Just before the elections in November, I posted about Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running for a seat in the Virginia House of Representatives. She and her husband had in the past live-streamed sex acts. It was all perfectly legal but some Republican operative had obtained the video and shopped it around to media outlets and the Washington Post had published it. Then flyers with that information were mailed out by the Republican party to voters in that district. To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her but in the end she lost a close race 17,878 to 16,912, a margin of just 966 or 2.8%. The fact that it was so close means that she might well have won otherwise.
Gibson has given an interview about the whole affair and about what people need to realize about the whole online experience.
I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.
Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.
This was why she was blindsided by the release of the videos. She says that this is going to happen more frequently in the future.
I think this is going to continue to happen as millennials age into running for office. There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point. This is something that is very common, especially in the younger generations.
I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.
Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.
…I want everyone to stop for a second and take a step back from this particular story and take more of a long-lens view of what actually happened in the way this [Washington] Post article was written. A political operative found sexually explicit videos of a young woman running for office that she never knew existed — and we made that pretty clear in our statement — and shopped them around to various news outlets, trying to get them published to humiliate, intimidate, coerce, harass this woman, and with the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election that very well could have been the majority maker or breaker for the House.
She is determined to find the Republican operatives who downloaded it from the dark web and shopped the images around to media that the Washington Post picked up.
I want the person who found and then disseminated illegal pornographic images of me — again, violating federal and state laws — they need to be held accountable. I’m working with a few members in the General Assembly in Virginia right now to amend Virginia’s current revenge porn law, particularly to remove intent or motives, because intent is so hard to prove in a court of law, and also to increase the penalty from a misdemeanor. If we don’t do that, what is the deterrence for people?
I think we also need, on a federal level, to push for legislation that covers the non-consensual distribution and sexual privacy of intimate material in every single way.
She continued to campaign after the revelations and describes the varying reactions she got to the story.
It’s interesting. Younger voters don’t care. Very, very few of them, I would say. My age and younger, maybe even mid-40s up to 50 or so, didn’t care. I’m a millennial, I’m the oldest possible millennial — 90 percent of millennials have taken nude photos. So, I think we all understand.
Gibson seems like a smart, tough woman. She eventually lost a race that she would likely have won, but she has not ruled out plans to run again. I hope she does and crushes the opposition.
I wish her well and hope she does an Alex Jones on them.
Sues them for monetary damages and wins.
I’ll even kick in a few bucks to her legal defense fund.
This wasn’t revenge porn but it was a close cousin.
A political hatchet job.
This case is similar to one that occurred not so long ago.
Katie Hill was an elected House of Representatives legislator from southern California.
She resigned after nude photos of her were sent out by her wacko ex-husband to the Daily Mail and other media outlets as revenge porn. She resigned in 2019.
She sued the media outlets and her ex-husband.
The media outlet suits were thrown out on the basis of free speech and cost her $220,000 in legal fees to the defendants.
Since then nothing much has happened.
She declared bankruptcy in 2022 and this somehow has slowed the legal proceedings down.
It’s been 4 years and the longer the case drags on, the less likely it looks like she is going to be able to finish it.
Or she might not have got so close otherwise…
(cf. emissions controls and the recent Uxbridge by-election.)
Does it really? On what basis?
Why could it not mean she might well have lost by even more otherwise?
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“Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time”
As in, video-streaming. How naive are we supposed to think her, a self-professed millennial?
“Chaturbate videos are streamed live on that site and are often archived on other publicly available sites. More than a dozen videos of the couple captured from the Chaturbate stream were archived on one of those sites — Recurbate — in September 2022, after she entered the race. The most recent were two videos archived on Sept. 30, 2022. It is unclear when the live stream occurred.”
and
“The Post typically does not identify victims of alleged sex crimes to protect their privacy. In this case, Gibson originally live-streamed these sexual acts on a site that was not password-protected. The couple had more than 5,700 followers there.”
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/09/11/susanna-gibson-sex-website-virginia-candidate/)
Who was that adult film star who won an election in Italy back in the day? Ilona Staller . ( I googled)
surprisingly there were a lot of them , male and female, and some even won
It’s not only millennials who don’t care
@John Morales
Well, I would suppose historical basis! raven mentioned Katie Hill as a recent example. Gary Hart in the ’80’s had come to my mind, but that was apparently worse than I thought it was as I did some quick re-research before posting this comment (I also couldn’t remember his name). “Worse” as in it seems Hart was quite the creep and got what he deserved. That said, I don’t know if all the details of his creepiness were publically known at the time. Granted, those two examples, and many others listed on Wikipedia typically involve more questionable behavior than simply making a sex video. But I would have also thought it is pretty well known that Americans tend to be quite prudish. Well, at least those born before 1980 as Gibson notes.
Perhaps a counter argument would be to look at all the support (What’s the term Mano uses? Serial sexual abuser?) Donald Trump has despite his creepy behavior. But surely we must realize that more conservative voters don’t necessarily enforce codes of conduct against their own? So I see no reason to believe Gibson would have gotten more votes and at least some reason why she would get less. Why would you think that it is even a possibility that she would have gotten more votes???
Leo,
I’ll quote from the OP: “To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her”.
“The Post typically does not identify victims of alleged sex crimes to protect their privacy.”
Well yeah, except they did here because otherwise it’s not the hit piece their informant wanted. They’re obviously trying to pretend that’s not what they’re doing because the second half of the story is all about the other aspects of the competing campaigns. But that’s the second half. The story is clearly the hit piece up front.
Here’s an interesting question. Why do you think they shopped it to the Washington Post and not Fox News? Maybe because Fox News viewers are already unlikely to vote for a Democratic candidate while the Washington Post would be much more likely to put the story in front of Democratic and independent voters? They were shopping a hit piece and they found someone willing to help them do it in the Washington Post.