Ethics report alleges Gaetz paid 17-year-old for sex

A yearslong House Ethics Committee investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz found “substantial evidence” that the Florida Republican committed statutory rape, solicited prostitutes and used illegal drugs, according to a copy of the report obtained by POLITICO.

The report's most explosive allegation, which Gaetz has long denied, is that he had sex twice with a 17-year-old girl at a party in July 2017, when he was 35 and serving in the House. Ethics Committee investigators found that he later paid the girl — part of a trend laid out in the report of him paying women after sexual encounters.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied that he broke any laws. “These claims would be destroyed in court — which is why they were never made in any court against me," he told POLITICO Friday morning.

But the committee's 37-page report, which it decided to release in a secret vote earlier this month, alleges several instances of illegal conduct by President-elect Donald Trump's one-time pick to serve as attorney general. Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Trump's AG last month as the potential public release of the investigation weighed on his chances of Senate confirmation.

“The Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the ethics panel said in its report, adding that he “knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct” the investigation.

The findings are poised to trigger shockwaves in Republican politics, in part because of Gaetz's close ties to Trump. Gaetz, who resigned from Congress when Trump tapped him to lead the Justice Department, has been floated as a potential Florida governor candidate in 2026, and some Republicans believe he could still win an appointment in the second Trump administration. Gaetz on Sunday also publicly mulled running for Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) likely soon-to-be vacant seat. The report’s findings could make Gaetz's political future difficult, though Trump has a history of dismissing accusations of criminal behavior against his allies.

The Ethics Committee investigation did not find "sufficient evidence" to show that Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws — an accusation that the Justice Department had also investigated. The DOJ did not charge Gaetz.

Gaetz has expressed regret that he once partied heavily and mistreated women and has said he's a different person now. In response to accusations that he slept with someone under 18, he has said “unequivocally no.”

In addition to allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, the Ethics investigation found that Gaetz violated House rules by accepting excessive gifts, including transportation and lodging, in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas. It also alleges that Gaetz violated another ethics rule in 2018 when he arranged for his top staffer to assist “a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent."

The Ethics Committee's decision to release the report — a move that required a majority vote by a panel split evenly between Republicans and Democrats — is controversial within the House. Members of the committee and other lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, argued that the panel shouldn’t break with its regular practice of ending an inquiry after a member leaves the House. But a majority of panel members concluded it was still “in the public interest to release its findings.”

The release of the report means at least one Republican on the panel sided with Democrats in a secret vote. Gaetz has a number of enemies in the chamber, particularly after he spearheaded the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Gaetz blamed the former speaker for the Ethics probe that launched in April 2021, though the Floridian has denied that’s why he moved to boot McCarthy. And McCarthy, at the time, argued he had no control over the internal probe.

The statutory rape allegations

At a party in July 2017 at a Florida lobbyist’s home, Gaetz had sex twice with a 17-year-old, who had just completed her junior year of high school, according to the report. Florida’s age of consent is 18.

In the testimony of the now 24-year-old woman, referred to as “Victim A,” she said that she had sex with Gaetz at “least once in the presence of other party attendees” and that she received $400 in cash from Gaetz, which she understood as a payment for sex. The woman also testified that she had ingested ecstasy before the sexual encounter and said that Gaetz used cocaine that same night as well.

Ethics investigators received evidence that Gaetz was unaware that Victim A was underage “until more than a month after their first sexual encounters” but noted that “statutory rape is a strict liability crime” — meaning it’s illegal whether he was aware of her age or not. Even after he learned that she was a minor, Gaetz kept in contact with her and then again “met up with her again for commercial sex” less than six months after she turned 18, the report alleges.

Investigators said they heard from the 17-year-old girl in question as well as “multiple individuals corroborating the allegation,” including some who have testified under oath. And it found that while Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, he has also “refused to answer specific questions relating to his interactions with Victim A.”

The panel also notes that while the statute of limitations to bring state law charges against Gaetz has passed, those same time limitations do not apply to the panel’s findings.

Prostitution accusations

Gaetz later boasted that he had slept with multiple women at the same party where he allegedly had sex with the 17-year-old girl, according to testimony the panel received from Joel Greenberg, one of Gaetz’s associates at the time. And it was not the only instance when he paid women after sexual encounters, according to the report.

Greenberg would meet younger women on SeekingArrangement.com, a site multiple women told the committee was used to connect with potential clients who would pay for companionship or sex. The women would then typically attend parties at Greenberg’s invitation and often engage in sex, getting compensated afterward.

“The Committee heard testimony from over half a dozen witnesses who attended parties, events, and trips with Representative Gaetz from 2017-2020. Nearly every young woman that the Committee interviewed confirmed that she was paid for sex by, or on behalf of, Representative Gaetz,” the report reads.

