In “Her Online Sex Life Was Exposed. She Lost Her Election. Now She’s Speaking Out.” Alexander Burns, head of news at POLITICO, highlights a scandal that rocked a state legislative race here in Virginia a few months back.
It is not often that a state legislative campaign in an off-season election seizes the national spotlight. But that is what happened in September, when the Washington Post revealed that a promising Virginia Democrat, Susanna Gibson, had previously been captured in a recorded video performing sex acts online with her husband.
[…]
The video — a recording of an explicit livestream that the Post said had been uploaded elsewhere on the internet — had been shared by a Republican political operative, according to the paper. The Post’s report upended Gibson’s life, to say nothing of her candidacy.
“I’m fundamentally changed as a human having gone through something like that,” she said in an interview.
[…]
To explore the difficult social and legal questions that churned through Virginia politics, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Gibson about her experience in the campaign — and the implications of that race for a larger cohort of younger candidates who grew up in a world of increasingly blurry lines around their public, private and online lives.
It’s an interesting case, to be sure. Here’s the key bits from the WaPo story linked above:
A Democrat running for a crucial seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates performed sex acts with her husband for a live online audience and encouraged viewers to pay them with “tips” for specific requests, according to online videos viewed by The Washington Post.
Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two young children running in a highly competitive suburban Richmond district, streamed sex acts on Chaturbate, a platform that says it takes its name from “the act of masturbating while chatting online.”
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 streamwere archived on one of those sites — Recurbate — in September 2022, after she entered the race. The most recent were two videos archived on Sept. 30, 2022. It is unclear when the live stream occurred.
While still listed on Recurbate, those videos were no longer available for viewing as of Saturday, after a Republican operative alerted The Washington Post about them. But the videos remained live on another non-password-protectedsite, which The Post viewed. At least two other publicly available sites displayed explicit still photos from the videos, The Post confirmed.
Gibson, 40, can be seen in the videos soliciting “tips” for performing specific acts — in apparent violation of Chaturbate’s terms and conditions, which say: “Requesting or demanding specific acts for tips may result in a ban from the Platform for all parties involved.”
In at least two videos, she tells viewers she is “raising money for a good cause.”
In multiple videos, Gibson interrupts sex acts to type into a bedside computer. Speaking directly into the screen, she urges viewers to provide tips, which are paid through “tokens” purchased through the site. In at least two videos, she agrees to perform certain acts only in a “private room,” an arrangement that requires the viewer to pay more.
“I need, like, more tokens before I let him do that,” she responds to a request that they perform a certain act. “One token, no. More. Raising money for a good cause.”
Almost immediately, as tips apparently arrive, she says “thank you” five times and tells her husband she will agree to that act.
Gibson takes the lead in addressing viewers on videos viewed by The Post, but in one case her husband, an attorney, chimes in with, “C’mon, guys,” to echo her entreaties for tips.
In a written statement, Gibson called the exposure of the videos “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.”
“It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” she said. “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”
Daniel P. Watkins, a lawyer for Gibson, said disseminating the videos constitutes a violation of the state’s revenge porn law, which makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor to “maliciously” distribute nude or sexual images of another person with “intent to coerce, harass, or intimidate.”
This strikes me as more than a stretch. Gibson wasn’t betrayed by a byfriend or hookup who took nude videos of her surreptitiously. She was performing sex work on a global platform.
For obvious reasons, it’s against said platform’s terms of service to record the sex shows. But they warn that it’s really, really easy to do so and that such content is likely to be distributed to any number of online porn sites. Doing so is a violation of copyright laws but, alas, the remedy is to file a DMCA takedown notice—which isn’t much of a remedy!
Gibson’s spin here is rather unconvincing:
My entire life was rocked on Sept. 11, when the article ran. It ran, implying that I performed sex acts online with my husband for money.
I have not viewed said videos and have no interest in doing so. But I take the WaPo reporter’s word for it, given that I can’t imagine the paper ran the story without editors fact-checking it.
It was really written based on this Dropbox file that self-described Republican operatives shopped around. They had found these videos on the dark web and shopped them around to various news outlets. I didn’t have any idea that there were ever videos of me that had been made and uploaded to multiple sites.
As noted in the WaPo report, the videos were on something called Recurbate, which a quick Google search shows was on the open web. Apparently, Chaturbate successfully “seized” the domain on November 17, whatever that means. But it also appears that several clone sites with the same name exist.
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.
It was a few days of feeling hopeful, then swung from hopeful to devastated. How can this be happening? How can a national news outlet decide to run a story about this? I think if I wasn’t a candidate, the Post probably would have been appalled at the invasion of my privacy. But because I was a candidate, they decided that it was a political story, rather than an invasion of my privacy and potentially a crime.
Honestly, while political operatives sending this sort of thing to reporters to use as leverage against the opposition is somewhat sleazy, I think the Post made the right call in reporting the story. They didn’t include salacious screenshots or anything. And, again, this wasn’t simply a candidate sharing racy photos with a boyfriend—which I agree would be private behavior that’s not newsworthy—but rather one performing sex acts on a public website for tips. That’s information voters might want to know.
I think this is going to continue to happen as millennials age into running for office. There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point. This is something that is very common, especially in the younger generations.
I have no idea what number of millennial women have been online sex workers. It’s almost certainly higher than it was for older generations. But, again, conflating that and “have taken nude photos” is disingenuous and I’m shocked Burns never once seeks to make that distinction.
Now, here, though, I mostly agree with Gibson:
I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.
Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.
The rise of platforms allowing women to make easy money selling pornography is a strange thing for many reasons but Gibson highlights one of them. In the strictest sense, she’s right. The charging of a fee for a video chat or site membership does not entitle customers to redistribute the content in violation of whatever terms were agreed to as a condition for access.
Gibson’s solicitation of tips from whomever was in her online chat at a given moment in time was certainly did not constitute consent to record her activities and distribute them freely for the world to see. If nothing else, because it devalues her ability to sell similar content if she’s competing with stolen “free” versions.
At the some time, the Internet has been a thing for a very long time now. I’m constantly shocked that people are shocked that their “private” OnlyFans accounts and the like are discovered by people they known and that this has repercussions for their families, co-workers and the like.
In an ideal world, I suppose, we would simply accept that the lure of easy money fueled by the seemingly insatiable appetite for online porn means that a whole lot of young women are going to cash in. Eventually, maybe the stigma from doing so will disappear. Indeed, Gibson barely lost her race even after this scandal broke.
