A suspected orgy with prostitutes. Accusations of having sex with a minor girl. A trophy photo of a woman wearing only a hula hoop. And a complicated extortion camp involving a likely dead American hostage in Iran.
Even by Florida standards, the Matt Gaetz saga is utterly bizarre – and gets weirder by the day.
Before this week, the young congressman from Sunshine State and ally of former President Donald Trump, like his mentor, was best known for his ambitious conservatism and the suburbs.
But this week, the Republican has been dealing with scandalous headlines on a daily basis.
The most serious is that he is being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl and that he paid to travel with him across state borders, possibly violating federal laws on sex trafficking.
Gaetz denies the allegations – but not the fact of the investigation.
Then, on Thursday, CNN alleged that he showed fellow lawmakers nude photos of women he said he slept with, including one photographed with a hula hoop and nothing else.
It was also alleged by two of Gaetz’s enemies that the FBI had photos of him in a ‘sexual orgy with underage prostitutes’.
It’s all enough to give him the tendency to pose on Instagram without a pair of pants, as in a message in July in which he ‘Covid work!’ seems tame in comparison.
This is how the latest Gaetz drama so far plays out:
The news of the sex trafficking investigation, which was launched in the last months of the last government, became known in The New York Times on Tuesday.
The 38-year-old Pensacola – whose fiancée to Harvard Business School student Ginger Luckey, 26, was announced by Fox’s Jeanine Pirro in December – immediately denied having sex with a minor or transporting one across state borders.
‘In the strongest possible terms. “I deny that I have ever been a minor with anyone,” he told The Post on Tuesday.
“It’s fake,” he insisted.
But Gaetz only raised more eyebrows when he admitted to the Times that some of his “generosity” in the past towards former girlfriends might come back to haunt him.
“I only know that it has to do with women,” he told the newspaper when asked what he knew about the investigation.
“I suspect someone is trying to recategorize my generosity towards ex-girlfriends as something more unfavorable.”
Soon, a new doubt of headlines – regarding victims of underage sex trafficking, an orgy and an extortion of $ 25 million – showed how much more could go wrong.
Hours after the Times story broke out, Gaetz interviewed Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
He was apparently there on camera to clear things up.
Instead, Gaetz sparked a twisted story that saw himself and his father, Don, a wealthy former Florida politician, as the heroic victims of a massive blackmail battle.
“What’s happening,” he told the Times of the DOJ leak to Carlson, “is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Justice Department official.”
The former official, the villain of his alleged extortion, is attorney David McGee, a former Florida prosecutor, Gaetz claims.
“On March 16, my dad received a text message requesting a meeting,” Gaetz said. “In which a person demanded $ 25 million in exchange for the horrific violation of sex trafficking against me, he goes away,” he told Carlson.
He and his father reach out to the feds, “and the FBI and the Department of Justice were so concerned about this attempt to blackmail a member of Congress that they asked my father to carry a wire,” Gaetz said. told Carlson.
The customers need to release the audio tape, he told Carlson, claiming it would prove his innocence and reveal a conspiracy to make my family bleed money. ‘
McGee leaked the DOJ investigation into sex trafficking to the Times when the blackmail conspiracy failed, Gaetz concluded in the shocking interview.
Then there is the Iranian hostage corner.
McGee and former Air Force intelligence officer Bob Kent did not want the money for themselves, Gaetz claims.
They wanted to use the money to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who was taken hostage by Iran in 2007 and declared dead by his family last year.
Oh, and about the allegations about sex trafficking?
“Providing flights and hotel rooms for people you’re going out with and who’s legal is not a crime,” Gaetz told Carlson, a denial that may have done less to clear his name than he intended.
McGee, meanwhile, has denied allegations of Gaetz’s hostage-taking and denied a “blatant attempt to divert him from being investigated for sex trafficking in minors,” he told The Washington Post.
And McGee fights Gaetz with the dirt of his own banner.
Which finally brings us to the alleged orgy.
Gaetz showed the Washington Examiner a series of text messages and other documents that he said showed details of McGee and Kent’s alleged extortion attempt – including the couple’s reference to the FBI showing photos of the congressman in a ‘sexual orgy’. with underage prostitutes’.
The document has not been verified, and the redundant reference to a ‘sexual orgy’ is not extended.
On Friday, text messages appeared indicating that Gaetz was linked to Joel Greenberg, a political ally and tax official in Seminole province who was being prosecuted for underage sex trafficking.
This was Greenberg’s prosecution – for allegedly making a fake ID for a minor girl ‘to facilitate his attempts to facilitate commercial sexual acts’, which Gaetz first put on the radar of the feds.
From texts obtained by the Daily Beast, it appears that Greenberg is asking one of his workers to draw up a driver’s license for Gaetz, who has lost hiss and needs a quick replacement to board a flight.
The congressman has repeatedly bragged to unnamed Florida police officers about women he met through Greenberg – even flashing during videos at parties of them in various stages of undressing, The Washington Post reported Friday night.
And to keep the week going, his communications director, Luke Ball, in Florida, mentioned Gaetz in his Twitter biography and offered his resignation.
“The office of Congressman Matt Gaetz and Luke Ball has agreed that it would be best to separate,” reads a joint statement. “We thank him for his time in our office, and we wish him all the best in advance.”