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 who was a cam performer for “prostitution.”
The Daily Caller — co-founded by Carlson in 2010 — published on Wednesday a report tendentiously titled “Virginia Prosecutor Coordinated With Porn Candidate Instead Of Prosecuting Her For Prostitution, Records Show.”
The main goal of the Daily Caller article, penned by GOP-aligned reporter Luke Rosiak, was to attack Henrico County Commonwealth prosecutor Shannon Taylor (D) for her alleged links to the campaign to elect Susanna Gibson — who has performed as a Chaturbate broadcaster — to a key seat in the Virginia statehouse.
“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 in his Daily Caller piece attempting to pressure authorities to charge the candidate for her sex work.
“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,” he added.
Gibson was outed as a cam performer by the Washington Post last month, in a salacious exposé that political observers’s believe to be an smear operation by her Republican opponents.
Gibson is running for delegate in 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 3 points in 2021, “but in 2022, voters swung in the other direction, narrowly favoring Democrats,” The Intercept reported.
A Smut-Filled Takedown
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 comes in the article’s description of the moments where Gibson discusses [Chaturbate] tips.”
The writer of the smut-filled Washington Post takedown of Gibson’s reputation is the newspaper’s Virginia reporter Laura Vozzella, who has been widely criticized for her relentless bias in favor of the current Republican governor.
Vozzella — who bizarrely and repetitively has been known to gush in print over Youngking’s height and build — penned an infamously slanted, folksy-washing profile of him as a gubernatorial candidate, where she marveled at his supposed “deep religiousity” (“he opens campaign staff meetings with prayer,” “he has a ‘cuss jar’ in his Falls Church headquarters that foul-mouthed staffers must pay into”) and also noted that the “go-to snack” of the megawealthy former CEO of financial powerhouse the Carlysle Group, “is bologna, the humble staple of his economically unstable boyhood.”
Outing a Sex Worker for Political Gain
“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,” Gibson commented after Vozzella’s article outed her and implied that she had violated Chaturbate’s policy by asking for tips for specific sex acts.
Chaturbate clarified that “the policy 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.”
