The World Cup winner, who currently plays for Porto, has insisted that he does not believe the lunar landings actually happened in 1969

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Legendary Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas has cast doubt on the United States moon landings!

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped foot on the lunar surface in 1969, meaning that 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of that “one small step for man”.

However, a number of conspiracy theorists believe that the moon landings were faked by the USA, with such evidence presented as an absence of stars in photographs and that the American flag fluttered as if caught in a breeze.

There are answers to each theory, but Casillas has now thrown his own hat into the ring, insisting that he has his own doubts.

Writing on Twitter, the Porto stopper said: “Next year it is 50 years (presumably) since the man stepped on the moon. I’m at a dinner party with friends… arguing about it. I raise the public gathering! Do you think he stepped on? Not me!”

Casillas is running a poll alongside the tweet, asking people to vote on whether they believe the moon landings actually happened.

Over 195,000 people have cast a vote at the time of writing, with 60 per cent believing the authenticity of the lunar landing.

Casillas has enjoyed an out-of-this-world career and has won an array of trophies both at club level and internationally.

The 37-year-old won the World Cup with Spain in 2010, and also won two successive European Championships, in 2008 and 2012.

With Real Madrid, he won five La Liga titles, and also lifted the Champions League three times.

Or maybe he didn’t.

The Old Lady made the headlines with the summer’s biggest transfer, but their rivals’ president believes it could backfire on them

Juventus have taken a big risk in signing Cristiano Ronaldo, according to Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis.

The former Manchester United superstar completed a move worth an initial €100 million (£88m/$117m)  from Real Madrid to the Serie A champions in June.

While it is believed to be less than his wages in Spain, Juve are reportedly paying Ronaldo €30m a year across a four-year contract, which is substantially more than the rest of their top players earn.

De Laurentiis believes such enormous fees represent a gamble on a player entering his 17th full season as a professional.

“Cristiano is getting on a bit now,” De Laurentiis told La Verita , as quoted by AS .

“To maintain some kind of balance, it’s very dangerous for a club to spend so much money on just one player – one who is reaching the end of his career.

“His salary is totally off the scale for Juve’s means. I wonder whether it will be more of a commercial success or more of a sporting success.

“If you start paying crazy wages, sooner or later, it will start going against you.”

De Laurentiis’ assessment of the financial risks stems from his claim that Ronaldo was offered to Napoli prior to the Juve’s involvement in discussions.

He says he met with the forward’s agent, Jorge Mendes, before the costs spiralled out of the club’s reach.

“[Mendes] told me that Ronaldo would make me rich, so I made him an offer: that the first €250m Cristiano brought in would be for Napoli and the next €100m would be for the player,” De Laurentiis said.

“That way, CR7 would have paid for himself. Then Juve appeared and that was when the bidding started.”

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The Barcelona head coach praised debutant and goalscorer Arthur following Saturday’s shoot-out win against Tottenham

Ernesto Valverde is excited about what Arthur can add to Barcelona after the Brazilian midfielder scored on his debut for the LaLiga champions.

It was a memorable debut for Arthur, who netted a stunning first-half goal as Barca defeated Tottenham 5-3 on penalties following a 2-2 draw at the International Champions Cup on Saturday.

Making his maiden appearance since arriving from Gremio in a €40 million (£35m/$46m) deal earlier this month, 21-year-old Arthur added to Munir El Haddadi’s 15th-minute opener 14 minutes later with an unstoppable shot from the edge of the penalty area, before Tottenham overturned a two-goal deficit in the second half to force a shoot-out.

Discussing Arthur’s debut at the Rose Bowl in California – where Malcom and Clement Lenglet also made their bows – Barca head coach Valverde told reporters: “He is a player who can give us a lot and he has shown he knows how to get the ball and give us a way out.

“Arthur has also shown how to approach shooting areas to score the goal he has scored.

“We have been training together for a while, just like with [former Sevilla defender] Clement Lenglet, with whom we have less doubts because he comes from LaLiga.

“In the case of Arthur we work so that he adapts. He had a good debut. He was very motivated.”

Barca’s night, however, was overshadowed by hamstring injuries to Denis Suarez and Andre Gomes.

Midifeld pair Suarez and Gomes were both forced off the field in the first half, putting a sour note on Barca’s winning start to their ICC campaign.

