigation. So. Correct. You regret that relationship that you had with the young female staffer . I know that it wasnt. Its not something that iwould repeat, right. Its something that started even before, you know, Harvey Weinstein and the Metoo Movement took full steam in november of 2017. It was something that i fell into when the campaign was very small. It was, you know, it was literally three people on the campaign team, and it was not something that, you know, was intentional. I think it had a lot to do with my troubled relationship. It had a lot to do with close proximity and the fact that we were so close knit. And so, you know, it happened, right, and i dont want to dismiss it. It was a real relationship. It was something that mattered to me. But, of course, in hindsight. Well, even at the time, i knew that it wasnt something that, you know, should have been happening, right, but i also know that, you know, it was not. It was not something that would have fallen under the house ethics rules. It was something that was with a Campaign Member and not with a member of my official staff and. In your book she will rise, you describe it as a grey area in your account of the relationship with the young woman because you are openly bisexual and you say it cant be explained in the zero tolerance terms of the Metoo Movement. But, katie hill, that sounds like youre looking for an excuse, really. Youre just saying, look, this happened before i was elected to congress. Therefore, it falls out of the scope of any investigation. You have to accept what you did categorically was very inappropriate and wrong. Yes, i. I have definitely accepted that it was inappropriate and, in terms of the morality of it, i think that thats where the grey area happens, right . I dont. I dont think that i. You know, it was not a coercion of any kind, right. It wasnt something. Theres a power imbalance that i didnt even recognise at the time because i did not feel like a superior, right. I never acknowledged that because thats not what the campaign was like. This was when i was such a long shot candidate. I didnt even, you know, i didnt even see myself as somebody who was over the people who worked on my campaign team. And in fact, it felt like we were peers. It was. You know, id been the supervisor in charge of a huge organisation for so long, and it never even would have occurred to me to cross that boundary. I want to press you just one more time on this, because nancy pelosi, the democratic speaker of the house of representatives, said you had made, and i quote, some errors in judgment that made your continued service as a member untenable. I put it to you again that youve brought this upon yourself. You had a relationship with somebody who was on your payroll, and that could arguably be interpreted as an abuse of power, not withstanding what youve just said. Fair point . Yeah, thats an absolutely fair point, and i think that reconciling that was something that, you know, ultimately factored into my resignation. It was not wanting to shy away from that responsibility, not wanting to be hypocritical, not wanting to say that, you know, in my case, Something Like this is ok but in another case its not. So, lets just give the background to your case. The conservative news website redstate published nude photographs of you, and some of those were also with the young woman with whom you had an affair. What is it like to see nude photographs of yourself circulated on social media like that . Oh, its a feeling of utter despair. Your heart sinks, your stomach sinks. You cant sleep. You know, you cant eat. You cant. You dont want to talk to anybody. You dont know how to respond. This is. These are your deepest, most personal moments, and something that you deserve to have some privacy around, which is your body, and that it has been taken away from you, notjust for the moment, but forever, and i have had to come to terms with now the fact that thats never going to go away, that, you know, people who i meet, people who recognise me, have likely seen those photos or have seen some version of them, and it takes you to these dark, dark places that you have to pull yourself out of, and thankfully ive had the support to be able to do that. Do you know how they were released into the Public Domain . I know that it was my ex husband and he denies it, but i am confident in it, and were going to be pursuing action against that. So, the investigation is still ongoing, and i have to just repeat that he categorically denies that he released those photographs. He says his computer was hacked and he also denies any allegations of abuse that you made. But look, there are two state laws in california that expressly, and i quote, prohibit any person to intentionally distribute an intimate image of a person when that image has been agreed or understood by the parties to be private. Are such laws not sufficient to tackle whats often described as revenge porn . Theyre not, because it. Well, for example, in my case, when you talk about both parties understanding it, i didnt even know most of those photos were being taken. So its not something that you can have an agreement on when one party is unaware of it happening. Also, the penalties around it, the consequences for a perpetrator, are unclear. They re, in many cases, not a felony. Theyre not a sex offence. And theres no federal law around it. So, theres not a consistency across the states. The uk actually has much stronger and better laws protecting victims around this. How far does your case represent a generational issue . Because illjust tell you what the republican congressman matt gaetz says. He says, a lot of baby boomers with whom i serve. And thats people in their 50s and 60s now, i guess he says,. They dont understand that millennials, by virtue of having smartphones, have shared stupid and regrettable moments for a substantial portion of their lives. Is it very much a generational matter too . I think it is absolutely a generational matter, and i think were going to have to see a reconciliation of this as more and more young people enter the public eye. These kinds of things and mine, i recognise, is a complicated case. Its not as straightforward as just these nude photos that, you know, any regular nude photo that had been leaked without my consent. So i want to acknowledge that and say that, you know, there are other situations in which it would be more black and white, right, but it is, you know, we know that about 80 of people with smartphones have shared some form of sexually explicit photo or text message and thats something that were going to see more and more of, and when you talk about young people who have notjust shared photos individually, but who have shared. Whove grown up online, who have done stupid things in college and in high school and have that kind of history that we. You know, everyone has made mistakes and has done stupid things when theyre younger, but those havent been documented until recently, so were going to have to reconcile that over