A House ethics panel found “substantial evidence” that former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl, used illegal drugs and paid thousands of dollars to women he met through disgraced Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, according to an investigative report released Monday.
The congressional probe emerged from the federal prosecution of Greenberg, who is now serving an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to several crimes, including sex trafficking of a minor.
Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has never been charged criminally.
But the ethics panel for the House — where Gaetz served nearly eight years — found “substantial evidence” that he violated Florida’s statutory rape law, engaged in commercial sex and broke House rules. Most of the sex-for-money encounters occurred in Florida, particularly around Orlando, and several of the women involved were students based in that area, the committee said.
Though the allegations have followed Gaetz for years, the committee’s report marks a first public finding of fault against the former firebrand congressman and loyalist to President-elect Donald Trump.
The committee authorized 29 subpoenas, reviewed nearly 14,000 documents and contacted more than two dozen witnesses, according to its nearly 40-page report.
Trump had picked Gaetz to become U.S. attorney general, but Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration while facing scrutiny from the ethics probe. Gaetz resigned his seat in Congress last month to pursue the attorney general post.
House investigators wrote that evidence showed Gaetz “regularly paid” women for sex from at least 2017 to 2020, engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old in 2017 and used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions. The panel also found Gaetz accepted gifts in excess of permissible amounts, including transportation and lodging for a 2018 trip to the Bahamas.
“Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon theHouse,” the panel concluded.
The committee said it did not find conclusive evidence that Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws.
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Asked about the report’s findings that Gaetz violated Florida laws, Nick Cox, statewide prosecutor in Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office, said any allegations of criminal wrongdoing would be investigated by a local police department, sheriff’s office or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
A spokesman said the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office is aware of the report but did not have an immediate response. A house party mentioned in the report took place in Seminole County. The FDLE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gaetz, 42, sued the House Ethics Committee in federal court Monday to try to block it from releasing the report, arguing it had no authority over a private citizen. In a social media statement, he denied having sex with a 17-year-old.
“My 30’s were an era of working very hard – and playing hard too,” he wrote on Wednesday. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”
Gaetz has acknowledged he paid for flights, hotel rooms and expensive dinners for women he dated, though he has maintained it wasn’t illegal. “I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not,” Gaetz said in an Axios interview in 2021.
The report details Gaetz’s relationship with Greenberg, whom he befriended shortly after Greenberg took office in January 2017.
Gaetz and Greenberg frequently attended parties with young women in attendance, many of whom were initially contacted by Greenberg via a dating website, according to the report.
“While all the women that the Committee interviewed stated their sexual activity with Representative Gaetz was consensual, at least one woman felt that the use of drugs at the parties and events they attended may have ‘impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent,’” the report states.
The women also discussed instances where “Representative Gaetz would try to convince them to have sex with him or Mr. Greenberg,” the report states. The ethics panel quoted one of the women as saying, “[H]e would make me feel bad about not having sex with him or Joel Greenberg” and that he would say, “Why don’t you want to have sex with me” or “[Mr. Greenberg] looks very sad over there … make him happy.”
The report references a July 15, 2017, house party that Gaetz attended at the Heathrow home of developer and former state Rep. Christopher Dorworth. The party was also attended by Greenberg, Gaetz’s then-girlfriend and several others, including a 17-year-old girl referred to in the ethics report as “Victim A,” the committee said.
“The record overwhelmingly suggests that Representative Gaetz had sex with multiple women at the party, including the then-17-year-old, for which they were paid,” the report states.
The ethics committee received testimony the girl and Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other attendees, according to the report. The girl, who had just finished her junior year of high school, recalled receiving $400 in cash from Gaetz, which she understood as payment for sex, the report states.
The girl acknowledged that she was under the influence of ecstasy during her sexual encounters with Gaetz at the party and recalled seeing Gaetz use cocaine, the committee said.
In a deposition in a related lawsuit, Dorworth denied being at his home during the party.
The women who provided crucial testimony to the ethics committee did so at “significant personal cost,” said Joel Leppard, an Orlando lawyer who represented two witnesses.
“Their testimony, supported by extensive documentation and corroborating witnesses, has now been validated through this comprehensive investigation,” he said.
For two years, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the allegations but ended its probe without filing criminal charges against Gaetz. The House Ethics Committee, which has jurisdiction over the conduct of members of Congress, started its probe in April 2021.
The panel concluded that Gaetz did not violate federal sex trafficking law because “although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the Committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the Committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion.”
Political analysts said the report’s findings would traditionally spell doom for a politician, but in today’s environment, his future isn’t clear cut, particularly if Gaetz continues to have Trump’s backing. Gaetz has been mentioned as a potential candidate for Florida governor in 2026.
“In any healthy representative democracy, that would be the end of Matt Gaetz politically,” said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee consultant and anti-Trump Republican-turned-Democrat. “I believe, as difficult a situation in which we find ourselves, that we are still healthy enough as a country and as a state for that to still be true.”
Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said that “in a different era,” the report’s findings would be disqualifying. “Now, in today’s era, it’s hard to say for sure.”
Gaetz hasn’t announced his next political step. He is launching a show on the pro-Trump One America News Network in January.
Orlando attorney John Morgan, a prominent Democratic fundraiser who left the party to become independent, has been in talks with Gaetz about joining his firm Morgan & Morgan. He wrote in an e-mail he was unfazed by the report.
“Many people have used cocaine and smoked dope,” Morgan said. “So what. I don’t care.”
Morgan said Gaetz assured him that the report’s finding of sex with a 17-year-old was a “lie.”
“My firm is a big tent, and I value mercy most,” Morgan said.