“It was the worst news of the night for us,” Valverde said. “It’s possible that we’ll lose them for the remainder of the [United States] tour.

“It will depend on the extent of the injuries.”

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Jorginho has already followed his former Napoli boss to Stamford Bridge, but the club’s chief warned there would be no further deals

Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis has accused former coach Maurizio Sarri of trying to take his “whole team” with him to new club Chelsea.

De Laurentiis replaced Sarri with Carlo Ancelotti at the end of last season, a punishment for taking too long to make his mind up about his future.

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The coach remained contractually tied to Napoli even after his dismissal, before Chelsea eventually reached an agreement with the club to bring him to the Premier League, sacking Antonio Conte as a result.

Chelsea’s appointment of Sarri played a major role in the signing of midfielder Jorginho, who initially looked destined to join Manchester City .

But Jorginho is not the only player Sarri tried to bring with him to Stamford Bridge, according to his former boss.

“I didn’t like him saying that we both made mistakes, as I don’t think I made any,” De Laurentiis told Sky Sport Italia.

“He had a contract, so I could’ve said something because he was behaving in unacceptably, going against players he didn’t think were very good.

“I was not wrong to not challenge him, even if it would’ve been the most obvious thing [to do].

“These players gave him a lot. He massacred them in his famous training sessions, but they always reacted well.

“After that, he wanted to take my whole team to England and dismantle it. I had to lay down the law to Marina [Granovskaia, director at Chelsea].

“He wanted Jorginho and I gave him away after talking with Ancelotti, who told me he was expecting a lot from [Amadou] Diawara and that he wants to play [Marek] Hamsik deeper.”

As is true of many legal concepts, “contempt of court” can be inexact in its definitions or implications. But that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her department’s treatment of thousands of students defrauded by the for-profit company Corinthian Colleges.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim in San Francisco on Oct. 24 slapped DeVos and her agency with a $100,000 sanction for civil contempt.

Kim found that, despite her having ordered DeVos’ agency in 2018 to cease collecting on federal loans taken out by the defrauded students, the Education Department had sent payment demands to 16,034 students. They included 847 whose credit reports had been dinged by the agency and 1,808 whose paychecks had been garnisheed or whose tax refunds had been withheld.

Eileen Connor, Harvard Law School

“There have to be some consequences for the violation of my order 16,000 times,” Kim ruled.

Kim’s ruling, stern as it is, fails to communicate the full flavor of the contempt DeVos and her department have shown toward those students — and students of other dishonest firms in the for-profit higher education sector — as well as for the processes established years ago to grant them loan forgiveness.

Don’t expect DeVos to feel the pain from Kim’s sanction. Although she’s an heiress by marriage to the DeVos family’s Amway merchandising fortune and estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, she won’t be getting the bill for the contempt citation — it goes to the taxpayers.

Those feeling the pain are the former Corinthian students, who were cheated of the opportunity to better themselves, and some of whom still struggle to make ends meet because the government hasn’t resolved their claims.

DeVos’ undermining of the forgiveness procedure started almost instantly after her confirmation as Education secretary in February 2017. She put a hold on a system that had been crafted under the Obama administration that effectively granted former Corinthian students full recompense on their government loans. Nearly a year later, she substituted an alternative process that was so legally flawed it was blocked by Judge Kim.

DeVos seemed to take the position that many, if not most, borrowers were intent on gaming the Obama system, claiming relief they didn’t deserve. She justified revoking the Obama-era program on grounds that “under the previous rules, all one had to do was raise his or her hands to be instantly entitled to so-called free money.” Told that she was legally bound to sign off on approvals for loan forgiveness that had been granted under Obama but not yet formalized, she added a handwritten note indicating she was signing the papers “with extreme displeasure.”

Meanwhile, she hasn’t shown the same skepticism toward the for-profit sector, appointing veterans of the industry to high-level jobs at the Education Department — including positions with direct oversight of the industry.

“The sector feels like they’ve never had a better friend in the federal government than Betsy DeVos,” says Eileen Connor of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, who represents plaintiffs in the lawsuit over the Corinthian settlement.

