A candidate in a high-stakes legislative contest in Virginia had sex with her husband in live videos posted on a pornographic website and asked viewers to pay them money in return for carrying out specific sex acts.
Screenshots of Susanna Gibson on the website were shared with The Associated Press. The campaign for Gibson, a Democrat running for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in a district just outside Richmond, issued a statement Monday in which it denounced the sharing of the videos as a violation of the law and her privacy. Gibson called the exposure of the videos “the worst gutter politics.”
“It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” she said in the statement. “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”
She probably didn’t break a law, but that may also depend on when and where this happened. Virginia passed a low that went into effect recently banning websites from showing content “not appropriate for children” without age verification. I doubt a user posting a video is responsible for it though, and the website may have required it (but some do not still).
That law came into effect two months ago, so if she was violating the law, it was by posting in the last two months on a non-compliant website which she would have had to personally run (since liability for that would fall on the site owners, as you alluded to).
So, uh, it’s basically guaranteed she didn’t break the law and nobody’s alluding to actual lawbreaking.