Matt Gaetz accused of abusing erectile dysfunction meds to “go all night” with “girls” in DC

Anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has faced allegations connected to underage sex trafficking for years without getting much ire from his fellow Republicans. But after he led a group of eight House Republicans that voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the speakership this past Saturday, several prominent Republicans are bringing up the allegations to attack him.

“This is a guy that didn’t have – that the media didn’t give the time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who was a member of the House until earlier this year, told CNN’s Manu Raju. “And there’s a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him – because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away, of the girls he had slept with.”

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The bill cites USAID’s support for LGBTQ+ rights and women’s equality as proof of its “perverse ideology.”

“He bragged about how he would crush E.D. medicine and chase it with energy drinks so he could go all night. This is obviously before he got married. And so, when that accusation came out, no one defended him.”

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A Republican senator just called out Matt Gaetz for allegedly sleeping with a minor and says he would brag about “crushing erectile dysfunction medicine and chase it with energy drinks so he could go all night.” (@acyn) pic.twitter.com/xeq7PtGrLH

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) October 5, 2023

Mullin suggested that Gaetz’s opposition to McCarthy as speaker is what gave him the media attention that he couldn’t get before. Gaetz opposed McCarthy’s speakership, leading to the House voting 15 times in order for McCarthy to get a majority this past January when the legislative session started.

This past Saturday, Gaetz introduced a motion to vacate to remove McCarthy from the position. Gaetz and seven other House Republicans voted to remove McCarthy. Since Democrats generally do not vote for Republican speakers (and Republicans don’t vote for Democratic speakers), and since Republicans only have a tiny majority in the House, all it took was eight Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting against McCarthy to remove him as speaker. He has said that he will not seek the speakership again.

While Gaetz has referred to LGBTQ+ people as “degenerate” in the past, his own past may be rather sordid. The Secret Service received a tip that Gaetz was associated with a Florida county tax collector who was charged with making fake IDs to sex-traffic underage girls. The Justice Department opened an investigation into Gaetz in 2020, and investigators found that Gaetz would show his colleagues videos of naked and topless women on his phone as he bragged about how he was able to go to the parties held by the county tax collector, according to some witnesses.

The county tax collector wrote a letter to the Trump administration in an attempt to get a pardon in 2020 where he confessed to paying women and girls for sex and said that he and Gaetz sexually abused a 17-year-old girl together but said that they thought she was 19. He said he confronted the teen girl and told her about “how many people she put in danger.”

Gaetz denied the accusations and said that he was the victim of extortion. McCarthy, who was House Minority Leader at the time, said that he would not remove Gaetz from his committee assignments. CNN reported that Gaetz showed pictures of naked women to his colleagues on the House floor and bragged about having sex with them in 2021, a time when Mullin was a member of the House. Gaetz reportedly helped in the investigation of the county tax collector, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

But by 2022, the DOJ investigation into Gaetz had concluded, and prosecutors recommended not charging Gaetz in the sex trafficking investigation due to a lack of credibility of two key witnesses.

Prominent Republicans have been pretty quiet about the investigation until now, and it’s not just Mullin speaking out publicly. Marc Short, former chief of staff to Mike Pence, told CNN that Geatz only got a job in D.C. to have access to “teenage interns.”

“Matt Gaetz, to say he came as a fiscal crusader, it’s more likely he came here for the teenage interns on Capitol Hill, to be honest,” Short said. “Look, he’s voted for continuing resolutions. He’s voted for omnibus bills. He voted for trillions of dollars in COVID spending. Even this year, he put forward an earmark, and yet he’s presented himself as, ‘I’m doing to do this for the fiscal benefit of the country.’ That’s not honest. The guy just has a distaste for Kevin and used the rules to dethrone him.”

Thanks for having me on, @jaketapper. pic.twitter.com/KLpyXfpfw8

— Marc Short (@marctshort) October 4, 2023

Other Republicans are attacking Gaetz without bringing up the sex trafficking allegations.

“He’s about clicks,” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) told Politico. “He’s about how many cameras he can get shoved in his face and he’s a historical figure because he caused for the first time in history and all that. I think he gets off on that.”