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Even after her department was raked over the coals by Judge Kim, DeVos tried to minimize her agency’s poor performance. “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans,” she tweeted. “We know & we’re fixing it.” Of course, the violation was her department’s, not the loan servicers’ — the department itself conceded in a report to the judge in September that it maintains “responsibility for the administration of its student loan portfolio” — and the “small #” was 16,000. DeVos, incidentally, couldn’t resist using her tweet to accuse Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of her most vocal critics, of lying.

In response to my request for further comment, the department referred me to a video featuring Mark Brown, chief operating officer of its Federal Student Aid unit, that was prepared after the contempt ruling. Brown asserts that refunds have been made to 99% of the borrowers who made payments on their loans or who had their wages or tax refunds garnisheed and that the department was working to correct credit reports for all the borrowers. Like DeVos, Brown blamed loan service firms for having “mistakenly billed” the borrowers. He also said, “We take full responsibility… We did not meet our own standard.”

A few words are warranted here about the company at the center of this case.

As has been amply documented in lawsuits and a congressional investigation, Corinthian Colleges victimized tens of thousands of typically low-income and minority students before it collapsed in 2015. The students were enticed by falsified job placement statistics to take out federal loans and spend those funds and their personal savings on technical and vocational programs.

Corinthian, a publicly traded company headquartered in Santa Ana, played a starring role in an investigation of the for-profit college industry conducted by a Senate committee in 2012. The committee reported that Corinthian, where the admissions staff was drawn chiefly from the ranks of salespersons and marketers rather than education professionals, had some of the highest student loan default rates and lowest student retention rates in the for-profit sector.

At its peak in 2009 and 2010, the committee said, Corinthian enrolled more than 113,000 students at 105 campuses in 25 states and online under the names of Everest, Heald College and WyoTech and collected some $1.7 billion in federal student aid.

Eventually the scam came crashing down. California then-Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris sued the firm in 2013, eventually winning a default judgment of $1.1 billion. More than 20 other states mounted their own investigations, and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed its own lawsuit alleging deceptive practices in 2014. The Education Department itself fined Corinthian $30 million in 2015 for “substantial misrepresentations” of job placement rates.

Corinthian’s insiders spent the years before its collapse riding high. Jack D. Massimino, its chairman and chief executive, collected $9.6 million in pay in 2011-13; Robert C. Owen, its chief financial officer, was paid $2.6 million over the same period.

The company recruited to its board former Secretary of Defense and U.S. Rep. Leon Panetta and former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, then (and still) CEO of the National Urban League with $60,000 a year in pay and $90,000 in deferred stock grants.

When the reckoning eventually came, however, the government treated Corinthian’s leaders with kid gloves. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its fraud case against Massimino and Owen for a pittance — $80,000 and $20,000, respectively. Neither had to admit wrongdoing and neither is barred from serving again as an officer or director of another publicly traded company. Some of the students who got nothing out of their high-priced Corinthian “education” ended up owing more than that for programs that charged tuition as high as $75,000 a year.

In a letter to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, Warren and fellow Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the settlement “shocking in its failure to appropriately hold these executives accountable for what they accurately termed “the largest collapse of an institution of higher education in American history.”

DeVos hasn’t made any secret of her indulgence toward the for-profit education sector. Among her earliest appointees was Julian Schmoke, a former dean of for-profit DeVry University, as chief enforcement officer and head of the Student Loan Enforcement Unit; in 2016, DeVry agreed to a $100-million settlement of Federal Trade Commission charges that it misled students with bogus employment statistics, covering some activities that took place while Schmoke was employed at DeVry.

Among DeVos’ other appointees were Diane Auer Jones, a former executive of Career Education Corp., which in 2013 had paid $10.5 million to settle a New York state investigation into inflated graduate employment claims, as principal deputy undersecretary (Jones served at CEC from 2010 to 2015); and Robert Eitel, a former executive at Bridgepoint Education and Career Education, as a senior advisor.

The loan forgiveness program that DeVos overturned had been crafted by the Obama administration to reflect Corinthian’s flagrant fraud. It offered fast-track relief to former students, canceling their outstanding federal loans and refunding money they already had paid. The government reached out to more than 300,000 former students to inform them of the program, and by Jan. 20, 2017, had processed more than 27,000 claims.

