Virginia Democrat Susanna Gibson saw her campaign for state House derailed this year by her former part-time career as an online pron star…
But Gibson has refused to rule out a return to politics… and in a Saturday interview with Politico‘s magazine, Gibson doubled down.
She told Politico‘s Alexander Burns that she’d “fundamentally changed as a human having gone through something like that.”
Gibson promised to pursue legal action against the people responsible for filming the videos.
“They need to be held accountable,” Gibson said. “I’ve told people this forever, but it’s true: When I decide to do something, I will work and work and work — I will outwork everyone. I will make sure it happens. It’s going to be a long process. Subpoenas take a long time. But there is a special victims detective who also has FBI privileges looking into it now. She has been for about a month now. I’m optimistic.”
Gibson says voters don’t care about her time moonlighting as an online porn star.
“Younger voters don’t care,” Gibson said. ” 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 said.
“After that kind of shock wore off — of such a salacious story — voters started not caring. They care much more about what I can do for them and the issues that affect them every day.”
Gibso lost by about 1,000 votes in a competitive district outside Richmond, and the Democrats regained control of the Virginia House, anyway.
Gibson viewed the sex scandal as a sign of her strong candidacy.
“You even saw the Republican Party of Virginia, loudly and proudly, take credit for and send out mailers that contained images and verbiage from these videos,” Gibson said. “The Republican Party in Virginia never would have sent those mailers if they didn’t know I was going to win or certainly could win.”
Gibson said she spent her campaign “fighting with the Post” to suppress the porn story.
“We spent a few days fighting with them, two days or so, a day and a half… Fighting with the Post. I hired an amazing attorney who worked around the clock and wrote them several letters, essentially saying: To be clear, Ms. Gibson never acknowledged or consented to videos being recorded, this is illegal pornography because it is illegal to record someone in a state of undress without consent,” Gibson said.
“I think that anything that has to do with people’s families — point blank, period — should not be [a political story]. And I think that anything that has to do with nudity or sexuality, there needs to be a barrier there…
The Post has said that it simply took a tip from the GOP and found the publicly available videos on three different “non-password-protected sites.”
The paper explained in September, “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.”
However, Gibson spoke in favor of amending Virginia’s law against revenge porn.
“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,” Gibson said.
“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.”
November flashback! ‘Porn Dem’ plans a return to politics after losing Virginia election
The Horn editorial team