Photo: Henrico County Sheriff's Office
A former Democratic Virginia state legislature candidate who made national headlines after her online sex videos were leaked was arrested on a domestic violence charge last month, the New York Post reports.
Susanna Gibson Payne, 42, was charged with assault and battery -- family member on September 22 and released after turning herself in. Gibson, however, claims her husband, attorney John David Gibson, 44, had been harassing her since she filed for divorce and was the aggressor in the situation.
“After my estranged husband, arrested three times since I filed for divorce, assaulted me during a June 2025 custody exchange while I protected our son, he filed a retaliatory criminal complaint against me,” Gibson said via the New York Post.
“More than three months later, police issued a misdemeanor warrant for my arrest. I turned myself in immediately,” she added.
John Gibson had been arrested several times last December for violation of a protective order, extortion and use of threatening language, all of which occurred days after Susanna requested a protective order against him for "family abuse," which was approved the following month, according to arrest records. Gibson received national attention when it was revealed that she previously performed sex acts with her husband on a live streaming website for "tips" during her campaign in September 2023.
Screenshots of Gibson and her husband on the legal live webcam website Chaturbate were shared with the Associated Press following the Washington Post's initial report. Gibson said the sharing of her past videos a violation of law and her privacy, referring to the sudden leaks as "the worst gutter politics."
"It won't intimidate me and it won't silence me," Gibson said in the statement obtained by CBS News at the time. "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."
Daniel P. Watkins, an attorney for Gibson, cited a 2021 Virginia Court of Appeals ruling that deemed it unlawful for a man to secretly record his girlfriend during a consensual sexual encounter regardless of whether he intended to show it to other people.
"A criminal act has occurred here, and that's the dissemination of revenge porn by a Republican operative," Watkins said via the AP.
Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two, won the Democratic primary in June 2023 and ran against Republican businessman David Owen in the 57th District. More than a dozen videos posted under Gibson's Chaturbate account were archived on another website in September 2022, the same month she announced her campaign, CBS News reported at the time.