House Ethics report details alleged sex with underage girl

The House Ethics Committee on Monday revealed it found “substantial evidence” that former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2017 and that he “regularly” paid women for sex, all while he was in Congress.

The panel, in a final report on its yearslong investigation into Gaetz, also found that he used illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions between 2017 and 2019.

Gaetz also accepted gifts, including a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, “in excess of permissible amounts,” the bipartisan committee concluded.

“Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House,” the 42-page report said.

The committee said it found “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.”

But the committee said it did not find sufficient evidence that Gaetz violated a federal sex-trafficking law, even though he “did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex.” The panel said it found no evidence that those women were under 18 when the travel took place, and it could not conclude that the “commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion.”

Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.

An attorney for Gaetz did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the report. As the report was released, Gaetz in a series of posts on X denied that he had engaged in prostitution or sex trafficking.

“There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses,” Gaetz wrote in one post.

Hours before the long-awaited report came out, Gaetz asked a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order that would block its release.

The ethics panel’s report, the final product of an investigation that began in 2021, was at the center of a recent controversy surrounding the former lawmaker from Florida.

Gaetz, 42, resigned from Congress in mid-November, shortly after President-elect Donald Trump picked him to be U.S. attorney general. Trump’s selection to lead the Department of Justice immediately drew howls from critics, who were quick to note that Gaetz would, if confirmed, be in charge of the agency that had previously investigated him on sex-trafficking allegations.

The Justice Department ended that probe without filing criminal charges. But the Ethics Committee, which had paused its own efforts while the DOJ’s version played out, reauthorized its investigation in May 2023.

When Gaetz left Congress, Republicans including Ethics Chairman Rep. Michael Guest, of Mississippi, said Gaetz was no longer within the committee’s jurisdiction, casting doubt on whether its report would come out publicly.

News outlets reported at the time that Gaetz’s departure came just two days before the Ethics panel was set to vote to release the report. The panel, which is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, deadlocked on whether to release the report despite Gaetz no longer being a congressman.

But in a secret vote Dec. 10, the committee decided that the report should come out.

Gaetz withdrew his bid for attorney general after just eight days as Trump’s pick, saying he was “unfairly becoming a distraction” to the Republican president-elect’s transition efforts.

His decision, which followed reports that numerous Republican senators would not support Gaetz’s confirmation, was the first major setback for Trump’s efforts to staff his Cabinet.

As more of Trump’s picks prepare to face senators’ scrutiny in the coming weeks, the contents of the Gaetz report could erode senators’ trust in the Trump transition team’s vetting process.

Between 2017 and 2020, Gaetz paid women tens of thousands of dollars “that the Committee determined were likely in connection with sexual activity and/or drug use,” the report said.

That sum includes money spent at a July 15, 2017, party, at which “the record overwhelmingly suggests that Representative Gaetz had sex with multiple women … including the then-17-year-old,” according to the report.

Gaetz, who was 35 at the time, and the underage girl had sex twice at that party, including at least once in front of others, the report found. The girl, referred to as “Victim A,” said she remembered Gaetz gave her $400 that evening for what she understood was payment for sex, the report said.

“At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school,” the report said.

Gaetz’s prior assertion that he has not had sex with a 17-year-old “since I was 17” was untrue, the committee concluded.

His “statutory rape of Victim A was a violation of Florida law, the Code of Official Conduct, and the Code of Ethics for Government Service,” the report said.

The committee said it found evidence that Gaetz did not learn the victim’s age until a month after they had sex. But “statutory rape is a strict liability crime,” the report said, referring to crimes that don’t require proof of intent for a conviction. The panel noted that Gaetz met up with the girl again for commercial sex less than six months later, after she turned 18.

The Gaetz investigation included 29 subpoenas, nearly 14,000 documents, more than two dozen witnesses, six Freedom of Information Act requests and nine other requests for information, the report said.

The committee said it received written communications from a Gaetz associate, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Seminole County, Florida, who in 2021 pleaded guilty to federal crimes including sex trafficking of a minor girl. Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2022.

Gaetz and Greenberg — who met and became friends shortly after Gaetz was sworn in to Congress in January 2017 — frequently attended parties with young women who had been contacted by Greenberg via a “sugar dating” website, the report said.

Greenberg said that he and Gaetz, who did not have his own account on the site, would split the costs of “drugs, hotel[s], and girls.”

The committee said that although Greenberg had “credibility issues,” none of its findings relied exclusively on information he provided.