On October 29, two days after giving up on her resignation from Congress, Katie Hill sat in the bathroom of her embarrassed Washington, D.C. apartment,” “just like that overwhelming sense of despair,” she told People, “as if she hadn’t gone.”
His life had just been in the shadow of two other sex scandals.
Eleven days earlier, photographs of california’s 32-year-old Democrat appearing naked with a crusader worker, and taken without her consent, she said, leaked to the right-wing RedState website, which wrote that Hill and her husband, Kenny Heslep, had a consensual tripartite quote with the crusade assistant.
The online page also reported that Hill had an affair with one of his members of Congress, an indictment that led to the start of a formal investigation in the House of Representatives. Hill resigned a short time later.
She denied having had an affair with the male staff member in her house office, which would violate the amended regulations as a result of #MeToo, but admitted that dating a female assistant on her crusade and prompted complaints from some advocates of the force imbalance.
Less than a year after taking her workplace in 2018, Hill left Congress: she and her circle of relatives were attacked online while dealing with public disclosure of a secret appointment and a separate case statement, which she said was false.
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In the bathroom of his apartment last October, Hill stabbed his wrists, the moment in just over a year he nearly attempted suicide, writes in his new memoir, She Will Rise, published on Tuesday. She says much of her problems were triggered by her husband now separated, whom she claims to be violent and whom she accuses of having been leaking photographs of him with help.
She had “known that my ex had many tactics to fulfill his promise to ruin me if she wished,” Hill writes in her book. (Heslep denied leaking the photo and said his computer had been hacked; through a lawyer, he also said the abuse fees were false.)
Last fall, Hill thought about dying. But she lived.
“Fortunately, ” he told People now, “I can get away with it. But it’s nothing anyone would like.”
His divorce from Heslep is still complete, as he “will indicate it,” says Hill (his lawyer says the settlement is being finalized); and Hill claims that Heslep harassed her: “Drag me online and replace my number and things like that. We had to make several stops for them to be arrested.” His lawyer denied that Heslep had committed any crime.
Hill says that with victims’ rights lawyers, he plans to record a civil complaint in the coming months against The Daily Mail, a British tabloid who has posted some of the leaked photos, as well as others adding Heslep to distribute the images. .
Heslep’s lawyer, Erin McKinley, told People: “Ms. Hill made no accusations of irregularities in her request for dissolution. Mr. Heslep categorically denies any allegations of irregularities or abuses. The parties are recently finalizing an agreement on their divorce file Mr. Heslep respectfully requests confidentiality during this period.
An emailed comment request was not returned to a Daily Mail spokesperson. RedState officials did not respond without delay on Thursday.
A few weeks after his resignation, Hill faced a tragedy.
His mother, a nurse, underwent brain surgery in January and Hill returned to California and his mother’s home, where he joined through his brother, Danny Bennett, who was part of the Navy SEALS.
“I had struggled with drug addiction in high school,” Hill says, “but he had won the remedy and been able to join the military, and we felt really smart in his recovery.
However, some time after his mother’s brain surgery, Danny recayed. “It was cocaine, but it turned out that cocaine was combined with fentanyl,” says Hill, who discovered his brother wasn’t sensitive and did CPR without success. The 20.
“It’s horrible. It’s the ultimate traumatic,” he says. “I just came out from under a rock when all this happened. You know, somehow, he put things into an attitude that made it less difficult to heal the other component of my life so difficult.
To help with healing, Hill’s psychiatrist replaced the dose of her antidepressants and she talks to a therapist almost every week.
He has a plan in case his temper goes down and he’s thinking about killing himself. “I’ve suffered a lot of depression over the years,” he says. “I’ve been diagnosed with depression since I was a teenager.”
After his brother’s death, Hill devoted himself to writing his book, which ended in three weeks.
The report examines the sexual abuse she claims to have suffered as a child and as a teenager, and points to resources for survivors on how to get help. Elsewhere, she discusses sexism in politics and offers her perspectives on how progressive women can bring about political change.
Beyond the book, Hill focuses on her own political action committee, HER Time, which aims to elect progressive candidates. His most recent task is his new podcast, rightly Naked Politics with Katie Hill. (In fact, coming out of his scandals included a dose of self-deprecation. Earlier this year, he joked about an episode of House Hunters about a “throuple,” and tweeted, “I’m going to take at least one partial credit”).
“The goal of the podcast is actually to pass the scenes,” says Hill of Naked Politics, “and communicate about the dirty look of how it all works.”
After her private life became a name and a punchline, Monica Lewinsky approached. “She just says, “I sense what you’re going through. Tell me if you need to talk,” Hill recalls.
Then she did.
“I called her and she shared a little bit of what she had laughed at Saturday Night Live,” Hill said. “It’s helpful to know that other people, even if it’s a small crowd, have suffered this kind of public embarrassment.”
When she ran for the workplace after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Hill was 29 years old and executive director of a nonprofit that helps the homeless. He was also in an dissatisfied marriage to Heslep, with whom he had been for 16 years, writes in his memoirs.
It was her crusade, a component of a wave of female applicants for the first time, that Hill entered into a threesome with her husband and the young crusader worker.
“I feel like my mistake didn’t put barriers between me and my team, especially at the beginning of the campaign, when I felt we were a mixed-running organization of friends to make this absolutely impossible,” Hill told PEOPLE. to overthrow a traditionally Republican neighborhood.
Eventually, Hill fell in love with his assistant, he writes.
However, since last year’s reports on their relationship, the two have been in touch.
“He needs to have his own life,” Hill says. “It was unfair for Array to become the center of attention. I think that’s one of the most hurtful things of all. That’s why he’s trying to get on with his life as much as he can.
During Hill’s marriage, Heslep risked “ruining” her if she left, writes, an alleged risk she claims to have taken after leaving months after her election in November 2018.
She blames him for leaking images and other intimate data that result. There was a great reaction, in non-public terms.
Immediately after the first photos of her were posted on October 18 last year, Hill said her workers began receiving “terrible phone calls every day” from voters, which her circle of relatives “harassed” in her hometown of Santa Clarita and her police. . my father went around town “literally breaking my posters” that “said terrible things.”
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With the risk of more images and personal texts appearing after RedState and The Daily Mail first published their articles, which included indicting a case in Congress, “it seemed like this kind of insurmountable thing at the time,” he said. give up that holding on, as some of his fellow Democrats had suggested him to do.
Besides, Hill needed to put his fellow Democrats in a position to protect her.
“At that moment, at least, I felt the right thing to do was to get out of the equation,” he says of his decomposition. “I was listening to a component of my conscience. I was afraid to fit a downside for my fellow Democrats.”
About 10 months later, when talking to GENS about the one-bedroom apartment in Washington he has with his orange cat, Archie, Hill is full of life and optimistic. She has a full day of interviews to talk about some of the darkest moments of her life and what happened next, and is excited about the replacement she thinks she can do with her political group.
“I feel like I’m on an upward slope right now,” she says. “I’m very nervous, I suppose, to get back to the highlight and the critics who are sure to come for that. But I feel satisfied and excited about the next step.”
This doesn’t come with the app, at least for the time being.
“I’ll never tell anything,” he said, “but it’s not in my immediate plans.”