On that date, President Trump’s inauguration, the program stopped dead. By December 2017, the backlog had reached 99,000 applications. The following month, DeVos announced an “improved” system in which the average income of borrowers in a given Corinthian program would be compared with the earnings of graduates from a non-Corinthian program. The debt relief would be reflected in that ratio — in other words, Corinthian borrowers earning 60% of the control group’s income would be granted relief on 40% of their loan.

The plaintiffs in the Corinthian lawsuit termed this arrangement “illegal in at least seven different ways.” Judge Kim focused on the department’s use of Social Security records to make its calculations, which she concluded was a violation of federal privacy law. She issued an injunction halting the new system and ordered the department to “cease all efforts to collect debts” from former students who had filed for relief.

DeVos’ department displayed indifference to the court order. As Kim observed, the department made only minimal effort to inform the nine loan servicing firms it had under contract to deal with borrowers, sending them “a single email with three brief sentences of instruction” and not even mentioning that a federal court order was in place.

Government lawyers acknowledged that the department hadn’t complied with the injunction, but said it had been “working diligently” to rectify its failure. They argued that a contempt sanction would only “divert … unnecessarily” the department’s effort to comply.

Kim wasn’t having any of it. At an Oct. 7 hearing, according to court filings, she depicted the department’s attitude to be “at best … almost gross negligence of the magnitude of ‘we don’t care about the order, we’re going to do the minimal amount of effort we need’” and “at worst, it’s intentional flouting.” She said she was “astounded, really, just really astounded” at the “sheer scale of violations” of her injunction.

Nothing in Kim’s ruling will force DeVos or her department to perform better. DeVos is immune from the financial consequences of her performance, and judging from her record, immune from shame at leaving defrauded students hanging.

Some veterans of the for-profit higher education sector are still in place at the department, crafting policies that overlook the true nature of an industry bubbling over with fraud and deceit. If the authors of the next legal dictionary are seeking a solid definition of “contempt,” they need look no further than the Department of Education.

WASHINGTON — 

Rep. Katie Hill (D-Santa Clarita) announced Sunday that she would resign from Congress after allegations that she engaged in affairs with a congressional aide and a campaign staff member became public this month.

Hill announced the resignation in a letter to constituents, saying she was stepping down “with a broken heart.”

The letter did not specify when the resignation would take effect. Hill will be the first female member of Congress to resign in a post-#MeToo era. Her resignation will also be the first after a House rule banning sexual relationships with staffers was enacted last year in response to nearly a dozen male members of Congress resigning amid sexual harassment allegations.

“This is what needs to happen so that the good people who supported me will no longer be subjected to the pain inflicted by my abusive husband and the brutality of hateful political operatives who seem to happily provide a platform to a monster who is driving a smear campaign built around cyber exploitation,” Hill wrote in the letter.

“I know that as long as I am in Congress, we’ll live fearful of what might come next and how much it will hurt.

“For the mistakes made along the way and the people who have been hurt, I am sorry, and I am learning I am not a perfect person and never pretended to be,” Hill wrote.

Hill is in divorce proceedings with her husband of nine years, Kenneth Heslep. William Strachan, an attorney for Heslep, said his client had no comment when reached by The Times.

The resignation marks a dramatic fall for Hill, who was elected to Congress as part of the “blue wave” that allowed Democrats to take the House in 2018. She had been a regular presence on cable news shows and was chosen by her fellow freshmen as their representative to the House leadership. That position gave her a seat at the table with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and some of the biggest names in the national party.

Pelosi raised money for Hill during the campaign, and Hill defended Pelosi when some Democrats were calling for new leadership. Hill leveraged the relationship in securing a coveted position among House leadership, a spot on the whip team and the vice chairmanship of the powerful House Oversight Committee.

“Congresswoman Katie Hill came to Congress with a powerful commitment to her community and a bright vision for the future, and has made a great contribution as a leader of the Freshman Class,” Pelosi said in a statement Sunday night. “She has acknowledged errors in judgment that made her continued service as a Member untenable. We must ensure a climate of integrity and dignity in the Congress, and in all workplaces.”

Hill’s prominence began even before her election. As a candidate, she drew the kind of attention that most first-timers can only dream of: profiles in national newspapers, major fundraisers and social media attention. Vice News spotlighted her campaign in a series of mini-documentaries.

