Katie Hill Describes Wanting to Kill Herself During Scandal

Former House member declares she hasn't given up the fight
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 8, 2019 11:25 AM CST
Katie Hill Describes Wanting to Kill Herself During Scandal
Katie Hill casts her ballot in 2018 in California, the election in which she won a congressional seat.   (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

As scandal closed in on her, former Rep. Katie Hill says, politicians and commentators were talking about her downfall in a way that sounded like she was dead. "I'm not," Hill writes in the New York Times, "though sometimes I’ve wished to be." So she picked up a paring knife and drew a bath. "I felt like I was out of my body, like it was moving without me," Hill says. After running the knife along the veins in her wrist, she thought of her family and supporters, the people she had let down already and would be hurting again. "I realized I couldn’t do it," she wrote. "I don't get to quit. I have to keep going forward, and be part of the fight to create the change that those young girls are counting on." Hill had resigned her congressional seat in October after allegations of an inappropriate relationship with an aide and nude photos of her were sent to a conservative website.

Hill maintains that her estranged husband is behind the downfall. She had tried to leave, she says in the Times, once just before she was elected in 2018. "He made it clear to me that if I left, he would ruin me." When she moved in with her mother later, she says, "The fear that my husband would ruin me hung over me every day." That's what she says happened with the release of the nude photos: "I believe my husband is the source of the images." Whatever is next for her, Hill writes, surely will include more pain. "But I'm in the fight," she says, "and I’m glad it's not all over after all." (More Katie Hill stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X