The 2023 Virginia elections left Democrats with much to be elated about. State Democrats took back control of the Virginia House of Delegates and maintained control of the Virginia Senate, denying Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin a legislative trifecta. In the lead-up to this election, many pundits were convinced that “electoral juggernaut” Youngkin would lead the state Republicans to a sweeping victory, despite his bizarre focus on abortion. (Virginia, like almost all other states, is pro-choice. This probably means that Glenn Youngkin is no longer going to run for president.
But all was not sunshine and rainbows for Democrats in the state for lovers. Democrat Susanna Gibson lost to Republican David Owen for the position of delegate for the newly mapped District 57. But a Democrat losing in Virginia isn’t very newsworthy. In general, nothing in the primarily Henrico and Goochland County’s District 57 is notable either. But on Sept. 11, the Washington Post (!) published the article “Va. Dem. House candidate performed sex online with husband for tips” and one small race became national news.
A Republican operative informed the Washington Post that Gibson live-streamed sexual activities on Chaturbate, a pornographic live-streaming website. Or, in the Washington Posts’ words: “Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two young children running in a highly competitive suburban Richmond district, streamed sex acts on Chaturbate, a platform that says it takes its name from ‘the act of masturbating while chatting online.’”
The article is riddled with strange sentences that are more moralizing than newsworthy. For example: “Gibson, 40, can be seen in the videos soliciting ‘tips’ for performing specific acts — in apparent violation of Chaturbate’s terms and conditions, which say: ‘Requesting or demanding specific acts for tips may result in a ban from the Platform for all parties involved.’”
It would seem more important to note that section 1.v of their terms and conditions says, “You will not record or otherwise capture any of the content shared and/or streamed by any other user of the Platform for any reason.” After all, that is the only reason that WaPo found out about this, and Gibson’s campaign’s labelling of the exposure as a sex-crime partially relies on this. The videos that the Washington Post saw were uploaded from other websites, as Chaturbate doesn’t save livestreamed videos.
The clearly motivated nature of this exposure has led Gibson’s campaign to call this “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family” and “revenge porn,” and their arguments are pretty sound. In 2021, the Virginia Court of Appeals found that consenting to be seen sexually does not imply a consent to be permanently recorded sexually, and the streaming on a site that explicitly forbids permanent recordings is a clear sign that Gibson and her husband did not consent to having recordings on the internet forever. There is a near unanimous agreement that celebrities that get their nudes leaked are victims, so why not here?
One big question that will come to the mind of anyone reading the article is, of course, “How did the operative stumble upon these videos? Is he (or she) some sort of pornography addict? Or is it now common for opposition campaigns to look absolutely everywhere for material?” Maybe the George Santos situation lit a fire under their asses. We aren’t told, because “the operative provided the information on the condition of anonymity to avoid being drawn into the controversy.”
We also get some play-by-plays of how parts of streams happened, which seems irrelevant. I can see how the overall fact of a candidate “performing sex online with [her] husband for tips” would be newsworthy. However, lines like “as tips apparently arrive, she says ‘thank you’ five times and tells her husband she will agree to that act” don’t seem to serve a real journalistic purpose. I did not come out of reading this article believing that the journalist who wrote it had a neutral perspective.
After all this information came to light, candidate David Owen was quoted as “feel[ing] terrible for her children.” This did not stop the Republican Party of Virginia from mailing out explicit fliers with censored screenshots and quotes from the videos. This is very weird at best, and disseminating revenge porn at worst, depending on where you land on the matter.
Of course, doing Chaturbate livestreams wouldn’t make someone a bad representative, and probably won’t even be newsworthy in 20 years. Owen won by a small margin of 52.16 percent to 48.40 percent, meaning this issue may have been enough to flip the election. Or it may have been the opposite, and the nude mailers may have disgusted enough voters that a Republican blowout turned into a squeaker. We don’t know. As David Owen said: “As far as whether it disqualifies her or not, that will be up to the voters in the district.” And so concludes another episode in the annals of the Washington Post’s stunning decline, and one more example of off-putting Republican campaign strategies. Susanna Gibson hasn’t ruled out another campaign in the future, and people are still replying obscenities to her on X (née Twitter) with their full legal names as usernames.
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