Government

Matt Gaetz Opposed Revenge Porn And Child Trafficking Laws. HUH!

Heckuva coincidence, right?

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Matt Gaetz (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

In 2017, the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act, sending it on to the House where it sailed through on a vote of 418 to 1.

Guess who the lone “no” vote was.

“Unless there is an overwhelming, compelling reason that our existing agencies in the federal government can’t handle that problem, I vote no because voters in Northwest Florida did not send me to Washington to go and create more federal government,” Gaetz said in a Facebook Live post highlighted yesterday by Business Insider. Yes, that is his “son” Nestor in the background — because irony is dead.

Gaetz is reportedly under federal investigation for sex trafficking arising out of allegations that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex. He is also alleged to have recruited women online and paid them for sex via CashApp.

The Florida congressman vehemently denies all of it, describing himself a righteous man caught in the crosshairs of the nefarious Washington swamp he’s taking on.

“Folks won’t be surprised that bizarre claims are being made about me shortly after I decided to take on the most powerful institutions in the Beltway: the establishment; the FBI; the Biden Justice Department; the Cheney political dynasty; even the Justice Department under Trump,” he wrote in the Washington Examiner.

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But his defenders appear to be thin on the ground, with Trumpland conspicuously silent and his own colleagues supplying reporters with a steady stream of background comments along the lines of “Oh, yeah, that guy’s a total sleaze. It was just a matter of time ’til that shit caught up with him.”

CNN reports that Gaetz had a habit of showing other legislators photos of naked women on his phone.

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.

“It was a point of pride,” one of the sources said of Gaetz.

Asked about it by the Washington Post, Gaetz replied by text “I have dated women in college and graduate school, and have boasted about how great they are across the board, as boyfriends do.”

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And indeed the congressman seems to have strong feelings about the right to “boast” about intimate partners even after the relationship has ended. As the Orlando Sentinel points out, Gaetz personally blocked the passage of a revenge porn law when he was a state legislator in 2014.

Beginning around 2013, activists spent at least three years trying to pass a nonconsensual pornography law through the Florida Legislature. But they had trouble getting by Gaetz.

In 2014, for instance, a bill cleared two Senate committees and the full Senate by unanimous votes. But the House version of the legislation, which attracted 17 co-sponsors, was never given a hearing in the first committee it was assigned to — a committee that was chaired by Gaetz.

“Matt was absolutely against it. He thought the picture was his to do with what he wanted,” former Republican state Rep. Tom Goodson told the Sentinel. “He thought that any picture was his to use as he wanted to, as an expression of his rights.”

The bill passed in 2015, with just Gaetz and his roommate voting against it. And now Gaetz himself is accused of passing around naked photos of his partners to other men.

It’s always the ones you most suspect, right?

Former lawmaker says Gaetz fought ‘revenge porn’ law: ‘He thought that any picture was his to use as he wanted’ [Orlando Sentinel]
Matt Gaetz is under investigation on suspicion of violating federal sex-trafficking laws. In 2017, he cast the only vote against a human trafficking bill. [Business Insider]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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