An alleged orgy with prostitutes. Accusations of sex with a minor girl. A trophy photo of a woman wearing only a hula hoop. It is a complicated extortion plan involving a likely American hostage killed in Iran.
Even by Florida standards, Matt Gaetz’s saga is totally bizarre – and gets weirder by the day.
Prior to this week, the young Sunshine State congressman and ally of former President Donald Trump was best known, as his mentor, for his ambitious conservatism and promontory hairstyle.
But this week, the Republican faced a daily flurry of scandalous headlines.
More seriously, he is being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl and for paying for her to travel with him across state borders, potentially violating federal sex trafficking laws.
Gaetz denies the accusations – but not the fact of the investigation.
Then, on Thursday, CNN claimed that he had shown fellow lawmakers nude pictures of women he said he had slept with, including one photographed using a hula hoop, and nothing more.
Two of Gaetz’s enemies also claimed that the FBI has pictures of him in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes”.
It’s all enough to leave your tendency to pose on Instagram without pants, as you did in a July post with the caption: “Covid work!” seem domesticated in comparison.
This is how Gaetz’s latest drama has played out so far:
News of the sex trafficking investigation, released in the last months of the last government, broke out Tuesday in The New York Times.
Pensacola’s bachelor, 38 – whose engagement to Harvard business student Ginger Luckey, 26, was announced on Twitter 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 with someone under the age of 18, ”he told The Post on Tuesday.
“This is false,” he insisted.
But Gaetz only raised more eyebrows when he admitted to the Times that part of his past “generosity” towards his ex-friends may be returning 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 that someone is trying to re-categorize my generosity with ex-girlfriends as something more unpleasant.”
Soon, a new headline storm – involving minor victims of sex trafficking, an orgy and a $ 25 million extortion plan – showed how much more unpleasant things could get.
A few hours after the Times story broke, Gaetz gave Fox News an interview with Tucker Carlson.
He was there in front of the cameras, apparently, to clear things up.
Instead, Gaetz wove a twisted story that placed himself and his father, Don, a wealthy former Florida politician, as the heroic victims of a massive blackmail plan.
“What is going on,” he told Carlson of the DOJ leak to the Times, “is an extortion from me and my family involving a former Justice Department employee.”
That former officer, the villain of his alleged extortion plan, is attorney David McGee, a former Florida federal prosecutor, Gaetz said.
“On March 16, my father received a text message demanding a meeting,” said Gaetz. “In that case, one person demanded $ 25 million in exchange for making the horrible sex trafficking charges against me disappear,” he told Carlson.
He and his father contacted the feds, “and the FBI and the Justice Department were so concerned about this extortion attempt by a member of Congress that they asked my father to use a bug,” Gaetz told Carlson.
The feds must release the resulting audio tape, he said to Carlson, claiming that he will prove his innocence and reveal “a conspiracy to bleed my family without money”.
McGee leaked the DOJ’s sex trafficking investigation to the Times when the extortion plan failed, Gaetz concluded in a shocking interview.
Then there is the angle of the Iranian hostages.
McGee and former Air Force intelligence officer Bob Kent did not necessarily want the money for them, Gaetz claims.
They wanted to use the money to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent held hostage by Iran in 2007 and declared dead by his family last year.
Oh, what about those sex trafficking charges?
“Offering flights and hotel rooms to people of legal age is not a crime,” Gaetz told Carlson, a denial that may have done less to clear his name than he intended.
McGee, for his part, has denied the accusations of Gaetz’s hostage extortion plan, calling it “a blatant attempt to divert attention from the fact that he is being investigated for child sex trafficking,” as he told The Washington Post.
And McGee is fighting Gaetz with his own dirt in the headlines.
Which brings us, finally, to the supposed orgy.
Gaetz showed the Washington Examiner a series of text messages and other documents he says show details of McGee and Kent’s alleged extortion attempt – including the pair’s reference to the FBI by taking pictures of the congressman in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes age”.
The document has not been verified and its redundant reference to a “sexual orgy” has not been elaborated.
On Friday, text messages emerged to link Gaetz to Joel Greenberg, a political and fiscal ally in Seminole County who is being prosecuted for child sex trafficking.
It was Greenberg’s accusation – for allegedly making a false identity for a younger girl “to facilitate his efforts to engage in commercial sex acts” – that first put Gaetz on the feds’ radar.
Texts obtained by the Daily Beast seem to show Greenberg asking one of his employees to get a driver’s license for Gaetz, who had lost his and needed a quick replacement to board a flight.
The congressman repeatedly bragged about an unidentified Florida police officer about the women he met through Greenberg – even showing videos at their parties in various stages of nudity, The Washington Post, however, reported Friday night.
And to close the week, his communications director, Florida native Luke Ball, erased Gaetz’s mentions from his biography on Twitter and presented his resignation.
“Congressman Matt Gaetz and Luke Ball’s office agreed it would be better to split up,” said a joint statement. “We thank him for his time in our office and wish him the best in the future.”