Katie Hill Biography

Katherine “Katie” Lauren Hill was born on August 25, 1987 in Abilene, Texas, United States to Mike Hill, a Beverly Hills police officer, and Rachel Stevenson, an emergency-room nurse. She has a sister and had a younger brother named Daniel Brett Bennett, who sadly passed away in January 2020 following a drug overdose.

She was a bright student who took extra classes to graduate from Saugus High School at the age of 16 in 2004. She had originally wanted to be a nurse like her mother and her grandmother and was even accepted to study nursing at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles.

However, after witnessing the death of a teen gunshot victim while interning in an emergency room, she realized the health care realities of the uninsured and decided to tackle social problems at policy level. She took a semester off and then went to California State University, Northridge from where she obtained her bachelor's degree in English in 2011 and a Master of Public Administration in 2014.

Katie Hill started her career as a policy advocate at People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), a nonprofit organization developing affordable and supportive services for the homeless in California. As its Executive Director, she took the organization from a local force in Los Angeles County to one of the largest nonprofit providers of homes for the homeless in California.

She was instrumental in passing a ballot initiative, Measure H, in 2017 to help alleviate homelessness by providing $1.2 billion in funds for homeless services in Los Angeles County. She saw threats to the work she had done following Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton, who she said, was “objectively the most qualified person in the race”.

She felt a need “to consciously try to elect more women” and decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives for California's 25th Congressional District in the 2018 election. Challenging incumbent Republican candidate Steve Knight in her home district, she finished second in the primary election and defeated Knight by 54% to 46% vote in the general election.

Her successful run was the subject of the HBO show Vice News Tonight, a documentary-style series of episodes that termed her campaign as the "most millennial campaign ever" for Congress. Before the midterm election, she was endorsed by former President Barack Obama, who also attended a campaign event in Southern California.

She often described her experience as a nursing student during her campaign, and prioritized healthcare and ‘Medicare for All’ as a major issue during her tenure, alongside addressing income inequality and affordable housing. She also supported comprehensive immigration reform to counter primarily illegal drug trafficking and other crimes along the southern border, while also supporting some form of physical barrier in certain areas.

She was accused of having an extramarital affair with her male legislative director by RedState on October 18, 2019, but she denied the allegations and blamed her abusive estranged husband for it. In their story, RedState had also published nude photos of Katie and alleged that she and her husband Kenny Heslep were both romantically involved in a consensual relationship with a female campaign staffer.

After the House Ethics Committee announced an investigation into the allegation on October 23, she admitted to having an inappropriate relationship with a 10 years younger campaign staffer before becoming a member of Congress. She also mentioned that the U.S. Capitol Police were investigating the publication of her nude photos.

She announced her resignation from Congress via a statement on Twitter on October 27th, and blamed "double standard" and "misogynistic culture" for her decision to resign in her final speech before Congress on October 31. She closed her speech stating, "as my final act I voted to move forward with the impeachment of Donald Trump on behalf of the women of the United States of America."

Katie Hill first met Kenny Heslep when she was working at a Barnes & Noble before going to college and they bonded over their mutual love of books. Katie, who came out as bisexual after high school, married Heslep in 2010 and claimed he introduced her to the idea of engaging in threesomes.

They were already active on websites for people seeking alternative relationships, and shortly after marriage, entered their first three-person, long-term relationship with a woman they’d met on OkCupid. She was also aware that her husband was posting intimate photos of her, where her face was not visible, on various websites, but did not consider any future consequences.

When Heslep became unemployed in 2014, he started tending to their dogs, goats, and chickens in their newly bought farm, the same one where she grew up. They tried to have children, but she was diagnosed with endometriosis and had to have an ovary removed.

She first met Morgan, a junior bisexual female campaign staffer, at a community event in fall 2017 and hired her “as my body person, my person who was literally with me all the time”. They developed feelings for each other and Hill revealed to her about her past three-person relationship, following which her controlling husband entered into the relationship and also took photos of them that were later published.

She termed the publication of her nude photos an invasion of privacy and filed a lawsuit against her ex-husband, the Daily Mail, and RedState over "non consensual porn" in December 2020. The case pitted California’s “revenge porn” law against the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the judge fined her ruling the photos were protected as "a matter of public issue or public interest".

She had an interaction with former Playboy reporter-turned-novelist Alex Thomas at the congressional softball game in June 2019, weeks after she left Heslep, and later credited him for being her “rock” during the scandal. They two are currently in a relationship and recently welcomed their first child, Finn, which they described as “a sign from the universe”.

Katie Hill has opened up about being sexually assaulted several times in her youth, starting at just eight, by a slightly older girl who, she later learned, had herself been molested. At 15, she was assaulted by an older man while camping with a friend during a France trip, and a year later, had an encounter with another older man that she initially “perceived” as consensual.