The House Ethics Committee report on former Representative Matt Gaetz released Monday details the downright shady ways the Florida Republican would allegedly pay—or not pay—several women and an underage girl with whom he had sexual encounters.
The long-awaited report that chased Gaetz out of his House seat determined that the Trump-backed Republican had “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” between at least 2017 and 2020. And the bill is nothing to scoff at.
To one woman, whom the committee determined had a long-term relationship with Gaetz from 2017 to 2020, the Florida Republican allegedly shelled out a whopping $63,836.58.
The report determined that due to the nature of their relationship “some of the payments may have been of a legitimate nature,” but the woman pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked if the payments were for sexual activity, drugs, or distributing payments to other women.
“Based on that assertion combined with evidence received from other sources, the Committee found substantial reason to believe that most of these payments were for such activity,” the report stated.
In addition to his payments to that woman, Gaetz allegedly paid nearly a total of $27,500 to eleven different women between 2017 and 2020. This total includes the $400 that Gaetz paid to a 17-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter, according to the report.
An additional $3,950 was paid to Joel Greenberg between 2018 and 2019. Greenberg is Gaetz’s associate who would find girls for them to party with through sugar dating websites and be reimbursed for payments made by the former lawmaker, according to the report. In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking, wire fraud, identity theft, stalking, producing a fake ID card, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. The Committee did not conclude that Gaetz had committed sex trafficking.
The report alleged that Gaetz would not set an amount to be paid before his sexual encounters, but that “the women had a general expectation that they would typically receive some amount of money after each sexual encounter.”
Gaetz allegedly used this power imbalance to his advantage, according to the report.
In one instance, a 21-year-old woman who had expressed to Gaetz that she needed help with her tuition said that he had told her to meet him at a hotel room where he would provide her with a check, which she noted to the Committee was “interesting because he had normally sent Venmo payments.”
When the woman arrived at the room, she said she was surprised to find Gaetz, Greenberg, and another 20-year-old woman, and she said there was an “expectation” of a “sexual encounter.” The four engaged in sexual activity, and the 21-year-old woman received a $750 check with “tuition reimbursement” as the memo line. She told the Committee she believed that the encounter “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money.”
Sometimes, it seems, Gaetz would get a little stingy, or fail to make payments to the women.
In another instance, Gaetz balked at a woman’s request for money in a text exchange reviewed by the committee. Gaetz bashed the woman for “ditching” him when she was feeling tired, claiming she only gave him a “drive by.” The woman told Gaetz that she was being “treated differently” than the other women he paid fo sex.
In a third instance, Gaetz’s then-girlfriend informed some of the women that he paid for sex that Gaetz and Greenberg were a “little limited in their cash flow this weekend,” and said that Gaetz was hoping it could be “more of a customer appreciation week.” In a message a few months later, she wrote that Gaetz now intended to be “a bit generous cause of the ‘customer appreciation’ thing last time.”
One woman recalled to the committee a conversation with Gaetz about Greenberg’s issues with “following through” on expected payments after Greenberg’s sexual encounters.
According to the report, Gaetz was given opportunities before the committee to discuss his payments to women, but he did not take them.
“While he has been unwilling to address the allegations under oath, Representative Gaetz has made several public statements regarding the allegations under the Committee’s review, including that his ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends’ is being misconstrued and that he has ‘never, ever paid for sex,’” the report stated. “The Committee found this to be untrue.”
“Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter,” the report concluded. “Such behavior is not ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends,’ and it does not reflect creditably upon the House.”
