Edited by: TJVNews.com
In these days of photographic proliferation, it really pays to keep one’s clothes on, at all costs. It was reported in the New York Post, that disgraced former California congresswoman Katie Hill, 33, is now back in the news. A Los Angeles Judge ruled on Wednesday that nude images of Hill that appeared the UK Daily Mail newspaper were in the “public interest” and therefore the judge decided to dismiss Hill’s lawsuit against the British tabloid.
The Los Angeles Daily News obtained the ruling of Superior Court Judge Yolanda Orozco in which she said that the pictures of Hill in the buff reflected on her “character” or lack thereof and purported “qualifications” for office. Hill resigned from her position as a California representative in the House in October of 2019. She had served less than one year of her term.
The Post reported that Hill had been the subject of intense scrutiny after it was discovered that she was having a three-way sexual tryst with her then husband Kenneth Heslep and an unnamed female staffer. It was also alleged that Hill had an affair with a legislative aide that worked in her office. Subsequently, the House Ethics Committee conducted a probe into Hill’s unconventional behavior.
The nude photos of Hill appeared in the Daily Mail only days before she tendered her resignation.
In her ruling, Orozco wrote: “Here, the intimate images published by (the Daily Mail) spoke to (Hill’s) character and qualifications for her position, as they allegedly depicted (Hill) with a campaign staffer whom she was alleged to have had a sexual affair with and appeared to show (Hill) using a then-illegal drug and displaying a tattoo that was controversial because it resembled a white supremacy symbol that had become an issue during her congressional campaign.” She then added that, “Accordingly, the images were a matter of public issue or public interest.”
According to the LA Daily News, Orozco based her ruling on the first amendment which guarantees freedom of the press. She said that sharing photos and information is “what journalism is all about.”
In addition to filing suit against the Daily Mail, the Post reported that Hill also sued her now ex-husband Kenny Heslep as well as Redstate.com back in December. Her lawsuit argued that by publishing the nude pics, the defendants in the case had distributed “nonconsensual porn.” One of the nude photos was taken by Heslep.
Hill had also said in her suit that she experienced a great deal of mental anguish over the explicit photos and had “suffered extreme emotional distress, attempted suicide and was forced to quit her job.”
In support of her case, the Post reported that her attorneys presented arguments that the naked photos could not fall into the category of “public interest” because the newspaper in which they were published had the option of verbally describing them rather than putting them out there for public consumption.
The report in the LA Daily News said that Orozco was not persuaded by the argument of Hill’s attorneys.
Orozco ruled that “the fact that information to be gleaned from an image may be disseminated in an alternative manner does not equate to a finding that the image itself is not a matter of public concern.”
The ruling by the judge could be a landmark one and have serious repercussions in the future as was noted by Carrie Goldberg, one of Hill’s lawyers. The Post reported that Goldberg said on Wednesday that “there is something “fundamentally different” about sharing nude photos — and warned that Orozco’s ruling would give anyone calling themselves a journalist free rein to publish such content.”
Hill was mandated by the court to pay the legal fees for the attorneys that the Daily Mail had to hire to defend them I this case.
