In October 2010, Krystal Ball appeared on “The Dylan Ratigan Show” on MSNBC to discuss “female politicians and their sexuality” and society’s tendency to portray women as “whores.”
Friday, Ball was back on Ratigan’s show to discuss a less controversial topic — the latest unemployment numbers.
For Ball, those two appearances book-ended a strange year-long journey: from little-known Virginia congressional candidate to infamous Internet sensation to professional pundit, opining on nearly every subject on the news.
Ball has become a fixture on MSNBC, with a freshly inked contract to serve as a “contributor” and go-to “Democratic strategist” on the network. She appears to have a bright future in the world of political media.
Celebrity works in funny ways, and Ball acknowledged she wouldn’t be on the right path now if she had not become famous for the wrong reasons a year ago.
“I don’t think I would have ended up going in this direction,” Ball said, if she had not been the subject of an online controversy. “Because that was what got me on to a lot of these programs and sort of got me in the loop, and then after the campaign was over, they just kept asking me back.”
Portrayed as ‘a party girl’
At this time last year, Ball was a 28-year-old political novice who was running an educational software company with her husband and launching an uphill campaign against Rep. Rob Wittman (R) in Virginia’s GOP-leaning 1st District, which stretches from Fredericksburg to Newport News.
Then risqué photos of Ball emerged on a pair of conservative blogs. Taken at a costume party when she was 22, the pictures show Ball and her ex-husband holding a sex toy.
The story was irresistible to the media: A young, attractive female candidate with a memorable name (her father, a physicist, wrote his doctoral dissertation on crystals) is undone by suggestive photos and the perils of the Internet.
Her candidacy, which had drawn almost no attention, suddenly moved into the national spotlight.
Ball’s response was quick and forceful: She blamed the story on sexism and a double standard for women who run for office. Instead of a congressional candidate, she lamented in a Huffington Post op-ed, “for millions of people around the world, I am a joke named Krystal Ball, a party girl or a whore.”
According to her official biography, which doesn’t shy away from the photo controversy, Ball’s name quickly became one of the most-Googled terms in the world. She appeared on MSNBC and Fox News.
Embarrassing as the photos were, Ball said she does not regret the incident.
“It did give me an opportunity to say something that I thought was really important, so in a way I’m kind of grateful for the opportunity to do that,” she said. “I feel very proud of how we handled it. I didn’t apologize. I didn’t just sort of hide in a corner. I didn’t deny that it was me.”
Ball emerged less damaged than two other politicians who faced scandals related to lewd photos: Reps. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and Christopher Lee (R-N.Y.) both quit Congress under pressure after embarrassing snapshots made the news.
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