Two women tell House Ethics panel Matt Gaetz paid them for sex and one saw him with a minor: lawyer
An attorney representing two women who testified before the House Committee on Ethics about Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz said Monday that both his clients stated under oath that the former Republican congressman paid them for sex — and one saw him in flagrante delicto with a 17-year-old.Orlando-based attorney Joel Leppard told ABC News that the ethics committee cross-checked his clients’ stories with Gaetz’s Venmo records, obtained via subpoena.“They essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them,” Leppard told the outlet.
“And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex.'”Both women were adults when the alleged transactions took place.However, one of Leppard’s clients gave more damaging testimony against Gaetz, who resigned from Congress Nov.
13 — hours after President-elect Trump tapped him as the top US law enforcement official.“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep.Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17,” Leppard recounted to ABC News.The age of consent in Florida, the Panhandle of which Gaetz represented in Congress for nearly eight full years, is 18.
However, Leppard added that his client told the committee that “her understanding was that Matt Gaetz did not know that [the 17-year-old] was a minor, and that when he learned that she was a minor, that he broke off things and did not continue a sexual relationship until she turned 18.”The lawyer’s statement came two days before the ethics committee is due to meet, possibly to discuss what to do with a report compiled from its investigation of Gaetz for offenses including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and sharing inappropriate images on the House floor.Gaetz has denied wrongdoing and his resignation left the ethics investigation in limbo, since the panel has no jurisdiction over former members of...