Things continue to remain crazy in the politics of the Old Dominion, with Susanna Gibson Payne, an already infamous Democrat in the purple state of Virginia, being arrested on domestic abuse charges related to her soon-to-be ex-husband and divorce from him, raising many eyebrows online. Payne, a former state house candidate, insists that she did nothing wrong.
As background, Payne is the candidate who, during the very middle of a nail-bitingly close Virginia state house race, was outed as a part-time sex worker who supplemented her wages as a nurse by livestreaming videos of her having sex with her husband in exchange for tips online. That appears to have tipped things against her, and the 42-year-old nurse lost the race by under a thousand votes.
Now, as the New York Post revealed in a report, Payne has been arrested on a domestic violence charge related to a report filed form her estranged spouse, who she is divorcing. Payne, who was arrested in Virginia’s Henrico County on September 22 for “assault and battery – family member,” insists that the report her estranged husband filed are bogus.
In fact, Payne told the New York Post that her estranged husband, a 44-year-old lawyer named John David Gibson, is the one who is at fault, as it was he who has been harassing her since she filed for divorce and had gotten aggressive with her in the domestic violence incident at issue.
Beginning her comments, Payne noted that Gibson had been arrested multiple times and claimed that he assaulted her, saying, “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.”
Continuing, she noted that the police issued a warrant for her arrest over the incident, and so she turned herself into the police as soon as she found out about it. She said, “More than three months later, police issued a misdemeanor warrant for my arrest. I turned myself in immediately.”
This isn’t the first time that Gibson has blamed others when caught in a major scandal. For example, as the New York Post noted, when she was caught in the scandal involving her use of the livestreamed sex videos with her husband, she insisted that Republicans were the ones at fault in exposing her, as doing so broke the law.
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She said, at the time, “It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me.” She added, accusing the GOP of crimes in promoting the video to dissuade voters from supporting her, “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.”
Similarly, she told Politico after losing the race, “I would say I’ve fundamentally changed as a human, as a professional. A political operative found sexually explicit videos of a young woman running for office that she never knew existed … and shopped them around to various news outlets, trying to get them published to humiliate, intimidate, coerce, harass this woman.”
She added, “Survivors deserve a justice system that recognizes abuse dynamics and protects our safety, not one that allows abusers to weaponize the law as continued control. I’m a mother and domestic violence survivor navigating a system that too often punishes those who seek safety.”
Featured image credit: Henrico County