The fall came just as quickly.

Last weekend, the conservative website RedState published a series of articles alleging that Hill had engaged in relationships with a member of her campaign staff and the House staffer. Hill denied the relationship with the House employee, which would be a violation of House rules, but did not deny the relationship with the campaign staff member.

The release of the stories, complete with intimate photos of Hill, sparked debate about a double standard in the male-dominated world of political sex scandals, particularly because Hill has blamed Heslep for releasing the photos. Hill’s resignation is likely to bring those questions further out into the open.

On Wednesday, in a letter to constituents, Hill again denied the alleged relationship with the House staff member but acknowledged she was involved in a separate relationship with a member of her campaign staff “during the final tumultuous years of my abusive marriage.”

“I know that even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate, but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment,” the letter read.

The House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating whether Hill “may have engaged in a sexual relationship with an individual on her congressional staff,” an allegation Hill has denied. House rules were changed last year to prohibit relationships between members and their employees in response to multiple allegations of harassment levied against male members of Congress.

Hill also said she had contacted U.S. Capitol Police after intimate photos of her and another person were published by the RedState website. Photos of her were also published by a British tabloid.

Hill said Heslep “seems determined to try to humiliate me.”

In the letter announcing her resignation, Hill said she would continue to pursue legal options over the nude photos posted online without her consent. The personal photos were “weaponized” against her and an “appalling invasion” of her privacy, she wrote.

Hill’s plan to resign will force Democrats to find a new candidate to defend the House seat in a district that is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats but went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hill won last year by 9 percentage points with 54% of the vote in the Antelope Valley district, which has trended Democratic in recent years as Los Angeles residents looking for affordable housing moved in. Democrats now hold a voter registration advantage there of nearly 5 percentage points.

Though Hill was expected to win a second term, her resignation will make it slightly more difficult for Democrats to retain the seat, said Dave Wasserman, political forecaster for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

In a statement, Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), chairwoman of the House Democrats’ campaign committee, called Hill “a dedicated servant who brought an important perspective to our Caucus.”

“This evening I told her that I respect her decision and wish her well,” Bustos said. “There is no doubt that Democrats will continue to hold this increasingly blue and diverse seat, building on Katie’s resounding victory in 2018.”

Local Democratic activists played a major role in Hill flipping the seat, and supporters were dismayed by news of her resignation.

Eva Rejhons of Valencia, a 50-year-old Democrat who enthusiastically voted last year for Hill over Republican incumbent Steve Knight, said she was devastated.

“I don’t care about people’s sex lives, but if she brought a staffer into it — you’re just not supposed to do that,” she said.

Republicans immediately pledged to win back the seat with a hint of the allegations against Hill.

“California voters are completely disgusted at what they’ve seen from the socialist Democrats these past ten months,” Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who leads the House Republicans’ campaign committee, said in a statement. “We look forward to winning back this seat and giving voters in CA-25 someone they can be proud to support.”

The timing of a new election remained unclear Sunday and may depend on the timing of Hill’s actual resignation. State law gives the governor up to two weeks after a vacancy opens to set the date for a special election, but there is some flexibility.

The most likely outcome seems to be a special election that would coincide with the state’s March 3 primary, but the election could come as late as early May. The winner of that election would serve out the remainder of Hill’s term. The top two candidates in the March primary would face off again in November 2020 to serve a full term.

A special election coinciding with the primary could favor Democrats because the party has an active presidential nomination contest likely to draw partisans to the polls, but the Republicans do not.

Wire and Haberkorn reported from Washington and Mai-Duc from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Michael Finnegan also contributed to this story.

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Katie Hill, the freshman Democrat from Santa Clarita, told colleagues Thursday that she is leaving because of a double standard for female politicians

WASHINGTON — 

In a blistering, emotional final House speech, Rep. Katie Hill, the freshman Democrat from Santa Clarita, told colleagues Thursday that she is leaving Congress because of a double standard for female politicians, a ruthless political climate and a misogynistic culture that helped her estranged husband bring down her budding career.

“The forces of revenge by a bitter jealous man, cyber exploitation and sexual shaming that target our gender, and a large segment of society that fears and hates powerful women, have combined to push a young woman out of power and say she doesn’t belong here,” Hill, 32, said during her final floor speech. She plans to resign Friday.

