Former representative Katie Hill (D-CA) did a new interview discussing how the leak of her nude photos ignited a sex scandal that ended with her resignation from Congress. Showing a millennial’s sense of irony, Hill discussed the potential chilling effect her story could have on young women running for office in Playboy, a magazine made famous for its nudes. That possible impact on other women is what she’s “most concerned about,” Hill told Playboy.

“There’s a whole generation of us who have pictures that could be compromising,” she said. “It’s normal, right? It’s not even ‘Oh, it’s so salacious.’ Everybody does it.”

But for Hill, the scandal represented an obstacle to doing the work she was elected to do.

“We found out they had 700 more files,” Hill said. “I just didn’t know how long this was going to go on, or what else they were going to have, or how I was going to be able to do the work that mattered to people in my district.”

Hill also pointed a finger across the aisle, explaining that the pressure campaign from conservative media outlets helped push her to resign, saying, “I hate that they won. I hate that I did end up quitting, but the GOP made it clear that they were going to continue this until I quit.”

The scandal broke in the midst of Hill’s very public divorce. Her marriage had already factored into her political career; she said other LGBTQ+ representatives had asked her, California’s first openly LGBTQ+ congresswoman, “‘You’re married to a man. Why would you come out as bi?’”

But it’s the impact of the leak on her that she sees as something that has not been spotlighted.

“The emotional trauma that it causes people is pretty much untold. This is a true threat. This is its own form of assault,” she explained. Even her staff was dealing with it: “They’ll talk to the staff and be like, ‘Will you tell Katie Hill I want in on one of the threesomes she’s having, but also she should get a boob job?’” she said.

Despite her experience and concerns that it could deter other young women who want to run for office, Hill herself seems undeterred in continuing her own political career.

“Every single bit of my dirty laundry will be out there — the most private things I didn’t ever think would come out. I’ll be quite literally fully exposed to the voters,” she told Playboy. “So judge me for what I’ve got.”

“This was a chapter that was important and that meant something. I think I have a legacy that is going to matter,” she said. “This is just the beginning.”

Hill also seemed to hint at her possible next steps or at least how she would frame herself as a politician moving forward, discussing a middle road through what she characterized as a partisan divide in the United States.

“When the two most commonly known names are Donald Trump and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and people tend to associate an entire group with one or the other, I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy,” she said. “A lot of what’s happening in the middle, which is the majority of the country, is not amplified.”

“Her policies are the extreme of our party,” she said of Ocasio-Cortez. “People have associated that the Democrats want to have the Green New Deal, right? But they don’t know that we also have all these other, more immediately achievable solutions to addressing climate change.”

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