Nude photos of Katie Hill were in the “public interest” when published by The Daily Mail – a Los Angeles judge ruled Wednesday by dismissing the ex-congresswoman’s lawsuit against the media.
Judge Yolanda Orozco, judge at the Superior Court in Los Angeles, said the photos spoke of Hill’s ‘character’ and ‘qualifications’ for the office, which she left in October 2019, less than a year after her first term, according to a ruling. from The Los Angeles Daily News.
The Mail’s website published the photos days before the California Democrat resigned amid intense scrutiny over her three-way relationship with her husband and a female executive and an alleged affair with a legislative assistant in her office, leading to an investigation of the House Ethics Committee.
Here, the intimate images published by (the Daily Mail) spoke of (Hill’s) character and qualifications for her position, as they would have depicted (Hill) with a campaign executive with whom she allegedly had a sexual affair and with which she reportedly show (Hill) a then illegal drug and with a tattoo that was controversial because it resembled a white supremacy symbol that had become a problem during her convention campaign, ”Orozco wrote.
“Accordingly, the images were a matter of public issue or public interest.”
The judge cited the grounds for the First Amendment in dismissing the case, saying sharing is “what journalism is all about,” the LA Daily News said.
Hill sued the Mail, Redstate.com and her ex-husband Kenny Heslep in December, alleging that they distributed “non-consensual porn” by publishing the images, including a nude photo taken by Heslep.
The former congressman said she “suffered extreme emotional distress, tried to commit suicide and was forced to quit her job,” after the publication of the sexually-explicit photos.
Her lawyers argued that the images were not in the public interest because the publication could have just described them.
But the judge found that argument “unconvincing,” the report said.
“The fact that the information to be extracted from an image can be disseminated in an alternative way is not tantamount to finding that the image itself is not a matter of public interest,” Orozco said.
Carrie Goldberg, Hill’s attorney, said in court on Wednesday that there is something “fundamentally different” about sharing nude photos – and warned that Orozco’s ruling would give anyone who calls themselves a journalist the freedom to publish such content.
Hill, 33, will now have to pay the Mail’s attorney’s fees for losing the motion, something her attorney said could bankrupt the former lawmaker.
The judge replied that “there is not much I can do about it. Some of our laws have had hard results, ”the report said.