ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Bar decided not to reprimand or disbar former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz after a House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” he had sex with a 17-year-old girl and frequently used illegal drugs while friends with disgraced Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg.

Gaetz’s attorney, Warren Lindsey — a Winter Park city commissioner — successfully argued it would be “inappropriate and very bad precedent” to discipline Gaetz based upon a “quintessentially political document that contains hearsay allegations of largely unidentified witnesses.”

Still, a Bar grievance committee informally chided Gaetz for his conduct as alleged in the Congressional investigation report, released in December 2024.

“As an attorney in this state, you are held to a higher standard, including the expectation to uphold the legal profession’s honor and public trust,” wrote Attorney Casey Pless Waterhouse, chair of the Bar’s grievance committee, in an Aug. 15 letter to Gaetz.

The Bar’s decision was first reported by the Florida Bulldog on Wednesday.

The Florida Bar investigates allegations of ethical misconduct among lawyers. Discipline can range from an admonishment to suspension of license to disbarment.

Even so, the Bar committee decided that Gaetz’s actions detailed in the Congressional investigation — including evidence that he regularly paid thousands of dollars for sex with women and accepted gifts and other special favors — did not warrant stripping him of his ability to practice law.

“The committee…draws a distinction between offenses of personal morality or alleged crimes which do not have a connection to fitness for the practice of law or otherwise indicate characteristics relevant to law practice,” Waterhouse wrote in her letter. But, she added to Gaetz: “You are urged, in the strongest terms, to reflect on your responsibilities as an officer of the court.”

It also stated that the letter’s admonishment “does not constitute a disciplinary record against you for any purpose.”

Gaetz resigned from Congress in November 2024, just days after recently-elected President Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate him for U.S. Attorney General. Gaetz withdrew his nomination within days after facing concerns from fellow Senate Republicans. Trump later nominated the current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who served in the same role in Florida.

Lindsey wrote a letter to The Florida Bar on Feb. 7, 2025, at the start of its investigation, urging the organization not to take action against Gaetz.

The allegations “have no bearing upon the practice of law or competence to practice law,” Lindsey said in his letter. “Mr. Gaetz has not been charged with or convicted of any crime in Florida or anywhere else.”

Lindsey did not respond to requests to comment.

The Bar’s investigative file on Gaetz will be sealed in August, one year after the investigation was concluded.

Soon after Gaetz was first elected in 2016 to represent the Florida Panhandle in Congress, he met Greenberg — who had just taken office as Seminole’s tax collector — at the Heathrow home of former state legislator and developer Chris Dorworth.

The pair frequently attended parties and other gatherings with young women. Many of the women were invited by Greenberg, who found them through a dating web site that advertises itself as a venue for older men to meet younger women, according to court records. Many of those women were paid escorts.

At a July 2017 party at Dorworth’s home, one of the escorts was a 17-year-old girl known as A.B. who had just completed her junior year of high school and drove her mother’s car to the event. Call girls engaged in sexual activities and participants used cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana, according to court records and the House Ethics Committee’s report. Dorworth has stated he was not home during the events.

The report and court records stated that witnesses testified that Gaetz had sex with the girl on a pool table, an allegation Gaetz has repeatedly denied. A.B. is now 26 years old and living in Colorado.

The House Ethics report stated that Gaetz would regularly pay thousands of dollars for sex with women.

“One woman who was paid more than $5,000 by Representative Gaetz between 2018 and 2019 told the Committee that 99% of the time that (Gaetz and I) were hanging out there was sex involved,” according to the report. “Representative Gaetz sent one woman several hundred dollars for marijuana cartridges.”

In July 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice decided against pursuing sex-trafficking charges against Gaetz.

According to the Florida Bar’s website, Gaetz is listed as practicing in Niceville, Florida, and has no disciplinary history over the last 10 years.

He is currently a host for the small, far-right network One America News, where on one recent show he asked whether recent wildfires in Argentina were “intentional [as] part of a globalist master plan to create a new Jewish ethnostate in the Americas?”

Greenberg resigned in June 2020 after he was first indicted on several federal charges. He is now serving an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in late 2022 to identity theft, stalking, conspiracy to bribe a public official and child sex trafficking, tied to the 17-year-old girl. He is scheduled to be released in July 2030 from a Miami federal correctional facility.

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