How far in the tank is the mainstream press for any Democrat who happens to have breath in their lungs? The answer is so far in the tank that Politico published a puff piece on failed Virginia politician Susanna Gibson that would make Katie Hill blush.

The background of the story involves Gibson's run for the Virginia Senate during the 2023 election. One of the reasons she ultimately lost that race was the focus on pornographic videos she filmed with her husband. Those videos were originally uploaded (or streamed and captured) to the internet by Gibson herself and included people paying her to watch her urinate and other degenerate behavior. 

In response, Politico decided to give her a platform to tell her side of the story in a piece laughably entitled "Susanna Gibson lost her election after her online sex life was exposed. Now she’s speaking out." The problem is that her side of the story makes little sense. For example, Gibson claims she had no idea that the videos were made and uploaded to multiple sites.

The last three months of a campaign are just a blur. Can you talk about what that experience was like for you, having to do the home sprint of a campaign with this other issue on top of it?

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. 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.

I'm not going to give a play-by-play of the videos, but rest assured, she was completely aware she was being filmed, even talking to those in a chat room who were making requests. Her comment that she didn't know they had been uploaded to "multiple sites" is a rhetorical sleight of hand. It's meant to give the impression she was unknowingly filmed. That's simply not true. What she actually means is that she didn't know her streams were captured and uploaded elsewhere.

Given that, Politico's description that her videos were "exposed" is misleading. She voluntarily put them on the internet. They were popularized during the campaign (because no one would have cared otherwise), but they were not exposed as if they were otherwise private videos.

Later in Politico's interview, Gibson goes beyond just insinuating she didn't know she was being recorded and makes the claim outright.

Can I ask you how your family and your friends responded to the Post story?

We spent a few days fighting with them, two days or so, a day and a half —

Sorry, “fighting with them” — meaning, the Post?

Fighting with the Post. 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.

Frankly, it's astonishing to see her say she didn't know she was being recorded when she was talking to the camera, interacting with a chat room of people online, and performing sexual acts for "tips" based on what the video audience requested. What is even the explanation there? How could she have not known she was being recorded? Again, it seems like a legal sleight of hand, perhaps suggesting that she knew she was streaming to a website but didn't consent to the streams being captured. That's not really how the internet works, though.

Yes this woman clearly didn’t know she was on video. pic.twitter.com/2XXUXmZpcw

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) December 9, 2023

Perhaps just as astonishing is that Politico never once pointed out the contradictions in its write-up. Gibson isn't pressed at all about her role in putting the videos online. Instead, she is left to make claim after claim that flies in the face of public evidence. At one point, she compared herself to Huma Abedin, whose ex-husband Anthony Weiner was caught sexting an underage girl. Whatever you think of Abedin, Gibson's situation is not at all comparable.

In short, Gibson was the architect of her own demise, and Politico is a joke for pretending she was a victim.