How a 17-Year-Old Girl Became Enmeshed in the Matt Gaetz Scandal

She was 17 and a high school junior in Florida. She was working at McDonald’s. And she was living in and out of a homeless shelter.

Hoping to save up to buy braces to fix her teeth, she falsely advertised herself in 2017 as 18 years old on a website that matches men looking for “companionship” with young women looking to make money.

What followed would set off a chain of events that would have a dramatic impact on her life and help upend the political career of one of the men she would encounter, Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican.

Mr. Gaetz was investigated by the Justice Department for child sex trafficking but never charged. Following the election last year, he was President Trump’s first choice to serve as attorney general. He subsequently resigned from Congress, and then withdrew from consideration as attorney general under a storm of scrutiny.

A bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation later determined there was substantial evidence that he had sex with the 17-year-old and the report included testimony from the girl about how she was paid by Mr. Gaetz for the sex.

For all the public furor over Mr. Gaetz — who always asserted that he broke no laws even as the House Ethics Committee found that he violated Florida’s statutory rape laws — little attention has been given to the story of the girl, how she came to be exploited and how she has coped with what happened to her and the ensuing political scandal.

Last month, in response to a request from the McClatchy newspaper chain, a federal judge in Florida unsealed court documents from a related civil case that shed some light on her background. The documents included a description of the girl that said that at the time she met Mr. Gaetz she was “a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler.”

In response to that disclosure, The New York Times reached out to the girl’s lawyer, Laura B. Wolf, who agreed to confirm some basic biographical information about her client, providing details for the first time of how the girl’s circumstances led her to her encounters with Mr. Gaetz. Ms. Wolf said her client believed the public should have a fuller understanding of how she had been victimized.

“The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public,” Ms. Wolf said. “Although my client’s circumstances were revealed outside of her control, I hope it helps for the public to see a fuller and more human picture of her than the press has reported on to date.”

Ms. Wolf added: “Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her.”

Experts in sex trafficking said that the matter involving the girl demonstrated how there is a spectrum of ways girls and women are exploited. In some cases, the girls or women are physically trapped and unable to escape men who are taking advantage of them. In other cases, the girls or women find themselves at the whims of more powerful men after turning to sex trafficking out of economic need.

The girl would emerge as the chief witness against Mr. Gaetz in the Justice Department sex trafficking investigation. The investigation ended with the department declining to bring charges. Among the reasons prosecutors did not move forward was their concern about whether she would be seen as a credible witness after being exposed to cross-examination by defense lawyers, according to people familiar with the investigation.

In response to questions about the girl, Mr. Gaetz said in a text message on Thursday: “I never had sex with this person.”

“This person threatened me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay her $2.3 million dollars,” Mr. Gaetz said. “She never sued me because her story is fiction.”

According to her lawyer, the girl’s path to meeting Mr. Gaetz began during her junior year in high school. In December 2016, she turned 17. Her parents were divorced. One of them was so poor that the parent was living in and out of a homeless shelter. When the girl and her siblings were staying with that parent, they lived with the parent in the shelter.

To make extra money, the girl worked at McDonald’s. But she began looking for other ways to make money and turned to a website that “advertised itself as a ‘sugar dating’ website that primarily connected older men and younger women seeking ‘mutually beneficial relationships,’” according to the report by the House Ethics Committee.

Through the website, in April of her junior year in high school, she met Joel Greenberg, a local Florida tax collector who was becoming a friend and ally of Mr. Gaetz’s, according to court documents.

Much of what followed has been documented in other inquiries and legal proceedings, including the Ethics Committee investigation.

Mr. Greenberg first invited the 17-year-old to a meeting on his boat, according to court documents. At that meeting, they did not have sex, but Mr. Greenberg paid her $400, the documents said. Around that time, Mr. Greenberg gave her ecstasy and told her to try it at home.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Greenberg contacted the girl again, and they ultimately met up at a hotel where they had sex, according to court documents. For that, she was paid another $400, the court documents said. In the months that followed, Mr. Greenberg, using his personal credit card and one for the local tax collecting office he was in charge of, would have sex with her seven times for money before she turned 18, the documents said. Often during those encounters he would give her ecstasy, and he would often pay the girl and other women additional money for taking the drug during sex.

On July 15, 2017, Mr. Greenberg asked the girl and others to attend a party at the home of Chris Dorworth, a former Republican member of the Florida state House of Representatives who at the time worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, which is run by a major Trump fund-raiser.

Court documents described the party as involving “alcohol; cocaine; middle-aged men; and young attractive females.”

Mr. Gaetz, then 35, attended the party along with a girlfriend.

At the party, the girl who was 17 later testified, both cocaine and ecstasy were offered to her. She took the ecstasy and drank, according to court papers. She testified that she danced naked in front of Mr. Dorworth and swam naked in his pool.

The ethics committee heard testimony that the girl twice had sex with Mr. Gaetz that evening, and a court document quotes her as having testified that she had sex with him once on a “pool table or … air hockey table.” She testified that Mr. Dorworth saw Mr. Gaetz have sex with her on the game table and “then laughed about it with other partygoers.” (Mr. Dorworth has claimed that he was not home at the time, an assertion undercut by phone records that became part of litigation in the case.)

The girl later told congressional investigators that she saw Mr. Gaetz use cocaine that night.

For having sex with him twice, the girl was paid $400, according to testimony she gave to the Ethics Committee.

That fall, the girl moved to live with a family member in Texas, according to Ms. Wolf. She did not complete her senior year in high school. She continued to work for minimum wage in the food services industry. Ultimately, between the money she made from her interactions with men and in the food services industry she was able to save up enough money to get braces.

Several years later, Mr. Greenberg came under investigation for trying to undermine a political opponent in an upcoming election by mailing fake letters to the school where the opponent worked as a teacher, claiming that the opponent had sexual relations with a student.

As part of that investigation, the Justice Department learned about Mr. Greenberg’s relationship with the 17-year-old girl, leading the authorities to broaden their inquiry into Mr. Gaetz and others.

During the investigation, the girl hired a lawyer and was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. The girl began mental health treatment around that time, according to her lawyer.

Mr. Greenberg pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor for having sex with the girl in exchange for money. He was sentenced to a decade in prison. But the department declined to charge Mr. Gaetz.

In late 2022, lawyers for the girl sent letters to Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Dorworth about whether they would reach a financial settlement with the girl. The girl never sued. But Mr. Dorworth sued the girl, setting off depositions and an exchange of evidence. Mr. Dorworth would drop the case against the girl, but some documents generated by the case were given to Ethics Committee investigators who later used them in their report.

The documents that revealed that the girl was “homeless” were unsealed in October.

Fritz Scheller, Mr. Greenberg’s lawyer, said that throughout the entire ordeal, including the investigations and the civil litigation, it became apparent that the girl was a “victim that embodied unwavering strength and courage.”

Devlin Barrett contributed reporting, and Kirsten Noyes and Matthew Cullen contributed research.