Katie Hill was once a rising star in the Democratic Party.

However, in 2019 the California Representative resigned from Congress after personal and intimate photos of her were published without her consent. Hill has filed a lawsuit claiming the photos that were distributed of her constituted "non-consensual porn."

In an interview for LA Times Today, Spectrum News 1 anchor Lisa McRee talked to LA Times reporter Seema Mehta about the rise and fall of Katie Hill. 

A word of warning, but some of the details of this story are not appropriate for children.

Hill comes from a northern-part of Los Angeles County that traditionally has elected Republicans and is more conservative than other parts of the County.

"In 2018, during the blue wave when so many Democrats were elected across the county and including Orange County, Katie Hill had a race where at first people did not really know who she was," said Mehta. "She was a non-profit executive, but she just generated a lot of excitement and a lot of energy, and she pulled out the surprise win. She was one of the seats that Democrats flipped from red to blue. She quickly became a very talked-about person on Capitol Hill. Nancy Pelosi took her under her wing because she saw herself in her. It really seemed like she was going places."

Less than a year after she was elected, stories started coming out about her marriage and other relationships.

"At first, some stories came that alleged she had relationships with both a congressional staffer and a campaign staffer," added Mehta. "She said she did not have a relationship with the congressional staffer, which would violate House rules, but she did say she and her husband had a relationship with a woman who worked on her campaign. As these stories were coming out, pictures started circulating among conservative media and her political enemies. There were rumors that there were as many as 700 of these pictures. Not all of them were nude, but they were intimate pictures that depicted her and her relationships."

Some of the pictures were published by the conservative political blog RedState and the British tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mail. Hill alleges that her husband was the only person who had access to these pictures.

"The husband, we tried to contact him and his lawyer, but nobody called us back," said Mehta. "So, we don't know for ourselves who truly was the first point of distribution. Jennifer Van Laar, who is a reporter and managing editor for RedState, says she got about 100 pictures through Google drive but says it was not from the husband. She has not named who it is. Several pictures were published, but the ones that raised the most eyebrows were, there was one picture where she is nude and brushing another woman's hair. There is another picture where she is holding a bong. The pictures were blurred over in terms of the most intimate parts, but you can tell she was naked in these pictures. This caused all these rumors in her district about there being more pictures and that they were going to keep coming out until she finally decided she had to resign to stop that."

Hill contends that the two media companies, Van Laar and her ex-husband, violated California's revenge-porn law. The statute makes it a crime to distribute intimate images without a person's consent. 

"It is an interesting legal area because it is like the law is trying to catch up with technology," added Mehta. "When I was a kid, you didn't have a camera that you walked around with in your pocket, where you can take a picture and instantly post it on social media or send it to 1,000 of your closest friends. The ease in which people can take pictures now and the increasing practice of people exchanging intimate pictures with their romantic partners is another issue. This revenge-porn law was really a case of the law trying to catch up with technology, which is front and center in this lawsuit."

Regarding the case, a judge issued a tentative ruling on a motion that one of the defendants had filed. The hearing for that motion will be in April.

"The two media companies and the reporter are going to have a hearing at the same time on this issue that argues that there are exceptions to the revenge-porn law," said Mehta. "That includes publishing something that is in the public interest, and this is clearly in the public interest. The statute is supposed to be aimed at the first distributor, and they are arguing they were not the first distributor. So they are going to make that case that this should be dismissed. The husband's lawyer has not responded to the suit yet. Katie Hill wrote a memoir that is being made into a movie, and she's on a podcast called Naked Politics. I think a lot of people wonder if she is going to run for that seat again, so I don't think this is the last we have heard from her."

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