Virginia 'porn Dem' Susanna Gibson breaks her silence after videos emerged of her performing sex acts with her husband online for 'tips' - and says she was victim of 'hit job' and wouldn't wish humiliation on her worst enemy

The so-called 'porn Dem,' Susanna Gibson, who lost her Virginia House of Delegates race last month, after webcam videos of her having sex with her husband were exposed, says she was victim of 'hit job' and is determined to find out who was responsible for leaking the clips.

Gibson, a Democrat whose House of Delegates campaign and personal life were rocked by news reports that she had livestreamed sex acts with her husband on a pornographic website, says she wouldn't wish the humiliation on her worst enemy.

While expressing regret about what unfolded, Gibson is also unapologetic about her participation in the online sex acts. 

She maintains that a crime was committed when members of the news media were alerted to the existence of videos documenting what had been livestreamed to the site Chaturbate.

In a profile piece with Politico, Gibson tells of the embarrassment she felt that such private acts were made glaringly public after the Washington Post broke the story.

'When you find out that there are sexually explicit videos of you online - it is a feeling that I would not wish on my worst enemy,' the nurse practitioner and mother-of-two said. 

'My entire life was rocked on September 11, when the article 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 explained.

'They had found these videos on the dark web and shopped them around to various news outlets. I didn't have any idea that there were ever videos of me that had been made and uploaded to multiple sites,' she explained, appearing to be blindsided.

Gibson together with her husband could be seen in more than a dozen videos all archived on Chaturbate dating back to September 2022.

She said she had 'no idea' the videos existed until they were brought to her attention by reporters. 

Two preemptive opposition research efforts into her own background that she had approved - a common political practice - also did not turn them up, she said.

Gibson and her husband had no idea their livestreaming would be recorded in any fashion, she said.

She claims she was the victim of 'an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.' 

The platform the couple used warns in its privacy policy that it cannot control the use of content and that streams may indeed be recorded. 

'I think if I wasn’t a candidate, the Post probably would have been appalled at the invasion of my privacy. But because I was a candidate, they decided that it was a political story, rather than an invasion of my privacy and potentially a crime,' Gibson said.

Gibson, who maintains that nothing about her use of the streaming platform had any bearing on her qualifications to hold public office, said sex between consenting adults should never merit a news story. 

'Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime,' she maintains.

'I think what people do in their private lives, digitally — if it is legal, it is consensual and has no bearing on their ability to do their jobs — I think there should be a barrier.

'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 explained.

'I think anything, especially that has to do with sexuality — there needs to be a significant barrier there, because of the damage that it can do. It’s a breach of trust and a breach of dignity — the right to dignity and privacy and sexual autonomy,' she said.

A nurse practitioner with degrees from the University of Virginia and Columbia University, Gibson said she decided to run for office after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to an abortion was overturned last year. 

She won a competitive June primary and centered her message to voters on protecting abortion rights as the state's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, pledged to enact stricter limits.

Gibson said she 'never once' thought of dropping out of the race despite such salacious details about her bedroom antics on full display.

Journalists loitered outside her home for days, unfamiliar vehicles lingered in the street and death threats landed in her mailbox, she claims. 

Her social media mentions are still replete with criticism and slurs.

'I could barely get up off the floor for about two weeks,' she said, adding that anyone reading about her account should think about how it would feel 'to know that your naked body is going to be splashed all over the internet.'

Gibson said 'of course' she regrets the part she played in allowing that to happen. But she added it was a choice she made 'in the context of my loving marriage' and that she was not ashamed and had done nothing wrong.

While some donors and top Democratic Party officials generally distanced themselves from the controversy, Gibson said she had plenty of support, including from one of the state's most prominent female politicians , L. Louise Lucas. 

Gibson's campaign staffers stood by her, friends flew in from around the country to comfort her and over 2,000 new donors contributed to her campaign in the immediate aftermath, she said.

Abortion rights groups and a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group continued to support her campaign.

Incredibly, the scandalous story appeared to have little bearing on the outcome of the election.

Although Republican businessman David Owen beat Gibson by less than 1,000 votes, final results showed - about 2 percentage points - it was a far narrower margin than some had expected.

'Voters didn’t care,' Gibson crows. 'The Republican Party in Virginia never would have sent those mailers if they didn’t know I was going to win or certainly could win.

'I knocked, on average, 100 doors a day for two months. You have conversations with voters and you can kind of tell who knew and who didn’t know, and who knew and didn’t care. Very few people actually seemed to care — very few. I can count them on less than two hands,' she boasts.

Gibson said she believes such 'revenge porn' episodes might become ever more common as millennials become old enough to run for office. 

'I think this is going to continue to happen. 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.

'There are going to be very few millennial women who are aging into running for office, who don't have some kind of picture or video on their device, on a partner's device, somewhere on their iCloud, right?' she said. 

Gibson said she's retained an attorney who specializes in sex crimes and has made a complaint with local police and the FBI.

She believes that distributing the videos in which she featured constitutes an offense under Virginia's 'revenge porn' law.

'I want the person who found and then disseminated illegal pornographic images of me — again, violating federal and state laws — they need to be held accountable 

'It’s going to be a long process. Subpoenas take a long time. But there is a special victims detective who also has FBI privileges looking into it now. She has been for about a month now. I’m optimistic,' Gibson said.

While Gibson called it 'enraging' to be 'reduced' by some people to this controversy, she said she's moving forward holding her head high.

'You don't get to treat women like this and have us sit down and be quiet,' she said.