Raw Story

A woman has come forward to tell her story after the House Ethics Committee determined that then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sexually abused her when she was just 17.

Laura B. Wolf, an attorney for the girl, spoke to The New York Times about the ordeal. The paper got in touch with Wolf after a federal judge in Florida unsealed court documents that described the victim as "a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler."

Wolf said her client was living with a parent in a homeless shelter and trying to save up enough money to buy braces to fix her teeth when she falsely advertised herself as an 18-year-old on a "sugar daddy" dating website in 2017.

"The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public," Wolf told the paper. "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."

"Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her," she added.

The girl was later introduced to Gaetz through his friend Joel Greenberg, who had sex with her seven times, paying $400 on each occasion.

She would later testify that Trump fundraiser Chris Dorworth witnessed her having sex with Gaetz on a pool table or air hockey table at a party at his home. She also told investigators that she witnessed Gaetz using cocaine that night. She said she was paid $400 for having sex with Gaetz twice that night.

According to the report, the girl eventually saved enough money from the encounters to afford braces.

For his part, Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.

Republicans are facing their next crisis after getting thrashed in elections last week — voters are seeing slow growth in their paychecks, making President Donald Trump's blindspot on affordability more startling and creating a larger problem for the GOP ahead of midterms.

Americans are feeling pessimistic over their economic futures and concerned over their own financial health, Politico reports Tuesday.

Economists also predict mass layoffs, climbing unemployment, a dip in job opportunities and hesitation among employers to hire new workers and potentially offer raises for current employees.

As wage growth has fallen and inflation rises, it's hitting lower- and middle-income families even harder since the beginning of 2025, according to the Bank of America Institute. These are the slowest rates of income growth seen since the early 2010s, when the economy was bouncing back from the Great Recession (2007-2009) and the unemployment rate was nearly double what it is now.

“We’re clearly going through a soft patch now,” Gary Schlossberg, an economist and global strategist for the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told Politico. “Households are going to be feeling some pain. [And] if you’re focused on the trajectory of wage inflation, I think it will be slower next year.”

This presents a "serious risk to Republicans" and exposes the weak point the GOP will face in 2026 as they refine their approach and message to address economic woes for Americans.

And while Trump claims inflation is declining, voters don't agree. Since his second term, he is losing the historic advantage he previously had over Democrats, Politico reported.

Only 34% of voters approve of the president's handling of the economy, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. This figure matches President Joe Biden's polling results during the end of his administration.

Although Trump's administration has argued he will shift his attention to the economy — even offering potential $2,000 checks for low and middle income Americans with tariff revenue — he's also attempting to lower drug prices and suggesting that 50-year mortgages could help reduce costs for people each month.

Tax cuts promised by the Trump administration could bring some relief, but it's expected that those cuts will help the wealthy and give them better purchasing power.

It still won't change that inflation is rising or how Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown could hit wage growth for lower-income jobs often done by immigrants, Recruitonomics Chief Economist Andrew Flowers told Politico.

The reality is that inflation is “worse today than it was at the start of the year, or a year ago,” Flowers argues.

Although President Donald Trump is confident in his redistricting battle designed to keep the Republican House majority, insiders say Republicans are fretting that last Tuesday's election results gave Democrats an opening to counterstrike, NBC reports.

While one anonymous Republican strategist tells NBC that “The president understands intuitively, in a way that other Republicans don’t … that Democrats are always assaulting us, always, and mostly much of the Republican Party never fights back."

“The redistricting fight is proof that they are not that way. So this is in his DNA in a way that is not in other Republicans’ DNA,” the strategist added.

Two other strategists described as close to the White House say they don't necessarily agree, telling NBC "there are growing concerns in the party that the political war is not going as planned — that the juice may not have been worth the squeeze and could, in a nightmare scenario, result in a net gain for Democrats."

"Misgivings" about Trump's strategy heightened after California voters overwhelmingly approved Governor Gavin Newsom's Prop. 50 plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a manner that Democrats hope will flip five House seats in their direction.

“For a few weeks now, he’s had the understanding that they were going to lose Prop 50,” a Republican operative close to the White House tells NBC, adding that Trump "has been planning to sue California over the ballot measure while believing it was a bad idea to get involved in the fight."

"The stakes couldn't be higher," NBC explains, noting that Trump's legislative agenda will be "imperiled by a Democratic takeover of the House," and "also his administration would surely face myriad investigations and he could be impeached for a third time."

“With a narrow majority heading into a midterm, they need more seats for a buffer in order to hold the House. If they can ultimately net five or six seats, then it will be the story of the midterms of success for Republicans,” a GOP strategist tells NBC. “If the whole thing here was to net one seat across the country, then it will not have been worth it.”

In the wake of "strong Democratic showings in predominantly Hispanic areas of Virginia and New Jersey," Erin Covey, a nonpartisan election analyst who is the House editor at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, says there’s “uncertainty” as to whether Hispanic voters will show up for the GOP next year like they did for Trump in 2024, particularly in states like Texas.

