2023 was an eventful one for sex scandals on Capitol Hill and beyond.
Here are some of the biggest political sex scandals of the past year.
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Senate and House sex tapes
Explicit video footage was published in mid-December that showed two men engaging in sexual intercourse on the dais of a Senate hearing room. The Daily Caller, which obtained the pornographic material, reported that the footage was filmed by a congressional staffer inside the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, which is known for high-profile confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices.
Although the outlet did not name the staffer in question, Aidan Maese-Czeropski’s name was subsequently widely shared on social media. Maese-Czeropski was a legislative aide in Sen. Ben Cardin’s (D-MD) office before the video came out, which resulted in his termination.
Maese-Czeropski, 24, has not confirmed that he was one of the two men in the pornographic video, instead taking to social media to largely absolve himself of responsibility for the video and threaten legal action. The post, published to his LinkedIn, has since been deleted along with Maese-Czeropski’s account.
The U.S. Capitol Police has told the Washington Examiner that it is investigating the matter, which Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) predicted would end in some manner of criminal charges.
“I think there’s gonna be an investigation, and I think there will probably be a criminal prosecution is my best guess,” Kennedy said.
For his part, Cardin has said that he is cooperating with Capitol Police’s investigation.
Just days later, a report emerged alleging that Capitol Police investigated an unrelated sex tape incident on the House side last year.
Semafor reported that a senior staffer for Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) was allegedly filmed engaging in a sex act in what appeared to be a Capitol office. The staffer, who was unnamed, told the outlet he was informed of the investigation in June 2022 and told by Newhouse directly in July that it has ended with “no evidence to the allegation.”
A spokesperson for Newhouse declined to confirm the staffer’s name to the Washington Examiner but said there was an investigation last year and that no “conclusive evidence” was found.
Lauren Boebert’s Beetlejuice date gone awry
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) sparked controversy in mid-September after being caught on surveillance footage causing a disturbance during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice at a Denver theater.
Before footage of the incident was released, Boebert acknowledged she was kicked out of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts but rejected the notion she was disruptive. She later apologized for her actions after video showed the newly divorced congresswoman vaping and touching her male companion intimately as others looked on.
The footage also showed Boebert recording and taking photos of the performance, which is strictly prohibited at most theaters.
“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry,” Boebert said in a statement after the footage came out. “While none of my actions or words as a private citizen that night were intended to be malicious or meant to cause harm, the reality is they did and I regret that.”
Boebert also apologized for the misleading claims her campaign made in the immediate aftermath of the incident. (The team had denied the vaping accusations by saying there was a misunderstanding due to heavy fog machines and other patrons using similar electronic cigarettes.)
Boebert has since said she canceled all future dates with the man she attended the performance with. She also said she learned to “check party affiliations” of potential partners, referring to reports that her date was a Democrat.
“All in all, it was mostly a lovely time, and I’ve taken responsibility for my actions,” Boebert said in a video. “I’d love to know how the musical ended, and I encourage people to go and see it, but yeah, it was a great time back in the district, seeing voters.”
George Santos’s OnlyFans purchases
One of the most shocking revelations in the House Ethics Committee’s report on then-New York GOP Rep. George Santos was that he spent thousands of dollars in campaign contributions on OnlyFans.
The committee found that Santos, with a company he co-owned, fooled donors into believing they were giving money to an independent expenditure group to support his campaign when it was going toward Santos’s own personal gain.
RedStone Strategies was formed in November 2021 and only had two authorized users, Santos’s single-member LLC, Devolder Organization, and Jayson Benoit & Associates, Inc. Despite Santos being connected to the company, RedStone was “described as an independent expenditure political committee formed ‘exclusively’ to aid Representative Santos’ congressional campaign,” the report says.
Over the campaign, at least $200,000 was transferred from RedStone’s bank accounts to Santos’s personal bank accounts, the report says.
On Oct. 21, 2022, a contributor sent $25,000 to RedStone, which then transferred the same amount into Santos’s personal account. Then, on Oct. 26, 2022, the other contributor sent a $25,000 wire to RedStone, which turned around and sent $25,000 to another account owned by Santos, the report found.
