I Hope There's a Fraternity Wherever Matt Gaetz Is Going
I Hope There's a Fraternity Wherever Matt Gaetz Is Going
The great and grand history of men not understanding that their actions have consequences
I am proud to say I rarely fall prey to a conspiracy theory. However, I am the Donald Trump of Matt and Nestor Gaetz-gate.
I love it. It sustains me in a way Bravo never will because it goes further than Bravo ever has: family tension? Check. Men that don’t understand what’s going on but think they do? Check. POLITICS???? Andy Cohen, you liked one of my photos on Instagram in 2014. You know where to find me. I think we have a hit on our hands.
I’m getting ahead of myself: last week, news broke that Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) allegedly had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old young woman and she would accompany him on trips. While the story only recently came to light, the Department of Justice has apparently been investigating the matter since last year; according to the Wall Street Journal, senior Justice Department officials were briefed on the matter as early as last summer.
This twisted tale has continued to build since last Tuesday and has become the perfect storm of my favorite things: drama, men getting their comeuppance, and Roy Cohn (I’m imagining all of your gasps as you realize I have found a way to tie yet another thing to Roy).
Anyway, this week, we’re going to break down this still unfolding Matt Gaetz drama and why it is so much bigger than just one overaged pedophilic frat boy.1
The Tea
This story started horrifically and has only gotten worse.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Gaetz was being investigated for sex trafficking allegations. According to the Washington Post, “the investigation apparently spun out of another sex-trafficking probe in Florida. That one focused on a former county official named Joel Greenberg, who was charged in the summer with a number of federal offenses, including sex trafficking of a minor.”2
Gaetz was alleged to have had a sexual relationship two years ago with a 17-year-old girl and paid her to travel with him across state lines for the purpose of having sex. For those keeping score at home, that is both statutory rape and sex trafficking.3
While this is disgusting enough, Gaetz wasn’t done there: multiple sources have confirmed that 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. (x)
On Thursday, the New York Times also reported that the DOJ investigations into Gaetz and Greenberg were focused on
their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.
Investigators believe Joel Greenberg… initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters. Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.
The Thursday article discusses how the nature of Gaetz’s alleged adult consensual sexual relationships could still lead to trafficking charges if the women were offered the aforementioned gifts, fine dining, travel, etc., in exchange for sex. There are also allegations that Gaetz and others took ecstasy but, while I can see him being guilty of various sex crimes, I honestly don’t think he’s a fun enough person to do recreational drugs. Hot take, I know.
I read Gaetz’s op-ed in the Washington Examiner and I got the sense that he thinks all of these allegations are now just going to go away.4 I mean, how could they not now that we all know he’s a happily engaged man who’s “really enjoying my current embrace of monogamy”? What??? You haven’t heard the news?????
It’s understandable: as of November 2020, everyone (including Tiffany Trump, apparently) assumed that Gaetz was simply a single non-biological and non-adoptive father to an ex-girlfriend’s orphaned immigrant little brother. But suddenly, on the eve of a very disgusting and very illegal sex scandal, he has a fiancée?? Who he’s been engaged to since December 2020????
Much like Nestor suddenly making his debut into society just in time for Gaetz to detract from Representative Cedric Richmond's (D-LA) comments on police brutality, Miss Ginger Luckey (which is, I guess, not a fake name) has magically appeared as the love of Gaetz’s life right as this news story broke.5 I’m a sucker for a when-you-least-expect-it love story, but this seems more like a super-convenient-because-it-is-100%-a-cover love story than anything you’d see on Lifetime.
This is clearly a very richly dramatic tapestry, but I don’t see how you are going to bring this back around to Roy
Gaetz vehemently denies all of the allegations brought against him, as any good conservative would, but he’s added an extra dash of spice on top because he knows how to appeal to his base (reality TV junkies): Gaetz is claiming that he and his family are being extorted.
Allegedly, two men learned of the investigation into Gaetz months ago despite not being affiliated with its proceedings. The men then reached out to Don Gaetz, Matt’s father, and asked if the elder Gaetz “could give a huge sum of money to fund their effort to locate Robert A. Levinson — the longest-held American hostage in Iran, whose family has said they were told he is dead. If the operation were a success, he would win public favor and help alleviate Matt Gaetz’s legal woes.” The elder Gaetz then reported this communication to the FBI, believing it to be an extortion attempt.
It is very clear to everyone besides Matt Gaetz that the sex crimes and extortion cases are not contingent on one another and are instead individual matters being investigated by two different government agencies. But it is convenient for Matt Gaetz to conflate the two and make it seem like the allegations against him are part of a larger attack on his family.
I wonder where Gaetz could have possibly learned to spin the truth into something that works for you while also giving the media the information that they think they want so they don’t go any deeper with their lines of questioning.
NOW we’re going to talk about Roy.
I’m proud to say it’s taken me nine weeks now —with only two light suggestions— to break into a full Roy-based discussion. So all you Judgey Jeannine’s can keep the tepidly funny commentary to yourselves!!