Some women also testified that they witnessed Gaetz take illicit drugs, including cocaine or ecstasy.

In one case, the report details a woman asking Gaetz for financial help paying her tuition when she was 21. Gaetz agreed and asked her to meet him at a hotel room so he could hand her a check, which she found “interesting” because he had normally used Venmo. When she arrived, Gaetz was there with Greenberg and a 20-year-old woman, who she had not expected to be there. She testified that there was an “expectation” of a “sexual encounter,” and the four of them had sex. Afterward, Gaetz handed her a $750 check with “tuition reimbursement” written on the memo line.

“The 21-year-old woman told the Committee she believed that the encounter ‘could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money,’” the report reads.

The report states that all the women who testified described their sexual encounters with Gaetz as consensual, but the panel adds that there was “an exploitative power imbalance” at times. Investigators accused him of taking “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.” And the women said that Gaetz guilted them into sleeping with him or Greenberg at various times. One woman testified that she feels “violated” when she reflects on their encounter.

The committee also had documented evidence that Gaetz paid the women, including from “various peer-to-peer electronic payment services,” like Venmo, as well as checks and cash. It also found that Greenberg would sometimes pay the women for having sex with Gaetz and Gaetz would later reimburse him. The committee found Gaetz paid over $90,000 to 12 women between 2017 to 2020, not including his payments to Greenberg.

In one case, one of the women Greenberg met on SeekingArrangement.com and introduced to Gaetz in or around March 2017 later became Gaetz’s girlfriend. The report said they had an open relationship, and that she not only participated in sexual encounters with other women involved in sex-for-money arrangements, but she also acted “as an intermediary between Representative Gaetz and the women he paid for sex.”

This then-girlfriend invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to several questions, including the purpose of specific payments and whether Gaetz ever paid her money for sex. She was paid more than $60,000 dollars throughout their relationship, but the panel notes this does not include the $50,025 Gaetz paid her attorneys at the outset of the Justice Department's investigation.

The committee noted that some of the payments to this one individual may be “legitimate in nature,” but based on assertion of her rights to other “evidence received from other sources, the Committee found substantial reason to believe that most of these payments were for such activity.”

The panel notes it was unable to interview every woman who received payments and was suspected of being part of the pay-for-sex arrangements. Some expressed fear of “retaliation or were unwilling to voluntarily relive their interactions with Representative Gaetz.”

The Bahamas Trip

A trip to the Bahamas, where Gaetz joined two other men who were reportedly linked to the medical marijuana industry and six women, was a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation into human trafficking. While the Ethics Committee report didn’t find evidence of those accusations, investigators found other issues with the trip.

The panel accused Gaetz of evading sharing documentation to prove he paid for his part of the lodging and a private flight for the September 2018 trip. Accepting any of that as a “gift” would violate House rules.

“Contrary to Representative Gaetz’s claims that he provided ‘substantial’ evidence to the Committee ‘demonstrating his innocence’ on this allegation, he provided no evidence showing how he paid for any travel costs other than his flight to the Bahamas, despite being given multiple opportunities to do so,” the report reads.

This was one of multiple cases where the committee said it found Gaetz “uncooperative.” The report says he provided “minimal documentation” in response to its record requests and blew off requests for both a voluntary interview and a subpoena for his testimony on July 11.

The committee concludes that Gaetz’s “attempts to mislead and deter the Committee from investigating him implicated federal criminal laws relating to false statements and obstruction of Congress. Even if Representative Gaetz’s obstructive conduct in this investigation did not rise to the level of a criminal violation, it was certainly inconsistent with the requirement that Members act in a manner that reflects creditably upon the House.”

Blaming the Justice Department for delays

The panel noted its report was delayed because Justice Department attorneys asked them to defer to their criminal probe, as is standard practice. After prosecutors concluded their probe with no charges, the Ethics Committee said they then failed to cooperate with any information requests.

“DOJ’s initial deferral request and subsequent lack of cooperation with the Committee’s review caused significant delays in the investigation; those delays were compounded by Representative Gaetz’s obstructive efforts,” the report reads.

The panel spends multiple pages of the report detailing its efforts to get the DOJ to turn over information. But despite multiple requests and even a subpoena seeking what the committee described as “particularized demands” — including “any exculpatory evidence” — they say prosecutors kept citing a non-legal basis that it does not release “non-public information about law enforcement investigations that do not result in charges.”

The panel typically doesn’t release its findings after a member leaves the House, as it noted in the report. But leaning on past precedent, the panel’s report said it “determined that it was in the public interest to release its findings even after a Member’s resignation from Congress,” while noting it did “not do so lightly.”