Right-wing media has been getting a great deal of mileage out of the supposedly titillating nature of Hill’s love life. Hill was one of the first members of Congress to identify publicly as bisexual, and the campaign staffer with whom she was in a relationship is female. An inordinate amount of media coverage has focused on the fact that the staffer was involved with both Hill and her husband. (“This is a whole lot less hot than you might think,” the right-wing political commentator Kurt Schlichter wrote on Twitter.)

Putting aside the leering, though, the story is appalling and sad. By her own account, Hill engaged in a profound breach of responsibility by engaging in a sexual relationship with someone who was working for her—and by doing so while running for public office. “The mistakes I made that brought me to this moment will haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said this afternoon in her final speech on the House floor. Members of Congress are no stranger to bad behavior. But in a time when Americans are remapping the difficult landscape of sex and power in the workplace, it would be willfully naive to shove aside the uncomfortable dynamics of Hill’s relationship with a staffer who was almost a decade her junior, and a recent college graduate.

Yet all of this must be separated from the question of whether or not the photos of Hill should have been made public. That, at least, has a clear answer: no. The photographs fit into the category of what is colloquially called “revenge porn” and what experts call “nonconsensual pornography”: explicit images of a person that may or may not have been taken consensually, but that are released to the public without the victim’s approval.

Hill stated in her speech that the photos of her “were taken without my knowledge, let alone my consent.” She has blamed her husband, whom she is divorcing, for the photos’ release. If her allegations prove true, she will be far from alone: As the law professors Mary Anne Franks and Danielle Citron (a colleague of mine) write, the release of sensitive images or video against the will of the person depicted “is often a form of domestic violence.” The vast majority of victims of this practice are female (though not all: Former Texas Representative Joe Barton appears to have been a victim of the practice in 2017).

Read more: How to fight revenge porn

And though research is scant at this point, sexual minorities may be particularly vulnerable. Ari Ezra Waldman, the founder and director of the Institute for CyberSafety, says that nonconsensual pornography of gay women may most commonly be released “when women come out as lesbians after breaking up with men”; the specific circumstances of Hill’s case obviously differ from this scenario, but there is a common thread in that Hill’s male former partner may have retaliated against her by releasing photos of her relationship with a woman.