How Politician Turned Advocate Susanna Gibson Battles Non-Consensual Imagery

0:07Hello, and welcome to another special interview episode of the 4for Media Podcast. 4-4 Media is a journalist-founded company and runs on your support. To subscribe, visit 4-4media.co. You'll get bonus content every week and access to bonus content like subscribers-only podcast episodes and much more. I'm your host, Sam, and with me today is Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner who ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2023 and is now a victim advocate for folks targeted by non-consensual intimate imagery online. Hi, Susanna. It's great to see you. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

0:46Thanks for having me. Yeah, most people I think listening probably recognize you from your candidacy and all the news stories surrounding it, including when you yourself became a victim of non-consensual imagery. But before we unpack all of that, I would love to get to know you a little bit deeper than that first. So yeah, I mean, first of all, I guess, where are you calling us from today? So I am originally from Charlottesville, Virginia. I was born here, raised here, went to UVA for undergraduate and then moved essentially as far away as possible, moved to San Francisco. as soon as college was done.

1:31And then came back to Virginia, but to Richmond, Virginia, about an hour away back in 2008. I am a nurse practitioner by training. And I have two young children, almost nine and almost 11. And yeah, ran for the House of delegates in Virginia, was the Democratic nominee in 2023, had never wanted to be in politics before ever. My mom was always very like politically involved, but I have always been a really big advocate for sexual health and reproductive health care in general, family planning, especially with the adolescent and young adult population. And so, yeah, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the seat was open and it was one of the most, if not the most competitive seat in the house in Virginia.

2:30And I decided that a nurse practitioner or mother is who could win it. Very cool. I've weirdly spent a lot of time in Charlottesville and not that weird. I went to school in Harrisonburg, but I went to EMU. Easter Mennonite. Yeah, but I spent a lot of time partying at Jameo and a lot of time driving down to Charlottesville and doing the same. And Richmond still very much has my heart. But yeah, so you decided to get into politics just because you saw the need for someone to step up after Roe Fowl or what was that kind of thought process like when you first got into it? Yeah, well, first of all, it's terrifying to, you know, just in general to like say, I think I can do this.

3:17I think I would be the best choice, especially as a woman. That is not a natural. We're not the ones in class, or at least I certainly wasn't throwing their hands up, shouting wrong answers. I was always the one that knew the right answer and was sitting there quietly because I was too afraid to even raise my hand. So, but yeah, the seat, Virginia had redistricted based on the 2020 census. And so lines were redrawn and this particular district had always been very heavily gerrymandered Republican. But with that redistricting, it moved to 51R, 49D district. So certainly winnable, but with the right Dem nominee and a lot of money.

4:09And when I decide to do something, I do it and I throw myself into it and no one will ever outwork me. And that was a promise I made to people who believed in me from the very beginning. And I think I've proved that that's true. So I worked my butt off and was able to raise a lot of money and get a lot of support from people who didn't normally get into primaries. I was in a primary with an older retired man. And a lot of people tend to stay out of primaries, but I was able to gain their support because I think people really sense that I was genuine and that I was not a career politician. I just really cared about my community, about reproductive health care.

4:54And then also healthcare policy in general has always been something important to me. Yeah, I would imagine as a nurse coming into this, you've seen firsthand the effects of things like sex education and reproductive education, reproductive health. And I can definitely see the call to kind of say, okay, if no one's going to do this, I need to do this. If the people we elect in there are going to be the people that can decide reproductive health care and access for women and girls in Virginia, I'm going to be there as a health care provider to speak up. Yeah. Kind of my thought process. But yeah, I also did home-based primary care for almost a decade.

5:42So primary care for people who are homebound. So people who are very medically complex, couldn't leave their home without significant difficulty, ambulance, transportation, that kind of thing. So patients with ALS, MS, patients on home ventilators, all of that. And I went in and out of their homes for the better part of a decade. And most of these patients were indigent and lacked a lot of resources and support. And so it really showed me the need for, in the intersection of affordable housing and transportation, you know, when their personal home, I'm probably going on too long, but when their home healthcare aides are the only ones that come into a house and get them up out of bed and help them toilet and feed them and that home healthcare aides car breaks down and then they are unable then to get to that patient, what happens, right?

