RICHMOND, Va. — An influential national right-wing news site linked to Tucker Carlson is attempting to shame a Virginia prosecutor into charging a Democratic candidate with prostitution due to her previous work as a cam performer.
The Daily Caller, which Carlson co-founded in 2010, on Wednesday published a report tendentiously titled “Virginia Prosecutor Coordinated With Porn Candidate Instead Of Prosecuting Her For Prostitution, Records Show.”
In the article, GOP-aligned reporter Luke Rosiak attacks Henrico County Commonwealth prosecutor Shannon Taylor, a Democrat, for her alleged links to the campaign to elect Susanna Gibson to a key seat in the Virginia statehouse. Gibson has been a broadcaster on Chaturbate.
“On September 14, The Daily Wire emailed Taylor’s office asking if she planned to seek an indictment of Gibson for prostitution based on Virginia code section 18.2-346,” Rosiak wrote. “Lawyers said her conduct fit the statute, which outlaws sex for money regardless of whether the recipient has sex with the payee or with someone else.”
A Smut-Filled Takedown
Gibson was outed as a cam performer by the Washington Post last month, in a salacious exposé that political observers believe to be a smear operation by her Republican opponents.
Gibson is running to represent Virginia’s 57th District, described by The Intercept as “a competitive swing district that holds massive implications for the upcoming November off-year state elections.”
Hard-right Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won the district by three points in 2021, but voters there narrowly favored Democrats in 2022, The Intercept reported.
The Washington Post hit piece, the investigative news site explained, “bore the signs of an opposition research dump. When oppo researchers of either party reach out to journalists with a pitch, the research is often contained in a slim packet, with relevant quotes from publicly available articles coupled with financial documents or other papers that form the building blocks of an article.”
“The telltale sign that such a packet was provided to the Post,” The Intercept noted, is the article’s misleading description of the moments when Gibson discusses Chaturbate tips.
The writer of the Washington Post attack on Gibson’s reputation is the newspaper’s Virginia reporter Laura Vozzella, who has been widely criticized for her relentless bias in favor of the state’s current Republican governor, and has even been known to gush bizarrely and repetitively in print over Youngkin's height and build.
Vozzella also penned an infamously slanted, folksy profile of Youngkin as a gubernatorial candidate. In it, she marveled at his supposed “deep religiosity,” reporting that “he opens campaign staff meetings with prayer” and “has a ‘cuss jar’ in his Falls Church headquarters that foul-mouthed staffers must pay into.” She also noted that the “go-to snack” of the extremely wealthy former CEO of financial powerhouse the Carlyle Group “is bologna, the humble staple of his economically unstable boyhood.”
Outing a Sex Worker for Political Gain
In addition to outing Gibson, Vozzella’s article implied that Gibson had violated Chaturbate’s policy by asking for tips for specific sex acts. Gibson decried the allegation, calling it an attack on her and her family and saying of her political opponents and their allies, “There’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”
Chaturbate clarified that the policy in question “applies not to performers like Gibson, but to users of the site, who are not allowed to demand performers do specific acts in exchange for a tip,” The Intercept reported.
Virginia Democratic operative Kamran Fareedi told the outlet, “It is absolutely hilarious that Republicans want to make this election a referendum on the Chaturbate terms of service. Voters are going to see through the transparent laundry of opposition research from the Washington Post, which failed to issue a correction that no violation occurred in the first place.”
