Hill recognized from the beginning that her relationship with Morgan, which spanned the majority of the campaign and her first months in office, could be problematic in her new role. Yet she did little to protect herself, failing to tell her chief of staff about the indiscretion. The photos and what they revealed about her personal life would have been damning for any politician but had the potential to be especially harmful to someone like Hill — young, female, openly bisexual. Having no plan in place put her at an immediate disadvantage. “You know, honestly, it was one of those things where it was like, Well, I’ll just deny it,” Hill told me. “Morgan is not accusing me of anything. She doesn’t want it to come out any more than I do.” Plenty of politicians lie, but it’s rare for one to tell a reporter it was her game plan.
...
Hill spent most of her childhood in Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita, a mostly middle-class enclave just north of Los Angeles. She told me she had a happy childhood, one spent riding bikes with her younger sister and other kids in the neighborhood, who sometimes pushed one another down hills in barrels. Hill credited her parents with allowing her to be independent: “They really did foster in me … that confidence in knowing I was able to do anything I set my mind to and being willing to take a risk. The risk piece is a big element of this.”
...
Looking back, Hill said she was perhaps too eager to rush through childhood. “If I were to say I have regrets, it would be that I was trying to grow up so fast,” she told me. Behind the façade of the brilliant self-starter was a young woman with depression, a fractured family, and the aftermath of what she described as many sexual assaults. (The precise number changes. In two separate interviews in December, Hill recounted to me being sexually assaulted three times. In February, at the Makers Conference in Los Angeles, she told another reporter she’d been sexually assaulted four times “before I even graduated high school.”)
...
Hill began a career in the nonprofit sector, first working at an organization that helps at-risk youth, then at People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), where she was employed for eight years. Hill worked her way up to executive director, managing a $50 million budget and earning $174,000 a year. Heslep briefly held a job as an EMT and also worked at PATH in a role Hill said wasn’t under her purview. But from 2014 on, he was unemployed. They bought the small ranch where Heslep grew up, and while Hill worked, Heslep tended to their dogs, goats, and chickens. The couple tried to have children, but Hill said she was diagnosed with endometriosis and had to have an ovary removed.
...
Even in the earliest weeks of her campaign, Hill proved to be a charismatic natural, able to position herself as both progressive enough for the resistance and palatable enough for moderates and independents. She was openly bisexual but married to a man. She supported gun-safety legislation but owned a gun herself. Hill sold herself as a “pragmatic progressive,” the scrappy daughter of a Republican who would cut through the bullshit in Washington and work across the aisle.
...
She went all in on women’s empowerment; after all, maybe for the first time ever, being a young, female candidate was an asset rather than a detriment. She denounced the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh and stood publicly with local GOP consultant Jennifer Van Laar, retweeting an interview in which Van Laar said she had been sexually harassed by a Republican assembly candidate who’d defeated Van Laar’s candidate in a primary. “Believe Women,” Hill tweeted. “#TimesUp.”
...
Hill said she was tens of thousands of dollars in debt from her divorce’s legal fees, and her last congressional paycheck was deposited on December 1. So she was wasting no time in launching her comeback. Hill is simultaneously writing a book, appearing regularly on TV, taking paid speaking gigs about women’s empowerment, and starting a political PAC with money from her war chest.
...
There’s suddenly a lot of freedom in her life. She has a new girlfriend. “Let’s put it this way: I’m new at being single, and I’m seeing a few people,” she said. It mattered less what people say or who they see her with. And while she hadn’t ruled out a future run for office, “I’m not going to live my life planning to run.” In a year when she thought she’d be campaigning for her reelection, she has thrown her weight behind California assemblywoman Christy Smith. It’s shaping up to be a political circus, with 13 candidates seeking her seat, including Knight and former Trump campaign adviser and convicted felon George Papadopoulos.
...
Hill’s reinvention as full-time feminist champion has relied almost entirely on people both liking and trusting her. Her forthcoming book, She Will Rise, will be both a memoir and “about how women ultimately shift power,” Hill said. (It will be released on August 18, the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.) And on the purple-and-pink website for Hill’s new PAC, HER Time, she pledged to help women running for office, making amends for what she called “this unreconciled dynamic around what happened with Morgan.”
...
Late that night, she shared a photo of herself and a friend out dancing, and soon she was back to tweeting about politics and wanting a pet squirrel. The next week, there were plugs for HER Time in national media outlets, with headlines such as “Katie Hill’s Next Chapter Starts Now” and “Katie Hill Is on a Mission to Get Young Women Elected to Office,” and a New York Times piece about her book that didn’t mention the hacking. Hill seemed to know the news cycle moves fast and that the interest in her, no matter what prompts it, is valuable. “She is an unbelievable political talent,” says the strategist, who watched her campaign closely. “Katie has that quality that people don’t believe negative things about her.”
She could have had a good career in Congress, but she will now have to continue having a career as an activist.
We are officially launching HER Time! 
" / Twitter