Woman told congressional ethics panel she saw Matt Gaetz having sex with minor at a Florida house party, lawyer says
A woman told the House ethics panel investigating Matt Gaetz that she saw the former congressman having sex with a minor at a Florida party, her lawyer said Friday.
“My client testified to the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Rep. Gaetz having sex with a minor at a house party in Orlando in 2017,” attorney Joel Leppard told NBC News.
Leppard said the woman told the committee about the alleged inappropriate sexual encounter in April.
The lawyer, who said he represents two witnesses who have provided testimony to the panel, insisted that the Ethics Committee release its findings related to allegations of sexual misconduct against President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general pick.
“The American people deserve to know the truth about the person slated to become the top law enforcement officer in the country” Leppard argued.
A spokesman for Gaetz noted that the former congressman was investigated by the Justice Department and not charged with a crime.
“Merrick Garland’s DOJ cleared Matt Gaetz and didn’t charge him. Are you alleging Garland is part of a cover up?” the spokesman told The Post.
The revelation comes a day after ABC News reported that the key figure in a Justice Department investigation into sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz told the House Ethics Committee that the Florida Republican had sex with her when she was 17 years old.
The woman, who is now in her 20s, was subpoenaed by the ethics panel over the summer and testified that Gaetz had sex with her when she was a minor and still in high school, according to the outlet.
The Justice Department informed Gaetz last year that it would not bring charges against him related to the probe, but the House Ethics Committee has been running a separate investigation into the former congressman, who abruptly resigned from Congress Wednesday after being nominated by Trump to lead the DOJ.
Gaetz told The Post Thursday that the woman’s allegations were a “false smear.
“These allegations are invented and would constitute false testimony to Congress,” Gaetz said in a statement. “This false smear following a three-year criminal investigation should be viewed with great skepticism.”
Gaetz has previously accused his accuser, as well as his former friend Joel Greenberg, of attempting to “frame” him.
“The Committee’s star witness, Joel Greenberg, is a felonious liar who involves others in his lies,” Gaetz wrote in a September post on X, which he called his “final response” to the ethics probe.
“On July 10, 2024, I provided the Committee dispositive evidence of my innocence by producing a ‘smoking gun’ contemporaneous, jailhouse writing, documenting the plot to frame me, which includes both Joel Greenberg and his victim. This was authenticated by two former federal agents who interviewed the jailhouse informant who revealed the plot against me,” he added.
Greenberg, a former local tax official in Florida, pleaded guilty to multiple federal charges, including sex trafficking, in May of 2021.
As part of the plea deal, Greenberg admitted that he recruited women for commercial sex acts and paid them more than $70,000 from 2016 to 2018, including at least one underage girl – who was the woman who told the ethics panel that Gaetz had sex with her as a minor, ABC News reported.
Greenberg’s plea deal states that the woman “represented that she was an adult” when she met him but that he “acted in reckless disregard” and had a “reasonable opportunity to observe” that she was under the age of 18 when he trafficked her for sex.
By leaving Congress, Gaetz, 42, is no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee – ending the probe and denying the panel the opportunity to release its findings – but several senators have demanded to see the panel’s report on Gaetz before the upper chamber deliberates on whether to confirm him to the cabinet post.