The Real Gaetz Story Is Less About Sex Trafficking, More About Poverty

Back in 2021, when I first heard that the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was being investigated for sex trafficking, there was an image that immediately jumped into my brain, and perhaps yours, too: It was of Gaetz, in a dark backroom office, barking orders over the phone to a henchman driving a windowless van. Teenage girls — probably white, with the trappings of a middle-class background — handcuffed to dirty cots, from which they were forced to sexually service an unending parade of shady older men.

You know, the vision of trafficking that you see in a movie like Taken.

At the time, I had done enough reporting on the topics of sex work and sex trafficking to have a hunch that the details of the Gaetz story were likely far more mundane than the lurid international kidnapping ring most people envision when they hear the phrase “sex trafficking.” And as more details about Gaetz’s victim emerged in a recent New York Times piece, that hunch has proven right. The real story doesn’t feel like some action-packed, edge-of-your-seat thriller. It is, instead, an all-too-common story of housing insecurity, poverty, and the sacrifices people make in the hopes of getting a leg up in a capitalist society. Yet to say that this story is banal is not to say it isn’t tragic: If anything, the story of Gaetz’s victim, and the many underage sex workers and trafficking survivors like her, is all the more heartbreaking in its sheer mundanity.

If you haven’t yet read the Times story, the narrative is fairly simple. In 2017, a 17-year-old high school junior in Florida decided she wanted to get braces. But her McDonald’s salary wasn’t going to pay for them, and her divorced parents — one of whom lived in a homeless shelter — didn’t have money for expensive orthodontics either. So she made a choice that many people in her situation have made before her: She loaded up a “sugar dating” website, lied about her age, and struck up an acquaintanceship with Joel Greenberg, a local tax collector and friend of Gaetz. From there, things progressed apace: Greenberg paid the teenager $400 per meeting, whether or not they had sex. Sometimes he’d encourage her to take drugs and have sex under the influence. On at least one occasion, he brought her to a party, where she took ecstasy, drank alcohol, and had sex with Gaetz twice. Eventually, the teenager left Florida to live with a family member in Texas, where she continued to work in food service. While she did not finish high school, she was eventually able to save up enough money for braces.

When I read through this girl’s story, it wasn’t hard for me to picture her. The details she’s shared with lawyers and reporters aren’t that different from the ones I’ve heard from friends and colleagues who either turned to or were coerced into sex work at a young age, usually while struggling with poverty and housing insecurity. For many young people — in particular, unhoused teenagers who can’t rely on their families for support — sex work is the quickest and most straightforward way to make the money that they need to survive. In other cases, people living in poverty find themselves pressured into doing sex work by family members or romantic partners, who treat the victim’s sexuality as a shared resource that can be tapped when the household needs funds. Oftentimes, the person’s age is treated as a technicality: What is the difference between being 17 and 18 for someone who sees sex work as their best path to financial stability?

It’s easy to point to men like Greenberg and Gaetz as the villains in this story — and to be clear, both of them exploited a vulnerable teenager who was clearly harmed by her interactions with them — but it feels evident to me that they are merely side characters in a much larger American tragedy. Remove Gaetz from this teenager’s story, and you still have a girl who’s financially dependent on a man who coerces her to have sex while under the influence. Remove Greenberg from the story, and you still have a girl battling housing insecurity and poverty, who could easily have wound up in yet another exploitative sugar relationship with some other abusive sugar daddy. To the extent that Gaetz plays a major role here, it’s far more through his work as a legislator who has actively worked to destroy America’s social safety net and render more and more people in the financially vulnerable position that might lead them to a party where they’re coerced into having sex with him.

There’s an obvious appeal to the Taken narrative of trafficking and exploitation. A pretty young girl with no real problems is kidnapped and trafficked; you get a Liam Neeson type to locate her, kill her kidnappers, and set her free, and suddenly she’s able to go back to her former life, a little bit traumatized but generally no worse for wear. If Matt Gaetz is the primary villain in a trafficking story, then all we have to do is punish him and we can stop worrying about sexual predators. A trial, a jail sentence, and everything can go back to normal. 

The true story of trafficking, however, poses a much more vexing question. You might “end demand” as countless anti–sex work activists have advocated, but you still have struggling people in poverty looking for a way out, people made vulnerable to exploitation by their desperation and need. You might put Matt Gaetz in prison (an outcome which, sadly, feels like a reach in the current legal climate), but there’s no shortage of creepy abusers lining up to take his place. If we want to truly end trafficking and exploitation, if we want to prevent more teenagers from winding up in situations like the one Gaetz’s victim found herself in, we need to do more than simply attack and regulate sex work. 

We need to attack the problem at its root. For Matt Gaetz’s victim, and many other girls and women like her, that ultimately means ending poverty so that they’d never find themselves having to ask if having sex with creepy older men was ultimately worth the $400.