Her decision came following publication of nude photos of her and allegations that she had romantic relationships with congressional and campaign subordinates.

Hill said after her speech that when she informed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) over the weekend that she planned to step down, the speaker — who had become a mentor for the younger Californian — was surprised and urged her to stay and fight, at least for a while longer.

But Hill said the personal embarrassment, as well as a fear that her scandal would distract from Democrats’ other priorities, led her to decide to quit. She said she has barely left her bed since the pictures became public just over a week ago.

“I am leaving because of a misogynistic culture that gleefully consumed my naked pictures, capitalized on my sexuality, and enabled my abusive ex to continue that abuse, this time with the entire country watching,” Hill said. “I am leaving because of the thousands of vile, threatening emails, texts and calls that make me fear for my life and the lives of the people I care about.”

Hill apologized to her family, mentors and friends, and to the thousands of people who knocked on doors and made phone calls to get her elected.

“To every little girl who looked up to me — I hope that one day you can forgive me,” Hill said. “The mistakes I made and the people I’ve hurt that led to this moment will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Hill acknowledged having a relationship with a campaign staffer but denies having had one with a congressional aide, which would be a violation of House rules. In a video statement Monday, she blamed her estranged husband and a campaign by “the right-wing media and Republican opponents” for using the pictures and false allegations to destroy her career.

Hill announced her resignation Sunday, just days after pledging she would fight. She said she learned over the weekend there were hundreds more private photos and text messages that might be released. It brings an end to the House Ethics Committee investigation into whether she had an affair with a member of her official staff, an act prohibited by a House rule approved after dozens of allegations of inappropriate behavior made against members of Congress and high-ranking staff members in the #MeToo era.

Hill has said that said she plans a legal fight against those who distributed nude and compromising photos of her. The congresswoman blames her husband, Kenneth Heslep. They are in the process of divorcing. He has not responded to requests for comment.

Though involved in local politics, including a successful proposition campaign to change how Los Angeles County provides support to its homeless population, Hill had never held public office before being elected to Congress in the blue wave of young, mostly female and minority Democrats, who helped take control of the House in 2018.

Pelosi told reporters that the photos and Hill’s resignation should serve as a warning.

“This is something that I think could spring from this that could be a benefit. Regardless of any errors in judgment that anyone may have made, it’s shameful that she’s been exposed to public humiliation by way of cyber exploitation,” Pelosi told reporters.

News of the allegations were first raised by a strategist of Hill’s former opponent in the conservative publication RedState.

Hill’s abrupt resignation surprised Capitol Hill. In just 10 months, Hill had quickly risen to become one of the party’s most powerful freshmen, a frequent spokesman to national media with multiple positions in leadership and the ear of Pelosi.

“She is an absolutely outstanding young public servant. She made her decisions, and her timing, and I respect that” Pelosi told reporters Thursday.

Hill gave her final House floor speech to a nearly empty chamber, with a smattering of tourists and three representatives. “I yield the balance of my time now, but not forever,” Hill said as she finished.

She has vowed to continue to work and speak against so-called revenge porn to ensure similar things don’t happen to other women, and said after her speech she is talking with various organizations about how best to do that.

Her fall comes less than a year after she was elected to Congress in a district long held by the GOP. Now Republicans see a chance to win back the seat, and a crowded field has already formed to replace her.

Katie Hill, the freshman Democrat from Santa Clarita, told colleagues Thursday that she is leaving because of a double standard for female politicians

Kenneth Heslep’s divorce from Katie Hill had grown nasty by the time he told a podcaster in late September that he was ready to talk publicly about his split with the Democratic congresswoman.

“Any interest in an interview, and the whole story yet?” Heslep texted Stephen Daniels, host of “Talk of Santa Clarita,” punctuating the offer with a smiling-face emoji. It was 1:40 a.m.

Daniels declined. “It was clear he wanted to air dirty laundry,” Daniels recalled Wednesday.

Conservative websites soon revealed that they had obtained some of Hill’s private texts and nude photos of her, including one with a campaign aide.

The main authors of the articles, it turns out, were former campaign advisors to Steve Knight, the Republican congressman ousted by Hill a year ago.

