Florida State Representative Chris Dorworth filed a lawsuit against Gaetz's and his friend, Joel Greenberg, for defamation. His August 2024 deposition is a fun read.
THE WITNESS: I mean, again, I take tremendous
7 exception to the idea that it was a party. You
8 know, again, there is seven of us. I count here --
9 even if you count Gaetz which I don't -- Fish said
10 he did. Mike Fischer, Gaetz, B , "AB," K
11 M , Joe Ellicott. That's -- it's not a big
12 group. It's a small group of folks.
13 I never met "AB." I do believe -- I believe I
14 met K M one time. I believe that was out
15 at a bar or something like that because Joe -- Big
16 Joe Ellicott was totally in love with K and
17 wanted to marry her, thought that he had sort of
18 found this tremendous gem via this -- I guess via
19 Seeking Arrangement or whatever it was. But he was
20 very much in love.
21 If you read some of the interrogatories or some
22 of the stuff I think we turned over from the feds,
23 some of the stuff they had there, he described her
24 as his girlfriend. He was very much in love with
25 her. If I had met her at my house at this point in
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1 time, I probably would have made a big deal out of
2 her because my friend was deeply in love with her.
3 Then about two weeks later, as I recall --
4 well, he called me up one day and asked me if I
5 could come join him at Duffy's, and I wasn't really
6 particularly close with Joe. I mean, that was sort
7 of out of the -- we had never been for food before.
8 And I said, Sure. You know, again, he was a client
9 of mine, and he worked for Joel and he was high up
10 in the tax collector's office and I really didn't
11 know what it was about.
12 I got there and Joe was in tears. It was
13 basically had a bunch of food on the table, and
14 like, you know, had to stop and lower his head. I
15 mean, it was very serious, and I asked him what was
16 wrong. And he said he found -- picked up K
17 phone and found a series of what would be very --
18 we'll call it not positive images of a woman if you
19 thought she was the love of your life and you were
20 together, finding her having group sex and being on
21 the receiving end of things that I don't think most
22 people want to see happen to a woman that they love.
23 But he was just beside himself, and he also
24 kind of acknowledged. He said like, Listen, you
25 meet somebody the way I met her, I knew that she
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1 wasn't some pristine thing, but I just didn't think
2 she would do this. Joe was -- he thought that she
3 really loved him, and he finds a video full of not
4 a -- I didn't ask the details. I wasn't like, Hey,
5 let me see the phone or anything. He didn't have
6 the phone. I think she was in the shower and he
7 picked up the phone, saw somebody text there,
8 started scrolling through the texts to see who it
9 was and saw all the videos exchanged back and forth
10 and stuff like that and he was just morose.
ETA link:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.414007/gov.uscourts.flmd.414007.183.5.pdf