6:36And so I really saw and understood the need and how people actually live in a way that I doubt very many legislators actually have ever experienced even for a day, much less for a decade. Yeah, absolutely. How did you first get into nursing? Because that's a tough career, let alone politics. I don't do anything easy. I have a degree in religious studies, actually, from UVA. So a bachelor's in religious studies. I thought I wanted to go to law school and then quickly decided I didn't. And a friend's mother was a nurse practitioner in the UVA PZR for a long time. And so I shadowed her a bit. And then I shadowed another nurse practitioner and volunteered at the UVA Teen Health Center and really fell in love with particularly family cleaning, sexual education, reproductive health.

7:37And so I went back to school at Columbia University and did an accelerated second degree program for people who have their bachelors in something other than nursing. So, and then did my master's, started my master's there and finished at UVA and worked full-time at VCU while I did that. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. I know I have a few friends who are nurses, and they are very hardworking and I don't envy their jobs at all. So you're doing the Lord's work for real. Yeah, so I guess that kind of brings me to the reason probably most people nationally heard your story originally was this story that blew up about images that were leaked to the press, sent to the press involving you and intimate imagery.

8:32Let's kind of unpack that a little bit. Where were you when you found out that these images were going around? Kind of walk me through what you heard that they were, who told you, all that stuff.

8:48So I was in clinic seeing patients. It was September 7th, actually. I remember it well. It was a Thursday afternoon. And around lunchtime, one of my consultants had, who is a longtime consultant in Virginia politics. He's been around for a long time. And really actually kind of my guardian, my other guardian angel, other than Charles. And he had texted me and said, hey, this reporter contacted, had contacted him and wants, you know, my number. her. And I said, okay, that's fine. Give it to her. And being just, again, not thinking that there was anything that could ever, why would I be afraid to talk to a reporter happy to?

9:33And he said, no, I'm not going to give it to her until I know what she wants. It's like, okay, well, go find out what she wants then and then get back to me. And I guess they had an exchange and it went back and forth for about an hour. And she was like, I'm not telling you why I want to talk to her. Not going to happen. And she said, she's a mom of two young kids. I don't want to have to go after her. And so it just was this back and forth. And finally, I screenshot it. I wrote a text and screenshotted it. And he showed the screenshot to her and she finally told him and he called me back and he said, they have pictures or videos of you having sex with your husband.

10:24And I mean, I just need people to know because people think that I posted these things. I uploaded them. I knew that they were out there. I had no idea, none ever that recordings of me were made much less than put on a pirate, a legal pirate pornography site. And apparently what had happened was that, and I've found out a lot more since election, how this happened and all of that, but you know, it's horrifying and it's profoundly violating as a human being to find out that there are intimate images of you or recordings of you online point blank period running for office, not running for office.

11:16It is a horrible violation of consent and it is sexual violence. and I felt though I've never, I've never been like wind knocked out of me feeling before, but I did, I felt like that. And I didn't even know what they had. And that reporter was kind enough to actually let us know where the links were that had been sent to her so that I could get them. I went home, figured out how to file DMCA takedown requests, like had no idea, figured it out, filed them. I thought there were only three links because this is how naive I was to the world of pornography and pirate user uploaded websites. And I thought it was done.

11:59And I was like, well, if I got them down, if the links happened to have gotten sent to someone else, at least they're down. They're not active. I didn't know until Saturday, two days later, when the Washington Post reporter came to a Canvas launch where I had my daughter with me, that they'd actually been put in a Dropbox file and sent to the AP, to the Washington Post, and to another reporter I know as well. And everyone else declined to write a story on it. They said, this isn't a story, right? This is a crime. And didn't write on it, didn't even contact me to ask me about it, but the Washington Post reporter did.

12:47And so that's how I found out. And then I found out on Saturday when she came up to me and my manager, luckily, was with me and kind of intercepted her as she started talking because I'm standing there with Senator Tim Kaine, who I just met, and my daughter, who was, what, she was seven, right? Seven, seven and a half. and uh it was it was horrible and that started a 48 hour give or take back and forth with the washington post and the reporter and her editors um that was probably the longest and worst 48 hours of my entire life and the the washington post reporter is the same one that texted originally sent a message that was a different reporter it was someone else it was wow yeah Yeah, she's a young woman, this reporter, who chose not to and told me where the links were so I could get them taken down.

