MURKY PAST

Trump Pick Failed to Disclose Sex Scandal-Accused GOP Client

Mike Beltran, who calls himself “MAGA Mike,” has received Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

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A Republican lawyer running for Congress in Florida failed to disclose his work for a key figure in one of the state’s most notorious sex trafficking scandals.

Former Florida House representative Mike Beltran, an ultra-conservative attorney who calls himself “MAGA Mike,” has received Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” in the race for the state’s 14th Congressional District. He trails incumbent Democrat Kathy Castor by 5 points, according to an October Emerson College poll.

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Beltran declined to identify his legal clients in a June federal candidate disclosure before winning the GOP nomination in August. Federal rules require candidates who own law firms to identify clients for whom their work generated more than $5,000, unless they identify specific grounds for keeping that information confidential—which Beltran did not do.

But a review of public court filings by the Daily Beast’s sister Substack PunchUp, along with Beltran’s financial disclosures as a state lawmaker, shows his clients included fellow Republican Chris Dorworth, 50.

Dorworth, a former Florida state representative, allegedly threw the party at which disgraced former GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, 44, was accused by House Ethics Committee investigators of paying an underage girl to have sex with him.

The alleged victim later claimed that Dorworth also had sex with her while she was still a minor. Dorworth denied it, hired Beltran to sue her, and eventually settled with her in 2024. Gaetz resigned from Congress that November before the House Ethics Committee could formally conclude an investigation into those and other allegations against him.

PunchUp asked Beltran’s campaign why he declined to name Dorworth and other clients on his federal candidate disclosure forms. We also asked whether he expected that work to resurface during his congressional campaign.

“Mike has, and always will, be as transparent as possible about his legal work while protecting his oath to client confidentiality,” Beltran’s spokesman Will Hampson said. He added that “Florida and Congress have different disclosure requirements.”

The woman Dorworth hired Beltran to sue was a victim of Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County tax collector and Gaetz associate who in 2021 pleaded guilty to child sex trafficking and later received an 11-year sentence. After the House began probing Gaetz the same year, the woman spoke with congressional investigators about a July 2017 party at Dorworth’s home, when she was just 17.

“Victim A,” as the woman is referred to in the ethics committee’s later report, claimed Gaetz twice had sex with her that night and that he gave her $400, which she understood to be payment for it. She recalled taking MDMA and allegedly seeing Gaetz do cocaine, and claimed that Dorworth walked in on at least one of their sexual encounters, joking about it afterward with other guests.

In April 2023, Beltran filed a lawsuit on behalf of Dorworth against Victim A, Greenberg, the former tax collector’s relatives and family businesses, accusing them of defamation and racketeering.

Dorworth’s complaint shows the woman’s lawyers had accused him, in a series of exchanges between 2022 and 2023, of also having sex with her at a hotel in July 2017, while she was still underage. They believed Greenberg had paid on Dorworth’s behalf, and told him she planned to sue for “child sex trafficking and rape,” but would consider a settlement.

The complaint claimed Greenberg had engineered the woman’s allegations after Dorworth refused to help him obtain a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Beltran’s filing also took personal aim at the woman and her sexual history. He alleged that she is “now a porn star,” highlighted her work on OnlyFans, said she had “lied about her age” when she joined the website where Greenberg met her, and claimed the former tax collector’s family had paid her to “provide false testimony” against Dorworth.

Her lawyers shot back in a motion that June, repeating her claims against Dorworth, and slamming him and Beltran for trying to portray her as an accomplice of the man who had trafficked her.

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Dorworth eventually settled with the woman in August 2024, with no money changing hands, according to the House Ethics Committee. The congressional investigation into Gaetz technically ended when he resigned that November after Trump announced plans to make him attorney general.

Gaetz withdrew his bid for that role before the ethics committee took the unusual step of releasing its report on the allegations against him anyway that December. Neither he nor Dorworth has ever faced criminal charges in connection with the scandal, and both have denied any wrongdoing.

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It is not clear how much Dorworth paid Beltran for his legal services, and he has not responded to questions on the matter. But financial reports covering the lawyer’s time in the Florida House, reviewed by PunchUp, show Beltran named Dorworth in the section of both his 2023 and 2024 disclosures reserved for clients responsible for more than 10 percent of a lawmaker’s business.

By the time he was running for Congress, the attorney had decided that Dorworth was entitled to confidentiality. Beltran wrote in his federal candidate disclosure, filed earlier in June, that “I owe my clients as much privacy as the law allows, so I respectfully decline to list them all.” He reported earning $1.7 million from them in 2025, and another $500,000 in the first five months of 2026.

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Federal rules generally require candidates who own law firms to identify clients for whom their work generated more than $5,000. For first-time candidates filing in 2026, that requirement reaches back through 2024, when Beltran still represented Dorworth.

House guidance allows names to be withheld on specific confidentiality grounds, but tells candidates to explain why. Beltran cited no particular rule, agreement, or court order to justify withholding his clients wholesale.

Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.

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