Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi.

Politics is a tough business. It puts you in the limelight, but sometimes it can be for the wrong reasons.

My guest is the American politician Katie Hill, a star of the midterm elections of 2018.

But barely one year after winning a congressional seat for the Democrats in California, she resigned after reports of an inappropriate relationship with a campaign staff member and after nude photos of her were published in the media.

What does her case tell us about American politics in the Me Too era?

Katie Hill in Washington, welcome to Hard Talk.

You made headlines in November 2018 when you flipped a seat in California from the Republicans to the Democrats, young women, early 30s, rising star and all the rest of it.

A year later, you resign. What went wrong?

The basics of what went wrong is that I had a relationship preceding my swearing in as a congressional member. And after I left my husband,

which was about in the middle of my time in Congress, there were photos that were leaked

that I didn't even know

had been taken. They were nude photos. They were ones that were compromising. And it led to a series of

articles and the photos were published in the Daily Mail and in another publication called

Red State,

and they were all over the internet.

And it ultimately led to my resignation.

And everything went south very quickly.

Some Democrats urged you to just slug it out.

So you basically resigned because of embarrassment?

I think that it was more than that.

I didn't want to be a liability to my colleagues.

The amount of pressure and stress that it was putting me and my family and my staff through,

...