Congressional Candidate Krystal Ball's "Sexy Santa" Problem

There is a woman running for Congress named Krystal Ball. This alone might be enough to titillate reporters. But also, she once went to a Halloween party with her then-husband on a leash, a dildo on his nose. Uh oh.

From the start, the coverage of Ball, 28, and her campaign has stretched credulity. Last year, when she announced her candidacy, the local NBC affiliate ran this story, headlined,” Krystal Ball — the Future of The Hill’s Most Beautiful.” It actually went downhill from there. Some highlights:

Why isn’t Congress concerned about babies? Because they don’t have enough of them! They’re all too old to remember what parenthood’s like, what parents are concerned about. As a congresswoman, Krystal Ball will serve as mother to all the babies in the country.

That alleged saintly purity, so instrumental to serving in Congress, is despite the fact that she has, in the words of this reporter, “a name out of the adult entertainment industry.” And is a Democrat. But clearly, names are destiny, because now, according to TBD’s Amanda Hess, the local press is obsessing over an issue that no one cares about.

Basically, one Halloween six years ago, Ball dressed up as a “sexy” Santa. We put sexy in quotation marks because, well, we consider the bar for sexed up to be higher than a black tank top. She also had her then-husband on a leash, meant to be Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, whose red nose was a dildo. In one of the photos taken at the party, she is sucking that dildo. And then conservative bloggers leaked those photos.

Ball is running against a well-established incumbent in a Republican district, but that doesn’t mean the local media can’t treat this like an affair of massive consequence, a dealbreaker. Another NBC affiliate intones, “The photos are not what you’d expect from a woman hoping to be elected to Congress. And Krystal Ball knows it.”

Something else she knows, according to a statement about the leaking of the photos:

“It’s sexist and it’s wrong, regardless of political party,” Ball said in her statement. “And I have a message for any young woman who is thinking about running for office and has ever attended a costume party with her husband or done anything stupid on camera. Run for office. Fight for this country. Don’t let this sort of tactic deter you.”

She has also said, “I think we all have been to parties in our life. I think we’ve all had photos taken that we wouldn’t want to be in the public eye.” Her Republican opponent’s campaign has said that the conservative bloggers should take down the post.

True. As ill-advised as the photos are, they hardly show Ball as outside the mainstream or unfit for office — they show her as a regular twentysomething, basically. There is a generational element here — endless digital photos of party indiscretions, on Facebook and elsewhere, trail millennials in a way that just didn’t exist before. Just ask Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who posed pretending to fondle a cutout of Hillary Clinton. Then again, at most, he just got a slap on the wrist for it.

Virginia Candidate Krystal Ball Photo ‘Scandal’: Finally, A Sexy Santa Only Reporters Care About [TBD]
Krystal Ball Condemns Bloggers’ Post Of Explicit Photos [Politico]
Related: Krystal Ball, The Future Of The Hill’s Most Beautiful [NBC Washington/Local Beat]