Embattled Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler is denying a news report claiming he asked for $2 million to resign from his party leadership role amid a sex scandal and police probe.
“It’s not true,” Ziegler told The Daily Beast via text. “100% false.”
According to the website Florida Politics, the high-profile Republican—through emissaries—supposedly asked party officials for a multimillion-dollar buyout from his $120,000-a-year job.
ADVERTISEMENT
The report arrives days before the executive board of the Republican Party of Florida is set to hold an emergency meeting over the rape accusations against Ziegler and controversy over a threesome he and his wife Bridget had with the accuser.
Asked who would make up the claim or why, Ziegler answered, “No clue. Crazy stuff floats all the time in order to generate a narrative.”
“Local blogger accepts Source A who gets ally Source B to confirm... as credible source for an entire article. Embarrassing. 100% false.”
On Sunday, the board is expected to discuss launching an investigation into Ziegler and possibly starting the process to suspend his pay or expel him.
One board member told The Daily Beast that Ziegler has sent out emails in recent days with talking points or voter registration numbers as if nothing has happened, but that a majority of the board is ready to vote him out.
Asked about Florida Politics’ report of an alleged buyout, the person said, “Not one penny. Not one penny.”
“I can tell you I’ll be voting against anything that is any kind of severance or payoff,” the person said. “Christian’s about to learn a very important lesson that a lot of people have learned. He's not Donald Trump and he's never gonna be Donald Trump.”
The member was referring to Ziegler’s suggestion to some party members that it’s hypocritical to target him for his scandal but not to denounce the former president for his own.
The Florida Democratic Party also seized on the news, with chair Nikki Fried releasing a statement calling the supposed demand “an absolute joke.”
“Christian Ziegler has spent weeks dragging his name, his family, and his party through the mud and he wants $2 million dollars to step down?” Fried said.
“Let’s not forget—Christian Ziegler is an accused rapist,” she added. “If the buyout request is true, thinking that he’s owed money for putting the Florida GOP in this situation shows exactly how little respect he has for Floridians. The best time for him to resign was two weeks ago. The second best time is now.”
Bridget Ziegler, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, is also fighting to keep her seat on the Sarasota County School Board. On Tuesday, the panel passed a resolution asking her to resign, saying she “would cause an irreparably harmful distraction” to board business.
Christian Ziegler once held a seminar at the Moms for Liberty (M4L) summit this summer titled “Mastering the Spin: Effective Messaging Strategies.” He told attendees to be wary of the media and advised people to “never apologize” during a discussion on the M4L chapter that faced blowback for quoting Hitler in a newsletter.
“I think apologizing makes you look weak,” he said. “And even if you’re wrong, you have an opportunity to correct it by bringing more information in and wording something differently.”
As The Daily Beast reported, a longtime friend of Christian Ziegler accused him of raping her at her Sarasota apartment on Oct. 2. She told detectives that she planned to have a sexual encounter with Christian Ziegler and his wife, but when she learned Bridget couldn’t make it, she canceled the meeting. “Sorry I was mostly in for her,” the victim messaged Christian, according to a search warrant affidavit.
The woman claims Christian Ziegler appeared at her home and raped her without a condom. Ziegler has not been charged with any crime and claims the encounter was consensual.
But the bombshell accusations have tarnished the Zieglers’ images as paragons of family values within the Republican party. Over the past two weeks, critics have repeatedly pointed out that the couple’s private threeway sex contradicts their public anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