The result was a shocking shift in fortune for a woman on a rapid rise to power after capturing a long-held Republican seat in 2018 in the northern suburbs of Los Angeles. Hill has announced her resignation. Her last day is Friday.

Her sudden downfall is due in part to the relationship she acknowledged having with the campaign staffer and an allegation that she had an affair with a congressional aide, which she has denied.

But it’s also the product of what she and her allies see as a plot by her estranged husband and former Knight operatives to use naked pictures to destroy her. Heslep did not respond to calls for comment, and Knight denied personal involvement.

Now, Knight is considering a run to win back his House seat. Hill is trying to pick up the remnants of her professional and personal life.

::

Hill and her husband, longtime sweethearts, were both waiting tables before they got married in 2010. By the time Hill was elected to Congress last year in an electric race that drew volunteers from across California, the couple’s lives had taken sharply diverging paths.

Hill had become a top executive at a Los Angeles nonprofit serving the homeless. She was one of more than three dozen Democrats who unseated Republicans, helping her party take control of the House in a suburban revolt against President Trump. She quickly became a member of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team.

While Hill, 32, was working in Washington, Heslep, 35, was living a quieter life in California, taking care of the couple’s horse, goat, turkey, chickens and dogs on their farm in Agua Dulce, a small town in the dry mountains between Palmdale and Santa Clarita. He has been unemployed since 2014. In his divorce filing, he suggested that the only reason he’d previously held jobs at Hill’s nonprofit was because of her influence.

Then, in June, Heslep wrote in the divorce papers, Hill came home from Washington and told him she was leaving. “She took our only operable vehicle and left me stranded at our residence.” Heslep said he had to borrow money from his parents to hire a divorce lawyer.

Heslep, described in Hill’s resignation letter as an abusive husband, criticized the congresswoman in his texts with Daniels.

“Even though I have made it clear that I am not looking for anything excessive, she is still fighting even basic spousal support,” he complained.

The first public sign that Hill’s private life might cause serious political trouble came on Oct. 10, when RedState, a conservative website owned by Salem Media Group, ran a story quoting Heslep saying on Facebook that his wife had been sleeping with a male staff member for at least a year.

RedState identified the man as a congressional aide. Hill denied the allegation, but the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation. House rules adopted last year bar members of Congress from having sexual relationships with subordinates.

More was coming. Joe Messina, a former Knight campaign advisor who hosts a syndicated conservative radio show, said he received an anonymous email with a Zip file packed with private text messages and nude photos of Hill. He got more by ordinary mail.

He decided to write about it on his blog, but said he first notified the National Republican Congressional Committee to check whether anyone there knew about the material.

On Oct. 17, he posted a story saying he’d “received over 700 images, pictures, texts, and notes on the escapades of one Katie Hill, both before and after her election.”

“Pictures I’ve seen show her in sexual situations” with a woman on her 2018 campaign staff, Messina wrote. He did not publish any of the texts or photos and said he didn’t share them with anyone.

“I didn’t have to give them away,” he told The Times. “They were all over the place.”

NRCC spokeswoman Torunn Sinclair said the committee “never shopped, possessed or circulated photos of Congresswoman Hill.”

“We didn’t see the photos until they were published, just like everyone else,” she said.

The day after Messina’s post, RedState published an article by another former Knight campaign advisor, Jennifer Van Laar of Simi Valley. Her story included private texts and intimate photos of Hill and her female campaign aide. One of the pictures shows Hill naked.

Van Laar wrote that Hill and Heslep were involved in a three-way relationship with the woman.

The next blow came on Oct. 24. Van Laar’s byline appeared again, this time on a lengthier article for the Daily Mail with more nude photos and Hill’s private text messages.

Neither of Van Laar’s articles disclosed that she worked for Knight’s 2014 campaign for Congress.

The stories also did not mention that Van Laar agreed to work for congressional candidate Suzette Martinez Valladares when Valladares was running to unseat Hill in the 2020 election. (Valladares is now campaigning instead for state Assembly.)

On Twitter, Van Laar, who does political work under the name Jennifer Knight (no relation to the former congressman), is open about being a partisan.

“I don’t hide it and I don’t act unbiased,” she tweeted this week.

Van Laar also wrote on Twitter that she would support Knight’s 2020 campaign “in a heartbeat” if he gets in the race.

