Susanna Gibson, the Virginia democrat who filmed live video streams of her and her husband having sex online for “tips,” said in an interview this week that she is the victim in the scandal that ensued after the videos were revealed to the public.
To recap, Gibson, 40, ran for Virginia’s House of Delegates and lost after the videos surfaced and were shared with the public. Gibson is a nurse practitioner and has two children. In September, The Washington Post broke the story claiming that she was performing sex acts online for tips.
In an interview with Politico published on Saturday, Gibson said: “I’m fundamentally changed as a human having gone through something like that.”
Gibson claimed that she was seeing patients when she was contacted multiple times by a reporter. That is when she learned that the explicit videos she made herself were uploaded to multiple websites and were on the dark web.
“My entire life was rocked on Sept. 11, when the article ran. It ran, implying that I performed sex acts online with my husband for money. It was really written based on this Dropbox file that self-described Republican operatives shopped around," Gibson said.
VA Dem featured in streamed sex acts online says she’s the victim: ‘Entire life was rocked’ https://t.co/LBGUncrxot pic.twitter.com/RWtHVGCbVS
— New York Post (@nypost) December 11, 2023
“That’s how I found out. When you find out that there are sexually explicit videos of you online, especially by being contacted by national reporters — it is a feeling that I would not wish on my worst enemy,” she added.
Gibson claimed she started “fighting” with the Post about the story.
“I hired an amazing attorney who worked around the clock and wrote them several letters, essentially saying: To be clear, Ms. Gibson never acknowledged or consented to videos being recorded, this is illegal pornography because it is illegal to record someone in a state of undress without consent,” she said, claiming that the story was an “invasion of privacy.”
Gibson added that she thinks what happened to her will “continue to happen as millennials age into running for office.”
“There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point. This is something that is very common, especially in the younger generations,” she claimed. “Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.”
Matt previously reported how Gibson and her husband posted the videos on the adult site Chaturbate. Her poll numbers sank after the Post’s story ran.
“I think that it is unethical to make people’s private lives — especially their sexual private lives — public and part of how we think about them and their ability to do their jobs and make positive contributions to their communities,” Gibson told Politico.