A Sex Trafficking Investigation Didn't Stop Matt Gaetz From Getting Married

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Rep. Matt Gaetz eloped over the weekend, during an ongoing federal investigation into whether he paid a minor to have sex with him. 

The 39-year-old Florida congressman married Ginger Luckey in California, Luckey (who is now going by the name Ginger Luckey Gaetz) tweeted Saturday. Former Rand Paul aide Sergio Gor served as the officiant. 

“I love my wife!” Gaetz tweeted Saturday. 

Gaetz and Luckey got engaged on New Year’s Eve at former President Donald Trump’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the Justice Department investigation into former Gaetz ally Joel Greenberg was well underway, and March Gaetz’s potential role exploded into public view after the New York Times reported that Gaetz was under investigation for sex trafficking. Greenberg pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor in May and is believed to be cooperating with the investigation. 

Gaetz has not been charged with anything thus far, and he’s repeatedly denied that he’s ever had sex with a minor or that he paid for the woman—who was reportedly 17 at the time—to have sex with him.

Luckey is the sister of Palmer Luckey, who founded the now-Facebook owned virtual reality technology company Oculus. Her mother, Julie Luckey, brought Ginger Luckey to the fundraiser where she met Gaetz, and has made large donations to Republican causes including the Republican National Committee and former President Donald Trump. Gaetz, however, described his new wife in a recent interview with Vanity Fair as relatively apolitical. 

“Ginger has not lived a hyper-politicized life. She has family members who are deeply and daily involved in politics. And I am deeply and daily involved in politics,” Gaetz told Vanity Fair. “I have seen speculation that this must be some sort of political arranged marriage.” 

But not all of the Luckey family has been happy about the relationship. Last month, Ginger’s younger sister Roxanne Luckey—a former White House intern—posted a series of now-deleted TikTok videos in which she called her now-brother-in-law a “literal pedophile” and claimed that Gaetz tried to set her up with a 40-year-old man when she was 19. 

In a statement at the time, Ginger Luckey referred to her “estranged sister” as “mentally unwell.” 

In the interview with Vanity Fair published over the weekend, Gaetz continued to deny the sex trafficking accusations and said Trump had been something of a role model for him in how to deal with an ongoing investigation into whether he committed crimes. 

“I have seen so much in politics: people distracted, dismayed, disoriented by bad coverage,” he said. “In a way Trump was an inspiration for me because despite whatever they were saying about him—with foreign intelligence services, with the DOJ—he had a determination to say what he was gonna say and share his vision for the country.”