Candidate Outed Over Sex Videos Issues a Warning

Nurse practitioner Susanna Gibson was running an otherwise ordinary campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates earlier this year when the Washington Post came out with a story that upended both her campaign and personal life. The story revealed the 40-year-old Gibson had been livestreaming sex videos on a pornographic website with her husband. However, unbeknownst to Gibson, the videos had been archived elsewhere on the web, and an unidentified person described as a Republican operative obtained them and provided them to the newspaper. Gibson lost her race in November by fewer than 1,000 votes, and now she's speaking about her experience.

• "I think this is going to continue to happen as millennials age into running for office," Gibson tells Politico. "There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90% of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point. This is something that is very common, especially in the younger generations."
• Gibson is unapologetic about the livestreamed videos she made with her husband, but livid about them being shared without her permission. "I think what people do in their private lives, digitally—if it is legal, it is consensual and has no bearing on their ability to do their jobs—I think there should be a barrier," she says. "I think that it is unethical to make people's private lives—especially their sexual private lives—public." She said she is determined to find out who shared the videos and see them charged under the state's revenge-porn law.
• "You don't get to treat women like this and have us sit down and be quiet," she told the AP in a separate interview. It also sounds like another run for office is in the cards. "I won't lose next time."

(More Virginia stories.)