Once he had amassed the $50,000, Santos used the money to, in part, make smaller purchases at OnlyFans, a site that is often used for pornography and where the people sell content directly to the user.
Earlier this year, Santos claimed on Fox Business that he “just discovered what OnlyFans was about three weeks ago” and that he was “oblivious to the whole concept.”
After news of the OnlyFans payments began to circulate on social media, a model on the website claimed that Santos was a subscriber.
“This guy was subbed to me HAHAHAHA,” porn star Leila Lewis wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to a tweet about the payments.
Lewis alleged that she had “rated his d***,” though she was unable to provide screenshots of their interactions because Santos had “deleted his account.”
Matt Gaetz’s looming ethics complaint
Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) feud with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) dominated headlines in 2023, culminating in the latter’s historic ouster in October.
McCarthy has argued that Gaetz’s efforts to take him down were based on personal grievances over his failure to shut down an ethics inquiry into allegations of sexual misconduct and misuse of campaign funds by the Florida lawmaker. Gaetz has denied those claims.
He has also denied the claims being investigated by the Ethics Committee, an investigation that was launched in April 2021 before Republicans and McCarthy took control of the House. The committee is probing allegations of sexual misconduct, including on Capitol grounds, and misuse of campaign funds.
Gaetz was also the subject of a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice Department that ended in February of this year without any charges being filed.
The ethics inquiry, meanwhile, has been going on for over two years.
McCarthy has frequently criticized Gaetz since his October ouster and repeatedly referenced the ethics investigation. In November, he warned that Gaetz could end up having the same fate as Santos.
Florida Republican Party chairman’s rape allegation
Former Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler was suspended from his post in December amid a police investigation into him and his wife Bridget for sexual battery.
Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of the conservative parental rights group Moms For Liberty, and her husband have close ties with the leaders of the state’s Republican Party, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) appointing her to sit on the tourism district that governs the Walt Disney World as he feuded with the company.
The two faced calls to resign from their respective posts after a woman accused the Zieglers of rape and sexual assault during an October 2023 threesome. After the woman told the Sarasota Police Department she was raped during the threesome, the couple admitted to being involved in a sexual relationship with her but denied that it was nonconsensual.
Despite their claims of innocence, Mr. Ziegler was reportedly recorded in a telephone call with the woman apologizing for the alleged assault and offering her financial compensation to resolve the issue.
The Florida GOP gathered for an emergency meeting earlier this month to vote to suspend Ziegler after he refused calls by DeSantis and Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) to resign.
The full state party will gather in early January to remove Ziegler should he not resign.
In the meantime, Ziegler has continued to claim that the police investigation will not produce any charges.
Virginia Democrat candidate’s sex cam scandal
The final months of Susanna Gibson’s race against Republican David Owen in the Virginia state Senate race for the 57th District became the subject of national attention after sexually explicit videos of her emerged.
Gibson lost to Owen in November, two months after the videos were leaked. The Virginia Democrat has maintained since then that “very few people actually seemed to care” about the videos and denied they were the reason for her loss.
Initial reports stated she performed sex acts for money, but Gibson has pushed back against the claims, stating that she was unaware that the videos would be disseminated.
When asked what she drew from the fact that the race was close — she lost by less than 1,000 votes — Gibson said, “That voters didn’t care.”
“I took more time off than originally intended, and I knocked, on average, 100 doors a day for two months,” Gibson said. “You have conversations with voters and you can kind of tell who knew and who didn’t know, and who knew and didn’t care. Very few people actually seemed to care, very few. I can count them on less than two hands.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, Republicans wanted to remind voters of the sex videos. Mailers containing screenshots of the videos were sent to Virginians, with the envelopes warning that explicit materials were contained inside and that minors should not open the envelope.
“The Republican Party in Virginia never would have sent those mailers if they didn’t know I was going to win or certainly could win,” Gibson said.
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“After the initial shock wore off, I think it had little to do with the race,” the Democrat added.
Rachel Schilke, Eden Villalovas, Jack Birle, Cami Mondeaux, and Reese Gorman contributed to this report.