For those of you new to the Emily For President multiverse, my one area of true expertise in this world is talking about Roy Cohn: McCarthyite lawyer, Republican powerbroker, Trump father figure, and AIDS victim. Like a really twisted version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, everything I ever do can always find its way back to Roy.
I’m currently reading Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by journalist Sarah Kendzior, a book about Trump that focuses just as much on the sociopolitical environment that allowed for (and even cultivated) his presidency as it does on the Trump himself. It’s really great, and not just because one of her chapter titles sounds an awful lot like my thesis title.
Most importantly, Sarah’s work has made me reconsider Trump in a new Roy Cohnian light: I have said for a while now that Trump is not his own person so much as he is a generic brand combo deal of the men he believed both his father and Roy Cohn to be. He’s embodied so many of the lessons, mentalities, and mannerisms Roy espoused albeit in a much shitter way.
But Roy didn’t just spring up fully formed and talking like a mafioso lawyer overnight. He also didn’t just influence Trump. Roy too was a result of his environment and then made a career off being an influencer. (I know what I said. Roy Cohn was an influencer. Have fun impersonating him on Fallon, Addison Rae!)
In the fragile masculinity food chain, we can clearly see that Roy influenced Trump who is now influencing men like Gaetz. For example, Roy didn’t believe he would ever face consequences, Trump calls any form of accountability a witchhunt, and Gaetz is already using the 1-2 punch method of denying and counterattacking that he learned from Trump and that Trump learned from Roy.
“Roy was a master of situational immorality . . . . He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” (x)
In 2019, Stephanie Mencimer wrote in Mother Jones that “Gaetz is often described as Trump’s protégé, someone who’s become a Fox News staple not just by sucking up to the president but by trying to out-Trump Trump with insults hurled at Democrats and anyone else with the temerity to challenge the president.”
I made a similar point in my thesis, writing that
the most Cohnian result of the USFL case was not the victory with only $1 awarded in damages, though; it is the clear transition of power from Cohn to Trump captured in the iconic photo from the press conference they held to present the case… Cohn is looking off into the distance absently, which serves as a visual foreshadowing of the way in which AIDS would destroy his mental endurance over the course of the next two years. In contrast, a vigorous and forceful-looking Donald Trump stares right into the camera and is mid-sentence, as if he is talking to or at anyone who dares to look at the photo. It was in this moment, in this photo, when the two made a transition: Trump was no longer Cohn’s mentee but his successor.
For all of the talk from conservatives about preserving traditional hierarchies and returning to a great America of the past, it is such a frequent occurrence for the student to become the master only to make the same mistakes (but certainly they’re more scandalous as well as more fun).
Why I bring Roy into the thick of this is to say this: Matt Gaetz is not special. He is just the next in line in the constant ongoing cycle of men acting horribly and thinking their actions have no consequences (or thinking their consequences are not real consequences, or that they’re consequences they can escape from).
And in a way, they’re right: Roy’s influence is still felt today, Trump has not faced punishment adequate of his crimes, and Matt Gaetz may very well be just fine after all of this. Whether you “bring Gaetz down” with allegations or “you bring Trump down” with impeachments or you think Roy Cohn was brought down when he was disbarred, there will always be another man who believes he can accomplish what his mentor failed to achieve.6
No matter who these men hurt in whatever horrifying ways they dream up doing it, they’ll always have the ability to persist and do it again.
In parting
I just want to say a final fuck you to Matt Gaetz for, among other things yet technically unproven in court, being a hypocrite and a headass.
For the sake of journalistic integrity, I do have to say that at this time, all of the charges against Matt Gaetz are only alleged and haven’t been proven in court. But neither were the ones against Jeffrey Epstein!!!
The Times reported that “the sex trafficking count against Mr. Greenberg involved the same girl [who has brought allegations against Gaetz], according to two people briefed on the investigation.”
While it’s not exactly proof of his crimes, Gaetz was the only representative (literally, it was 418-1) to vote against an anti-sex trafficking bill during his first year in Congress which is 50 Shades of Suspect.
In all seriousness, Gaetz’s op-ed is a masterclass in whataboutism.
I would just like to say that I am also suspect of Miss Luckey and her story because of one specific detail: she claims to be Gaetz's "travel buddy," and says she has been accompanying him everywhere during the pandemic.
While I'm not going to even touch the lack of regard for our current situation, I believe she thinks this claim should ease up scrutiny on Gaetz for, how could he be trafficking a 17-year-old girl across state lines when he is with her, his lovely bride to be.
However (and my Gaetz conspiracy tendencies may be showing a little too strongly here), the young woman charging Gaetz traveled with him before he ever met Luckey, and if he wants the woman he's with to travel with him everywhere (i.e. as Luckey claims she is doing now), wouldn't that simply lend more credence to the young woman's claims?
I rest my case.
Will the next man to take up Gaetz’s mantel be Nestor??? Only time will tell.