A Florida Republican lobbyist’s attempt to sue the young woman at the center of the Rep. Matt Gaetz underage sex trafficking scandal has backfired in spectacular fashion, with the woman filing a response that repeatedly accuses the lobbyist of raping her.
Christopher Dorworth is a real estate developer whose brief yet meteoric rise in the Florida state legislature—where he was once the House speaker-designate—came to a sudden halt when he failed to be re-elected in 2012. He switched gears and became a power player and lobbyist instead. But two years ago, just as the world was learning that the FBI was looking into two of Dorworth’s connections—Joel Greenberg and Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—Dorworth quit his job at the influential lobbying firm Ballard Partners and dialed back from public life.
Despite claims from Greenberg that Gaetz recruited and paid that teenager for sex, the high-profile investigation fizzled in February when the Department of Justice declined to prosecute the congressman.
ADVERTISEMENT
But little was ever said about the lobbyist.
He’s now attempting to sue Greenberg, Greenberg’s wife, and the woman at the center of the child sex trafficking allegations for defamation and racketeering—and asking the court to declare that he never had sex with the woman when she was underage.
But just as Barbra Streisand’s efforts to conceal a picture of her home led to more attention, the lawsuit is now drawing more attention to the old wounds—and putting the once underage sex trafficking victim on the record that Dorworth had sex with her too.
Despite his stature and influence in Florida, Dorworth was a side-character in most of the reporting about the investigation. The sparse news stories about him mostly focused on his alleged scheme to run a spoiler candidate that would unfairly tilt a local election. Unexplored were the details that several sources briefed on the investigation had told The Daily Beast: that federal agents were also exploring whether they could target Dorworth for alleged sexual interactions with the same underage teen girl. As Dorworth would later describe in court papers, “the investigation progressed from allegations [of] sexual activity to allegations of obstruction of justice.” However, the DOJ never charged him with either crime—and he largely avoided the limelight.
That is, until Dorworth made the curious decision in April to sue Greenberg and the sex trafficking ring victim herself, who is referred to in the lawsuit only by her initials, “A.B.”
Dorworth is seeking $1 million, according to a court docket, claiming that his career was destroyed by the investigation and bad press, which he blames on the defendants’ allegedly coordinated lies to protect Greenberg. One problem with that theory: Greenberg is now serving an 11-year prison sentence, stemming from a conviction that A.B.’s attorneys believe was thanks in large part to her testifying against Greenberg.
And now the tables have turned.
The young woman has taken the opportunity to lump the lobbyist in with Greenberg. Her motion to dismiss, which her lawyers filed in federal court on June 16, contains a half dozen passages that directly or indirectly accuse Dorworth of having sex with her when she was underage. The response asks the judge to toss Dorworth’s claims against her, portraying his lawsuit as a thinly disguised attempt to shield himself from his own accountability.
“The complaint improperly seeks to preempt any claims A.B. may have against Mr. Dorworth for raping and trafficking her,” they wrote. “Simply put, Mr. Dorworth has no legal right not to be sued by A.B. for raping and trafficking her.”
The phrasing also makes clear that Dorworth is indeed being accused of having sex with her when she was still underage, with lawyers describing “A.B.’s experiences being sex trafficked and statutorily raped by plaintiff.”
The response also confirmed what Dorworth previously alluded to in his lawsuit: that the young woman’s lawyers approached him seeking some sort of out-of-court settlement.
Her legal team appears to have initially reached out to Dorworth’s attorney over the holidays in December 2022 to warn about an incoming “child sex trafficking and rape” lawsuit. Dorworth’s lawyer, Richard E. Hornsby, responded in January with a five-page letter that stated he is “unwilling to enter into a private resolution regarding her claims, even for a nominal amount,” calling her attempts “a false money grab” by a woman with a “highly problematic” online history. (The Daily Beast previously reported that the former teen went into the pornography industry shortly after the sex trafficking events.)
Hornsby also attached polygraph exam results to his letter showing that Dorworth successfully passed a lie-detector test when he asserted never having sex with the young woman.
In their filing last month, the woman’s lawyers described their attempts to keep this from ever coming out.
“A.B. offered the opportunity to resolve any legal disputes without publication of her allegations,” they wrote.
