Congresswoman Katie Hill is finally resigning from office after admitting to a sexual relationship relationship with a 22-year-old female campaign staffer. She has also been accused of carrying on an affair with her legislative director, Graham Kelly, though she denies the latter charge.
Despite being guilty of blatant sexual misconduct with a very junior subordinate, and potentially even more blatant sexual misconduct with a different subordinate, Hill has made it clear who the victim is in all of this really: Herself. In her self-pitying resignation letter, Hill laid the blame at the feet of her “abusive husband” and “hateful political operatives.” She lamented the “unprecedented brand of cruelty” that has brought her to this point. But she doesn’t explain how the allegedly abusive husband, or the hateful operatives, or the unprecedented cruelty, could have forced her to mine her staff for sex partners.
As The Daily Wire has covered, the media and many on the Left have gone right along with Hill’s persecution act. On her Twitter page, the disgraced former congresswoman has been furiously retweeting blue-checked leftists proclaiming that Hill is the victim of a sexist conspiracy. “She was thrown on a pyre for the benefit of men,” says one. Another blames Hill’s critics for being “the reason more women don’t run for office.”
Of course, the sexism in this case runs in exactly the opposite direction. There is simply no denying that if a photo leaked of a male congressman, in the nude, brushing the hair of his 22-year-old staffer, and if leaked text messages revealed that that staffer felt like a “toy” for said congressman, none of Hill’s defenders would be standing in that congressman’s corner. On the contrary, they’d be the first ones in line for the public stoning. And if we were talking about someone named Kurt Hill instead of Katie Hill, he would not be able to get away with a resignation letter that saves its half-hearted apology until the very end, after a long diatribe explaining why he is the real victim.
It is worth emphasizing this point: The media are asking that we feel sorry for a member of Congress who had three-ways with her subordinates, kept her sex partners on her staff without disclosing it, and put herself in a compromised position by allowing photos to be taken of her while naked and doing drugs. More than that, the media demand that we see Hill as a casualty of patriarchal oppression. This would be hard enough to stomach in its own right, but its downright vomit-inducing when you consider that Hill’s defenders are the very same people who have spent the last several years insisting that consent is murky, if not impossible, when one of the people involved in the act holds significant power over the other. But of course, these MeToo crusaders only meant for that principle to apply when it is a man who is in the position of power. Which is another way of saying that it’s not a principle at all.
Indeed, Jessica Valenti took the hypocrisy a step further. In a post on Medium (shared by Hill), Valenti argued that the people holding Hill accountable for sexual misconduct are the same “forces that enabled Weinstein.” You see, when a man exploits his power and uses his subordinates as sex toys, he’s doing what Weinstein did. But when a woman exploits her power and uses her subordinates as sex toys, the people who object are doing what Weinstein did. This is the kind of logic that can only possibly make sense in the dizzied brains of left-wing feminists.
But despite all of this hypocritical blathering, the fact remains: Katie Hill violated ethics and possibly the law. She did it for the sake of her own sexual pleasure. She is unfit for office and deserves to lose her job. She is not the victim. This was all her doing. And now she is paying the price.