“We can take this back — it’ll take work and volunteers but we can do it!” she tweeted.

Van Laar declined to be interviewed.

Knight did not answer requests for an interview, but he issued a public statement Thursday that said neither he nor anyone involved in his 2018 reelection campaign against Hill “had any contact with her husband or anything to do with the release of private information about her.” He did not deny that Van Laar and Messina had worked for his previous congressional campaigns.

On Wednesday, Heslep’s father, Fred, defended his son, saying he did not release the images. “He was hacked, is what he said,” Fred Heslep told BuzzFeed News. “I think he started having computer issues, so that’s what made him think it was a hacking.”

Hill has apologized for having a sexual relationship with a campaign aide.

“I know that even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate, but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment,” she said.

She also said she’d reported the photos’ release to the U.S. Capitol Police and hoped whoever distributed them is “punished to the full extent of the law.”

“I am going through a divorce from an abusive husband who seems determined to try to humiliate me,” she said in a statement addressing the ethics inquiry. “I am disgusted that my opponents would seek to exploit such a private matter for political gain. This coordinated effort to try to destroy me and the people close to me is despicable and will not succeed.”

Sharing private, nude photos of people without their consent and to inflict harm is illegal in many states and in Washington, D.C.

California’s law, which took effect in 2013, forbids the intentional sharing of such images when “the person distributing the image knows or should know that distribution of the image will cause serious emotional distress, and the person depicted suffers that distress.”

Hill’s lawyers demanded that the Daily Mail take down the nude photos, but they were still online Thursday. A spokesperson for the Daily Mail did not respond to a request for comment.

Hill worried that more compromising photos would emerge if she stayed in Congress. She feared “what might come next and how much it will hurt.”

In her farewell speech on the House floor Thursday, Hill said that she had not left her apartment since the photos were published more than a week ago.

“I’ve hidden from the world, because I am terrified of facing all the people I let down,” she said.

She hinted that she would not be long out of the spotlight: “Thank you, and I yield the balance of my time for now, but not forever.”

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Beverly Hills Mayor John Mirisch is one of the more provocative characters in the debate over the cause of California’s housing problems. In one recent speech, he compared the state lawmakers who are trying to strip some power from local governments to the villain in the Jewish holiday of Purim.

A frequent target of Mirisch’s bromides is state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is among the most aggressive proponents of greater homebuilding in the Legislature.

On this episode of “Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast,” Mirisch and Wiener debated for the first time. The episode is a recording of their conversation from the annual conference of the Southern California Assn. of Nonprofit Housing, which was held earlier this month in downtown Los Angeles. The debate lays out their stark differences of opinion over how California should grow.

“Gimme Shelter,” a biweekly podcast that looks at why it’s so expensive to live in California and what the state can do about it, features Liam Dillon, who covers housing affordability issues for the Los Angeles Times, and Matt Levin, data and housing reporter for CALmatters.

You can subscribe to “Gimme Shelter” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play and Overcast.

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USC picked up its first basketball commit in the 2021 recruiting class Thursday when Santa Ana Mater Dei junior Harrison Hornery committed to the Trojans.

The Australian native chose the Trojans over a double-digit list of scholarship offers that included Pac-12 competitors Arizona, California, Utah and Washington State.

Hornery’s decision comes two weeks after he took an official visit to USC and the coaching staff was able to lay out how the Trojans plan to use the 6-foot-9, 210-pound forward in their offensive concepts. Hornery isn’t known as a back-to-the-basket big man. Instead, he spreads the floor and can knock down deep jumpers. He made 53 three-pointers his sophomore season at Mater Dei when he averaged 11.9 points and 6.1 rebounds

Hornery is rated by the industry-generated 247Sports Composite rankings as a three-star prospect. He is the No. 201 overall prospect in the 2021 class.

The Trojans signed one of their top recruiting classes in school history this past year, finishing No. 7 in the 2019 class rankings. The class was led by five-star big men Isaiah Mobley and Onyeka Okongwu, who are a part of talented six-man class that is expected to contribute significantly when USC opens the season next Tuesday against Florida A&M.

USC ranks No. 61 and only has one commit in the 2020 recruiting class, but that commit is the top player in the nation, Temecula Rancho Christian center Evan Mobley.

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