13:43Oh, okay. She's a young woman. She's a mom. And she understood there seems to be a generational divide and gap between. It seems to be the kind of 60 to 70 year old feminists actually are the ones that really, one, don't understand. and two have been the worst to me by far, I would say is a generalization. Not all, by any means, but they tend to be the ones that have an issue. And I think that's because when they were born, like they grew up during the period of radical feminism, which was anti-sex. Sex is a tool of the patriarchy, right? Like certainly no pornography, certainly no anything. and um you know as i've learned more about the different waves in eras of feminism that really does make a lot of sense to me but yeah that like second wave feminism that's like all all sex work is exploitation or that you know all sex in general is like you said like a tool of the patriarchy is it's still powerful it's still out there there's still an influence of that but i would love to get into just like the generational divide in a few because i think that's really that's very interesting um that's something that i've written about too especially with like millennials running for office now but yeah i just kind of want to unpack a little bit without getting into too much detail because i don't want people to try to go find this stuff because i'm sure it's still available but are we talking about like like what exactly how are these images captured like it was a it was a screen recording right so like there was like a live stream or like, we're not talking about hidden cameras in your room.

15:33Like it was, yeah. No. Cause I think some people just have heard like kind of the top lines of the story, but just like how it actually happened. Cause it does happen to a lot of people. I think it'd be helpful to hear. Yeah. So what happened was my husband and I were having marriage difficulties a few years ago and we still are. I have filed for divorce, but not because of this, but right. But like We had been having difficulties in our marriage for a while. And this is before I decided to run for office, before it was even on my radar.

16:07And so he came to me one day and he said, hey, I have this particular fantasy of people watching us have sex. I was like, okay, I'll try that. I'm trying to save my marriage here and work on my marriage. And my husband had come to me. He had already researched it. He said, this particular platform is the safest one. No one can record you. And yes, I totally understand that. I am naive and believing that. Okay. But you trust your partner and he's technology savvy and I'm really not. And so he said he had done this research. It was safe. No one could be able to record you. You can block different areas of the US, different states, all of that.

16:55And so I said, okay. And I tried it. And I tried it a few times. Went to him and was like, I'm really not comfortable with this. This is not for me. And that was that, right? Done. And unbeknownst to me, there are different types of software and bots where users... It's not like someone was recording this on their phone, right? Like recording a screen of this. It was this bot, if you will. It is a huge problem. It is all non-consensual. This is not consensual recordings that people took, made, or uploaded. Yeah, it's something that's meant to be like ephemeral. And like you said, like you can kind of gate it by location to protect yourself or if you don't want to be like outed to your family or your community, which is a huge problem.

17:53If you're doing sex work, it's something that people who are doing that for their full time jobs, they don't want family to know. um so like you said it's like it's it's a huge it's this industry almost it's like this cottage industry of people pirating what should be yep um you know something that isn't saved forever then it suddenly is so yeah that's i think that's super interesting and that's that's an interesting thing to kind of i guess tease out like the technicalities of that because i think a lot of people don't realize you know they're like it's a live stream or it's a it's a um it's a Snapchat that disappears.

18:29It's stuff like that. It's just kind of like it gets saved even if you don't realize it a lot of the time. Snapchat absolutely gets saved. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, big time. And I think like consent, particularly in the digital age, as you just said, people don't understand that. So there is case law precedent in Virginia, and I'm sure throughout the country that says there is a difference between consenting to something that people can see that exists only for a moment in time and exists only in their memory and consenting to someone having a recording or downloading something that can be replayed and then shared in perpetuity.

19:13There is a difference. You consenting to letting your boyfriend see you naked is not the same as you consenting to your boyfriend and his friends seeing you naked, right? Very different things. And when it comes to the digital age and the digital world, that is something that people really do seem to grasp, have a difficult time grasping and understanding. Thank you.

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24:10So how did this, this story comes out in the Washington Post. They're the only ones that run with it. They break the story. What are the repercussions? Like how does it affect the rest of your campaign? Do you get things like harassment? What do you hear from people and the fallout of this for you? I mean, during the campaign... So I will say this. She wrote that article and it was her and I know it was her editors as well, but they wrote that article in a way that framed it as I'm essentially raising money for my campaign by having sex online, which is insane. I'm a nurse practitioner and I'm running for the most competitive seat in Virginia.

