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so back in 2019 uh then democratic congresswoman katie hill who we've had on the program a number of times resigned from congress after revelations of an inappropriate relationship with someone who'd worked on her campaign and that relationship had been exposed in a really kind of awful way in nude photos that were leaked to and then published in a british tabloid without katie hill's consent now hill sued that tabloid for violating california's revenge porn law yesterday she lost that suit she now plans to appeal but katie hill had also struck up what she called an unlikely friendship with matt gates in congress and at the time when she resigned gates actually publicly defended her over the leaked photos the two kept in touch through 2020 despite gates relationship with donald trump but their relationship petered out after the trump january 6 insurrection then cnn reported that congressman gates had showed nude photos of women he had slept with to lawmakers in a new piece in vanity fair katie hill writes that if the report is true he engaged in the very practice he defended me from and should resign immediately and katie hill joins me now um it's it's great to have you on the program uh katie i wonder if you just uh maybe just sort of talk about your relationship friendship with matt gates what you sort of thought of him and what you make of all this now yeah i mean look we became friends because we served on the same committee and we were about the same age and he was friendly to me when i was a new lawmaker um but when it really mattered when i was feeling particularly abandoned by the people within my own party um and when i felt just betrayed and alone and disgusted and uh disgusted with myself it matters a lot that somebody stands up for you and i i don't know how many people have been in a situation like that right where you where anybody standing up for you feels like a big deal but it gets a lot of points and um you know now with all of this coming out i think people can certainly say that i have maybe not made the best choices when it comes to my relationships with men i never had a real relationship with matt gates but regardless i feel i feel betrayed by him and i have to wonder about his motivations for defending me in the first place and um you know i think that what's so gross is to see all of this coming out each one of these uh you know accusations or allegations or charges that are coming out is it's just like he should resign immediately the ethics violation the ethics committee should be opening an investigation immediately and for some reason they haven't when they opened one on me based on a tweet or a or a facebook post from my bitter ex-husband i mean it's just it's just like where did the double standards end and then you see within my lawsuit that it is okay they're saying that it is okay for any person any woman who runs for office opposition research firms can go to their exes and can say hey we'll pay you if you give us nude photos of so and so who's running for office and then they can give those photos to the daily mail or to red state or to some of the other publications that are disgusting and willing to do that and it's free game it's it's free speech it's you know it means that it's it's wide open and it's just like horrifying that this is what the reality is that we're looking at for women who are running for office as compared to men who honestly gates could probably get indicted and run for election and reelection and still win i mean we had that with duncan hunter yeah we've had that on the inside a hundred times so i'm just like you're you're wilder and curious your point here about the the the double standards i just you know i just for folks to remember i mean you resigned shortly thereafter um these you know the photos were leaked and there were allegations of an improper relationship with the campaign staffer um and you know we're in a territory i think by any objective metric again that gates denies but worry to be true is way worse yes way worse but i mean in a different universe honestly than than what happened with you and and we should also say that like the the thing that he's been sort of casually accused of doing is just showing pictures of you know sexual conquest or women that he has had relationships with to uh members of the house floor like you know it's not illegal uh but it's it's gross and it's sort of part of the same culture i think that produces a appetite for the publishing of photos of you that you're suing over 100 it's commoditizing women's bodies and it's making it that we don't have any ownership of it that other people do specifically men do we are we are simply there for their pleasure and enjoyment and uh entertainment and uh and that's it that's it we don't we don't have any um you know autonomy beyond that right and so that's one of the reasons that i have i before the results of this lawsuit i have focused so much time and energy on getting an amendment into the recently passed violence against women act which the amendment would make it a federal law for revenge porn to be illegal which seems like it should be obvious and in fact it is illegal in most states but there's this fabric this you know patchwork of laws um the mere fact that it's not a federal law makes it so that internet companies are less incentivized to uh you know to to do anything about it and that media companies would have to think twice about publishing those images if it was a federal law um but you know that is something that matt gates voted against too he voted against the violence against women act and uh here we are we're going to be taking this to the senate it's going to take 60 votes and by god if we can't find 10 republicans who vote with us on a violence against women act that includes an amendment to make it so that women's nudes can't be shared without their consent where are we even as a country i mean i guess we've all been asking that question for you know quite some time at this point but it just it just shows you how far we still have to go for