Florida Republican Matt Gaetz allegedly sent text messages to a young woman who had previously received payments for sex from the then freshman congressman’s good friend Joel Greenberg asking her to join him and others on a three-day trip to the Florida Keys shortly after his first inauguration.
ABC News first received the evidence from a source with knowledge of the House Ethics Committee’s investigation.
In the alleged text messages described exclusively to ABC News, the then-freshman congressman appeared to message a woman, who ABC News is not identifying, asking if she would fly on a private plane to the Florida Keys for a trip with Gaetz, three other women, and one other man.
“Hey — any interest in flying on a private plane to the keys May 19-21?” Gaetz allegedly wrote to the woman, who was older than 21 at the time, according to multiple sources familiar with the messages.
Gaetz then allegedly said that the trip would feature “2 guys, 4 girls. A very high-quality adventurous group,” according to the messages, which have previously not been reported on.
“Yeah I’m in,” replied the woman, according to the texts.
Gaetz allegedly replied: “Fantastic. As is true with all time you spend w me, it’ll be fun and chill […] You have a passport?”
Earlier in the week, Gaetz was one of the subjects discussed during an impromptu press conference on Capitol Hill hosted by ousted speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. It was the California congressman’s first since announcing he intended to resign from his seat in the House of Representatives.
Referring to the Florida congressman’s recent bill to defend Donald Trump from accusations that he launched an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, McCarthy said, “Is he trying to deflect from what’s happening in [E]thics? I don’t know what happened.”
The Independent reported that “Mr. McCarthy was then pressed about the Ethics investigation itself, and answered that he didn’t know much about the investigation — but claimed that Mr. Gaetz had been ‘very concerned’ about it while Mr McCarthy was still speaker, and had asked the speaker “to do something about it.’
But he wouldn’t, Mr McCarthy, went on, because that ‘would be illegal.’
The former speaker wasn’t done. At another point in the press conference, he also appeared to make another reference to his enemy’s Ethics probe, or at the very least his sex life: ‘He probably lies about who he sleeps with too.'”
Gaetz responded to the comments by asking, “What stage of grief is this?”
