“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
She was once the top up-and-coming face in the Democratic Party — and now she has gone belly-up financially.
The young, left-wing Democrat, once considered a future leader of her party, has announced she’s flat broke.
Former Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California—who left Congress after nude photos of a “throuple” involving her, her husband, and a female staffer went viral—declared bankruptcy this week.
Hill sued the British newspaper The Daily Mail, the conservative website RedState.com, and two journalists who published pictures showing Hill and her polyamorous partners in various stages of undress, often with drug paraphernalia.
The Democrat said the outlets had violated state law by publishing her nude photos, which she called a form of “revenge porn.”
She went to court to shut up the newspapers, and she lost.
A judge said the naked pictures were a vital part of the story—the newspapers couldn’t prove their case without them.
The court ordered Hill to pay $220,000 in damages and lawyer’s fees.
But she’s declaring bankruptcy because she says she can’t pay up.
On Tuesday, Hill announced she “incurred substantial financial loss to fight this case,” but she only sued in order “to try to protect future victims of cyber exploitation.”
“The consequences for me personally meant that I had to recently file bankruptcy,” she claimed. “Still, I don’t regret doing so, despite the severe and lasting financial repercussions of the offensive and just plain wrong ruling.”
Her old legal foes say this is just sleight-of-hand: She’s trying to skip out on her responsibilities.
Bankruptcy “means Katie Hill avoids paying the attorney fees she forced my indie journalist clients to incur,” wrote renowned lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, a Fox News fixture who represented two of the defendants in court. “Who do you think is left holding the bag? Not Katie Hill.”
“Katie Hill sued my journalist clients for exposing the truth. We warned her lawyer Carrie Goldberg about” the facts of California state law “in writing. And yet they persisted into six figures in attorney fee losses,” Dhillon added.
By claiming she has no money, Dhillon stated, Hill has “dodged service of the judgment. Nothing is ever her fault. Typical.”
Still, bankruptcy is a massive fall for the woman The Los Angeles Times once called “the most powerful freshman in Congress.”
Hill ran for the House of Representatives as an openly bisexual liberal, who the DNC embraced. The young, attractive woman flipped a Republican seat in 2018 and immediately shot up the ranks to become the vice chair of the House Oversight Committee.
Then the photos surfaced.
Pictures in the British newspaper showed Hill stark naked and brushing the hair of a much younger female staffer, who complained to others that she felt pressured in the relationship with the far more powerful politician. Hill also ran into controversy because one of her topless photos showed an Iron Cross tattoo, a symbol common among neo-Nazis and other controversial subcultures.
To further complicate matters, at the height of the controversy, Heslep accused Hill of “sleeping with her [male] finance director [Graham Kelly] for the past year at least.” She denied that relationship.
Hill resigned in October 2019, and a Republican took the seat back for the GOP.
Since leaving politics, Hill has written a book and has regularly been a guest on liberal cable news outlets like MSNBC.
She later claimed her “estranged husband,” Kenneth Heslep, “forced” her into the three-way relationship.
Last October, Hill announced she was having a baby with one of the journalists who defended her: Alex Thomas of Playboy magazine.
Despite the sexual, and now financial, scandals engulfing her, the media still regularly fawn over Hill. Last June, CNN’s Briana Keilar repeatedly asked Hill if she was ready to “get back in the arena” and run for office again.
When Hill eventually said no, Keilar said, “We will keep asking.”
Katie Hill got caught in a drug-fueled “throuple” with an exploited staffer, blamed the whole thing on her husband, played the victim, sued the journalists who blew the whistle on her, and now has declared bankruptcy to avoid the consequences of her actions.
Maybe she is the perfect Democratic candidate.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”