The Congress Woman From California

Katie Hill’s rise heralded the arrival of a new and modern political generation. And then the pictures leaked.

- Caitlin Moscatello

Any chance you could grab us a bottle of wine or something? Lol,” former California congresswoman Katie Hill texted. We settled on rosé. Hill and I had never met, but she was in the midst of a professional and personal crisis. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and she would be going live on air with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that night. “rough day,” she wrote. I brought wine as well as a bag of pretzels to Hill’s Manhattan

hotel room. Wearing leggings and a hoodie, she took the wine and glanced down at her phone. An editor at the New York Times had questions about an op-ed the 32-year-old Hill wrote about contemplating suicide, one that’s set to publish the next day; they’d been going back and forth for hours.

This was in early December as Hill scrambled to form a new life after photos of her—some of which she said were taken without her consent—were published online in mid-October. One shows Hill nude, brushing the hair of a junior female campaign staffer, Morgan (referred to here only by first name), in a hotel room. In others, there is Hill naked, holding a bong, with a tattoo of an iron cross—a Nazi-associated symbol used by white supremacists—near her groin; Hill and Morgan kissing. The articles accompanying them include private text messages among Hill, Morgan, and Hill’s estranged husband, Kenneth Heslep, detailing a threeway romantic relationship, as well as a claim by Heslep from a since-deleted Facebook post that Hill had had an affair with her male legislative director, Graham Kelly.