Suddenly Susanna Gibson, a Democrat candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, is getting shy and claiming she is the victim of a sex crime after screenshots of her extracurricular activities went public. Gibson and her husband often participated in live videos posted on a pornographic website “and asked viewers to pay them money in return for carrying out specific sex acts” reports the Associated Press (AP).
“It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” said Gibson, who is running in a high-stakes legislative contest in a district just outside of Richmond, Virginia. “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.”
Gibson said that exposing the videos is “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.” Gibson’s attorney, Daniel P. Watkins, said that disseminating the videos is a violation of Virginia’s revenge porn law, which makes it a crime to “maliciously” disseminate or sell nude or sexual images of another person with the intent to “coerce, harass, or intimidate.”
“A criminal act has occurred here, and that’s the dissemination of revenge porn by a Republican operative,” Watkins told the AP.