women in america um to even be seen as equals uh katie hill uh it's always a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you i really appreciate you coming on tonight thank you very much just moments ago the daily beast peeled back another layer of this story reporting quote in two late night vanmo transactions in may 2018 representative matt gates sent his friend the accused sex trafficker joel greenberg nine hundred dollars the next morning over the course of eight minutes greenberg used the same app to send three young women varying sums of money in total the transactions amounted to 900 nbc news has not verified this information it just published 15 minutes ago gates has acknowledged the existence of the investigation but again denies the allegations daily b says that they asked for a response their latest story and the chief of staff for congressman gates requested quote more details on the times and amounts being discussed so we can review any details with our lawyers and the dailyvee's political investigations reporter jose palieri broke the story and he joins me now um all right so this this has to do with joel greenberg the individual who had a status conference today uh who appears in like he's going to plea we don't know that for sure walk us through what your reporting shows so in all of this what we've heard is that there's a federal investigation that extends to the congressman right and key to that would be any evidence of payments that would have been made from that congressman to his friend this tax collector in florida now what we have gotten to hold about the daily beast are proof of venmo payments that matt gates did way back in 2018 and it's worth telling this story okay overnight late at night the congressman sends two separate payments via venmo to his friend the first one is titled test the second one says hit up and it names a person who we've now determined was a teenage girl now this is pivotal because just hours later as we reported uh joel greenberg then turned around and made three payments totaling 900 to three young women now this is really important this detail is huge what we were able to find is that one of those young women is now a porn star now we have not revealed her name because she was so young at the time but what my colleague roger sollenberger and i have been able to do is get a hold of financial payments that directly tie matt gates to joel greenberg and very quickly turn around and have girls names on them okay so uh there's a bunch of stuff here so let me just sort of take them uh in turn right so uh obviously under the law it is illegal to pay for sex uh and uh matt gates says he has never paid for for sex right but it doesn't get you out of legal jeopardy if your buddy pays for sex and then you pay your buddy the same amount i'm not saying that's what happened here there seems to be a colorable case that if your reporting is true it did but from a legal exposure standpoint if someone pays for sex and you pay them you're not off the hook correct that's right that's part of a conspiracy right now what we have here though and it is worth going through the detail we got hold of venmo payments and as anybody who uses venmo knows when you pay anyone anything when you want to make a financial transaction you have to explain what that thing is for now we have to ask ourselves why would a sitting congressman be making two payments five hundred dollars and four hundred dollars one of which says to hit up it says hit up and it mentions a girl's name a name that just hours later receives money from that same person who got that money and so that's what we've got here we've got venmo transactions that definitively tie him to them but we've got more coming because we don't just have these financial transactions well tell me well what do you have well what we've got are lots of sources with direct knowledge of joel greenberg and his behavior and so in the coming days we'll be coming out with more but right now this is just the start i mean what we've got with these venmo payments are i mean we've got dates we've got amounts and we've got people's names and it's worth noting that until now what so many have reported is that this federal investigation extends to matt gates through his connection with joel greenberg but we're looking at venmo payments that are now in the hands of federal investigators themselves okay so now the the second part of this so this is about you know payment for sex allegedly right through a sort of intermediary the second thing i think is very important both morally and legally is the age of consent right i mean to my mind the most by far troubling accusation here is um the sex trafficking a minor in in the sort of technical legal sense but the the paying of a 17 year old for sex right a minor a girl underage well i mean the 33 count indictment of joel greenberg that is what's detailed i mean in describing this federal investigators have said that he engaged in sugar daddy relationships and if you look at these general transactions when when someone makes a vendor transaction they have to explain what it's for and in the detail in the memo for what it's for joel greenberg wrote tuition and school next day after receiving this money from the congressman okay but final question here do we know the age of the girls that he is paying and memoing it with tuition and school well it appears that one of them which later became a porn star she had just turned 18 just months earlier than that and we we haven't been able to determine the ages of the other girls but we have so many venmo transactions with so many girls names we're trying to go through that now but i can tell you that most of the women whose names we know were extremely young we're talking about 18 19 years old at colleges like ucf and um and others in that area and so no we can tell from the venomous transactions and from the social media accounts that we've been looking at that these were all young women extremely young women

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Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021