“That does not bode well for Republicans banking on Hispanic voters to help them keep their majority next year — but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see Republican incumbents who would be in safe seats suddenly look vulnerable all of a sudden,” she said.

Another anonymous Republican with close ties to the president agrees and is raising the red flags, especially on Texas.

“I think ‘concern’ is a fair way to say it," they tell NBC.

GOP consultant and data scientist John Eakin puts it more bluntly,

“Nobody wants to go against Trump in this district map because they fear him. They’ve pushed the envelope and it’s going to come back to bite them in the ass,” he said. "They’re high as a f—— kite off of 2024."

MAGA insider Laura Loomer suggested President Donald Trump was not to blame after he chose to meet with a former terrorist the day before Veterans Day.

On Monday, Trump welcomed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House despite his past ties to terrorism. The Syrian leader had links to Al-Qaeda under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, and he battled U.S. forces in Iraq before entering the war in Syria.

At one point, al-Sharaa had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head and was eventually imprisoned by U.S. forces in Syria for several years.

Loomer blamed the meeting between him and Trump on "the people who work for President Trump."

"Sometimes I feel like some of the people who work for President Trump deliberately go out of their way to sabotage him," the Trump insider wrote Tuesday on X. "Who said: let's invite the ISIS terrorist to the White House for a photo op in the Oval the day before Veterans Day? How many US soldiers did Julani kill?"

Several of Loomer's followers accused her of holding Trump blameless.

"I think it's high time that people stop making excuses for Trump by blaming the people around him like he has no control whatsoever," one person replied to Loomer. "Just remember the guy sitting in Florida who everybody MAGA thought was not qualified to be president is doing far more conservative things than Trump ever thought of doing."

"I am a huge Trump supporter and voted for him 3 times. I hate feeling betrayed by what he's doing but I am," another commenter said. "He's imploding from within his own administration. It's his fault tho... He's his own worst enemy because his ego blinds his common sense."

A significant number of President Donald Trump’s supporters may have reached their “breaking point” as costs continue to climb, according to a new poll from Politico published Saturday.

The poll found that the “typical” Trump supporter would be willing to pay $65 more per month in taxes if it meant supporting the president’s agenda. After the Democratic sweep in this week’s elections, however, Politico’s Jessica Piper argued that Trump’s policies – which some critics have blamed for the rising costs of goods and energy – had officially gone too far for Trump voters.

“The POLITICO Poll results are a reminder that — while many of Trump’s supporters have a reputation for intense loyalty — they also have a breaking point,” Piper wrote. “And Tuesday’s election results suggest that despite Republican voters’ willingness to pay a literal price for Trump’s policies, the Trump agenda to date may have pushed voters too far.”

Trump’s tariff policy in particular has seen the cost of goods soar, with Americans bearing the cost of the tariffs by as much as 55%, NBC News reported. Energy prices have also soared, increasing twice as fast as inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to the Trump administration’s war on clean energy, and in spite of Trump’s pledge to slash energy prices “by half within 12 months.”

The Democratic candidates that clenched victory this week all ran on the issue of affordability, signaling an appetite among voters for politicians pledging to lower cost-of-living expenses. The messaging proved so successful that Trump himself has launched a new push to target affordability, while decrying Democrats’ attempts to advocate for affordability a “con job.”

President Donald Trump has ordered senators to remain in Washington D.C. throughout the weekend to negotiate an end to the ongoing government shutdown. But negotiations — even among Republicans — have become fractious.

That's according to a Friday article in Politico, which reported that bipartisan talks in the Senate have appeared to sputter after an offer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was almost instantly rejected by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) along with most of the Senate Republican Conference. That deal included a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that are due to expire at the end of 2025, in exchange for Democrats voting for the House of Representatives' continuing resolution that House Republicans passed in September.

Now, Politico reports that senators are once again at an impasse. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) was not optimistic that his colleagues would be able to hammer out an agreement by the end of the weekend.

"What we have here is an intergalactic freak show," Kennedy said after leaving a closed-door meeting with the Senate Republican Conference. When asked what senators could accomplish this weekend, the Louisiana Republican said "nothing."

"We're going to be here for a long time," he said.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), whose bill to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) was blocked by Thune in October, was unmoved by Republicans' apparent inability to come together on a solution to end the shutdown.

"My adage is, put them in a barn and don’t let them out until they come up with a solution," he told Politico.

According to the outlet, senior members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have been assembling a three-bill package that would fund government agencies and programs for a full year, while bipartisan Senate negotiators are contemplating three separate bills to fund government agencies through next year. Senators are also pushing for legislation that would prevent Trump from making so-called "pocket rescissions," in which the president refuses to allow money appropriated by Congress to be spent. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) argued it was "insane" that Trump had yet to meet with Congressional leadership to iron out a deal.

"They refuse to engage," he said. "It’s killing the country."