House investigators said Gaetz paid more than $90,000 (£71,843) to women for sex and drugs, but created a complicated web of transactions that were hard to trace, according to the report.
“The committee was unable to determine the full extent to which Representative Gaetz’s payments to women were compensation for engaging in sexual activity with him,” the report found.
He allegedly used his friend Joel Greenberg, currently serving 11 years in prison for crimes he said he committed with Gaetz, as a frequent go-between and logged onto Greenberg’s account on SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as a “luxury dating site”, to interact with young women.
Gaetz also paid women directly, sometimes through platforms such as Venmo, according to the report. But the committee said he often used another person’s PayPal account or an account linked to an email address with a fake name.
He also obscured payments, the panel wrote. In one example, he gave a college student a cheque made out to “cash” with “tuition reimbursement” in the memo line. The woman said she received it after a group encounter, which “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money”.
Gaetz has posted on social media that he gave money to women he was involved with as gifts, not payments. The committee found that two women, aged 27 and 25, did not consider their relationships transactional.
Another woman who was considered his girlfriend invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked if she was given money for sex or drugs, or to pay others.
The committee attempted to prove Gaetz frequently paid for sex through evidence such as a text message where he reportedly balked at a woman’s request that he send her money after he accused her of “ditching” him one night. The woman then asserted she was “treated differently” than other women he was paying for sex.
In another message, his then-girlfriend said that he and Greenberg were “a little limited in their cash flow” and asked a group of women “if it can be more of a customer appreciation week”.
A few months later, according to the committee, she wrote: “Btw Matt also mentioned he is going to be a bit generous cause of the ‘customer appreciation’ thing last time.”
As a Congressman, Gaetz earned $174,000 (£138,843) a year.
His net worth is greater: On his most recent federal financial disclosure, external filed in August, he reported owning assets worth at least $575,000. His father Don Gaetz, who co-founded hospice provider Vitas Healthcare, has a fortune of about $35m, Forbes reported.