24:50I do not have time to be like, how much time does one person have? I have two young kids also and a husband who commutes and is an attorney. But they wrote it in a way without actually understanding. I never made any money. First of all, to be clear, again, this was not sex work. It was kinky sex with my husband a few times. It's just not who I am. And I do feel that there's nothing wrong with sex work. And I feel strongly about that, but it's just not accurate in terms of like what I was doing. It's not your work. Yeah. It's not my work. And it happened before the campaign, right? Like it was.

25:30Correct. But they wrote that article and they said, I think, I forget how many, 12 or 14, you know, there were 12 or 14 videos uploaded to this illegal pirate site in the month of September of 2022. Like I have no control over when illegal well, pirate sites upload things, but also recently have gone to this site and there's two minute videos and three minute videos and five minute videos. Like people don't understand, they take a recording and they chop it up and they put in this, all pirate sites do this, right? Like it's not this 12 separate sexual encounters. It is a two minute chunk of a video that they had obtained.

26:14So they wrote this article, the Washington Post did, in a way that essentially implied that. And really, they wrote it in a way that was sensationalized and the headline was written to draw attention. And they put a picture of me up in there with my scrubs and my dog. And immediately this goes viral. X, to put it in perspective, the videos of me, X actually blacked out for a chunk of time to try and scrub these videos off of X because it was taking over all of X. I mean, and we didn't have to ask them to do that. They did that. That is how many times non-consensual recordings of me were posted on Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, just that day, just that day that it came out, that article came out about three o 'clock.

27:14And there was this immediate explosion of every national news organization in the country then decided to follow it. And several, not in the US. One of my donors heard about it. He was in Belgium, right when this happened like it went they were internationally spread and shared and unfortunately what happened is the Virginia House caucus refused to let me respond or talk to any reporters and being women being silenced by the way is another topic we can talk about but like At that point, I was on the floor of my bathroom with my heated floors, but unable to get up off the bathroom. I couldn't eat.

28:07I couldn't drink. I couldn't physically lift myself up because it is sexual violence. And then to have national news organizations repeating something that is so not true and misleading, but also leads to further distribution and dissemination on a global level of non-consensual images of you, right? These videos and images, what JR or JM Murkowski, JH Murkowski, whoever he was, posted a snippet of this video on his ex that had 5.2 million views just from his one tweet and picture of me. So, I mean, millions of views and mass distribution. Most of the male members in the Virginia General Assembly watched these videos and shared them amongst themselves.

29:04My coworker, my now state senator, who was a delegate at the time, who I shared an office space and staff with, we shared staff together, watched my video and then told me he didn't believe that I didn't know I was being reported. Okay. And banned me from going into the office, refused to let volunteers door knock with his stuff and my stuff they had to choose. And I mean, it was just this immediate explosion of victim blaming, shaming, mass distribution, and without people understanding or even feeling bad, you have the lawmakers of a state sharing non-consensual imagery of a female colleague and they don't feel bad about it.

29:51There is a problem with this. And I think that reflects society's, I think, one lack of understanding of technology and consent, but also the way that we view these crimes and that they're not crimes of sexual violence, right? But what ends up happening, it happened with me and it happens to women every day. Like I am not special to be clear. Like what has happened to me happens all the time. It is very textbook. So these images go viral. They then get posted everywhere.

30:33and I immediately started getting death threats, rape threats. I've gotten over a thousand rape threats and well over that in death threats. 4chan and 8chan, 8con started posting incredible death threats with my address, my phone number, my names of my children and their ages and the things that they wanted people to come do to me and my children. So I had to move my children out of the home in the middle of the night that same night and go take them to a friend's house. I had reporters, especially from the Daily Mail, camped out in front of my house for two weeks. I had to leave the state to get them to leave.

31:15I lost my job. I have had difficulty finding a new job. And by the way, I'm a really good nurse practitioner. like I was the lead of an entire division at the major academic medical center in Virginia, like the level one trauma center. I was running an entire division at the age of 30. Like I'm good at what I do. And I lost my job because of concerns of my reputation.