On Thursday, Michael Beltran, the Central Florida lawyer who filed Dorworth’s recent lawsuit, told The Daily Beast that “there have been no settlement negotiations at any point and Dorworth will never pay a nickel.” But he also warned this journalist about reporting details in this case.
“I would be careful with what you publish… there are no witnesses, no paper trail, no history of the two meeting and a polygraph examination passed by Mr. Doworth conducted by a 30+ year polygraph expert for the FBI and Homeland Security that said he didn’t do it,” Beltran wrote.
Beltran went on to claim that written questions and interview requests The Daily Beast sent to Dorworth’s wife in 2021 asking about the federal investigation were tantamount to “a series of harassing text messages,” and threatened to drag several The Daily Beast reporters and editors into court as witnesses in the current defamation case.
As for Beltran’s claim about “no witnesses,” Greenberg might dispute that. In a pre-emptive 2020 pardon request to then President Donald Trump, the disgraced Seminole County tax collector wrote that Dorworth—identified as a “prominent lobbyist for Ballard Partners”—hosted parties at his home where a number of men, specifically including Gaetz, paid to have sex with young girls, including A.B.
“On more than one occasion this underage individual was involved in sexual activity with several of the other females at the house, myself and also the congressman from Florida’s panhandle,” Greenberg wrote in the letter, adding that he paid several of the girls on Gaetz’s behalf, though he did not say whether he did the same for Dorworth. “None of us would have ever engaged in any type of relationship with this individual had we known the truth about her age,” the letter said.
The alleged events at Dorworth’s house play a central role in his claims against A.B. His complaint cites a Gaetz ex-girlfriend—a key witness in the case—who allegedly told Dorworth that his name had come up in A.B.’s conversations with investigators, and “she believed it had something to do with Dorworth’s house,” the complaint said.
Dorworth’s team is already in something of a retreat. On Friday, his lawyer cut six paragraphs from his initial lawsuit—all lurid accusations about the private sex life of Greenberg’s wife—pursuant to an agreement the two parties struck ahead of her own scathing motion to dismiss. (All other defendants—Greenberg’s parents, a corporate entity affiliated with his father, and the family dental company—also moved to dismiss the lawsuit; Greenberg, however, only filed a motion asking Dorworth to clarify his allegations.)
In court papers, Beltran called the deletions “a courtesy” to Greenberg’s wife but acknowledged that the move would “avoid unnecessary litigation.”
The ongoing lawsuit, which was originally filed in Seminole County’s state courts but has since been moved over to federal court in Orlando, is yet another indication of enduring damages from this sex trafficking ring that involved Florida power players in Republican political circles.
A.B.’s 28-page motion to dismiss could fairly be described as scorching. Her counsel stressed the self-destructive nature of Dorworth’s lawsuit, repeatedly pointing out that the lobbyist’s quest for vengeance has only drawn more negative attention on himself. The woman’s lawyers claim it’s a pointless exercise, noting that Florida’s defamation laws have a relatively short statute of limitations—so the fact that Dorworth quit his highly paid job at Ballard Partners in March 2021 means that he sued just one month too late in April 2023.
“Because the alleged harm occurred more than two years before filing, Mr. Dorworth cannot base his damages on his separation from Ballard Partners,” they wrote.
Their response also provides the first window into certain aspects of the Gaetz investigation, with the woman’s attorneys saying she remained truthful when discussing what she experienced when she was paid for sex by several older men.
“A.B. maintains that she has never provided any false information to prosecutors or the public relating to her experiences being trafficked and statutorily raped by Mr. Greenberg and others,” her lawyers wrote.
While the DOJ has remained characteristically silent about its decision to close the probe, several witnesses’ lawyers told The Daily Beast that prosecutors simply didn’t feel comfortable presenting devastating criminal charges against a sitting congressman as politically divisive and obstreperous as Gaetz.
A.B.’s true identity has been known to The Daily Beast since at least April 2021; however, this publication is continuing to withhold her name because she is a sex trafficking victim who has not come forward herself.
The woman’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
U.S. Judge Carlos E. Mendoza, who is based in Orlando, has yet to rule on any of the motions to dismiss Dorworth’s lawsuit.