time, and i think that my case really brought it to light that this is something thats going to keep happening, and hopefully we see the impact of this being one that is an example of how we should not react any more, because, in the aftermath of mine, we saw people try to blame me for having taken those photos, right. You can blame me for other aspects of this, but taking the photos, and especially because mine were not even photos that i had taken, they were ones that were taken of me, that was not the part that was at fault. But when the speaker of the house of representatives, nancy pelosi, says we should say to young candidates and to kids in kindergarten, really be careful when transmitting photos, isnt there also an onus on the individual to be careful . Is that a realistic comment that shes making . Is it possible . I think that its not a realistic comment, and i actually reached out to her office afterwards because i think portraying it that way is a form of victim blaming, and, again, blame me for the parts that i did wrong. Dont blame me for the parts that were not. And she kind of course corrected after that. And a big part of it is that, especially when youre younger, were talking about kids that are, like, 13 years old who start sharing these kinds of photos, are pressured into it, and theres a social element of it that as people are growing up and kind of discovering their sexuality, they start doing these kinds of things, and if youre talking about a 13 year old who begins to share these kinds of images, you know, not that they should, and of course we should have these conversations and protect our kids and tell them that these can be exploited, but its going to happen, and we should never blame the victim, because its something. Its a very different thing when you intentionally share something that is meant to be private, and when it becomes public it is completely exploitative. You said in your last speech, your resignation speech, when you Left Congress last year, you said that there was a double standard and misogynistic culture that resulted in your decision to step down. Why do you believe there was a double standard . I mean, youve admitted freely that you were wrong to have had the relationship with the young Campaign Staff member. Why . Why did you say that there was a double standard . Well, again, thats. Theres this expectation of women and how we behave and the morality thats around it that is absolutely different. Weve seen men who will apologise or not even apologise in many cases and who stay in office and who dont even think twice about it. And who are. We almost expect a certain kind of behaviour from men as though theyre going to make these kinds of mistakes. What, even post metoo era . Even post metoo, Harvey Weinstein behind bars and all the rest of it . I think thats what. I think that thats what were figuring out, and, again, that was a big part of the reason that i chose to step down, because i dont want to say and i didnt want to set up the whole argument of saying that, oh, well, this shouldnt apply to me. This should apply uniformly, so i feel like i set something up so that if it happens in any other case then, you know, we know the expectation. We know what we want to. We want to ensure that people are held to account for. But can i. So, can ijust check, then, with you . I mean, you know, theres been a lot made of metoo, and hollywood has become infused with this idea now, and so on. Are you saying that american politics is yet to experience the full impact of the Metoo Movement . I think that thats accurate, but i think that its starting to. Its. You know, its new. It happened in 2017. The end of 2017 is when it really started to kind of make a big, you know, a big impact on our society, and though. You know, weve seen how challenging it can be to apply what we want from metoo, what the expectations are and also what we want from people who have been accused. What is the apology . What is the change in behaviour that we want to see . The change in behaviour is obvious, but do we want to see, you know, how do people seek redemption . How do they say that they are going to change and that they regret their actions and that they are, you know, that theyre trying to move forward . Or is it a simple. . Is it ousting from whatever position forever, right . So, we. You know, we saw that Withjoe Biden and the tara reade allegations, right. We dont know quite how to handle these kinds of things because we say, on one hand, believe women, but youre never. Youre going to come up against this time and time again where it is. It is like weve seen one person saying one thing and another person saying another, and theres no other witness. Theres not going to be another witness. Butjust going back to your case do you think you would have had to have resigned if youd been a man . I cant. I really cant say in the time that. You know, i think that if i were a republican man, honestly, that theres a much better chance that i would have. I would have not cared or i would have stood strong and just said that, look, this happened before my time in congress, and yes, it was a mistake, but i am. Im going to leave it to the voters to determine whether they want me to continue. Yeah, but i mean, ijust put it to you that perhaps affairs that breach house rules now are not tolerated. Early last year, joe barton, the longest serving congress memberfor texas for the republicans, resigned because of nude photos and explicit Text Messages to a constituent that appeared on social media. He felt he couldnt continue. So. Yeah. I put it to you. He didnt. That perhaps american politics is changing. No, i think it is changing, and i think thats why i say that i dont. You know, i cant really say in a hypothetical of whether i would have or not, but i do know that the nude photos certainly would not have circulated, and we can look atjoe barton as an example. His were certainly not shared in the same way that mine were. They were blocked off in a much more careful and intentional way, and also people dont want to see that mine was sensationalised. Mine was. You know, it was. They were consumed and, again, exploited in a way that we just have not seen. Do you think your. . Sorry. Do you think your bisexuality was relevant . Because Laura Palumbo from the National SexualViolence Resource Centre in the United States says its important to note the consequences katie hill faces may be different because she is a woman, but also because she identifies as bisexual. I do think so. I think that this is a new concept for people. Im only the second person ever whos openly bisexual to have served in either branch of congress, and i. Even people coming out and being open about it is. Its just rare, so the dynamics of relationships, especially in the context of having of, you know, of marriage and of, you know, just our sexuality in general is. Its not really understood and its not something that has been confronted and it is something that has been fa ntasised about. You know, thats