Did former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tweet on X about "age gap dating" in November 2024? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that Gaetz ever made such a post. Also, the account that published a screenshot of the supposed Gaetz post later revealed online that it was fake.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on November 15, 2024. It included an image made to look like Gaetz's X account, suggesting that he made a post on November 13, 2024, that said:
Being nominated to head the DOJ is such sweet revenge after they came after me for 'sex trafficking.' The general wisdom concerning age gap dating is to halve one's age and subtract seven. I'm 42 and have almost never betrayed this general maxim over the last 10 years.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 19:17:56 2024 UTC)
President-elect Donald Trump announced Gaetz as his pick to be attorney general on November 13, 2024 (archived here). The announcement was made before a report from a House Ethics Committee probe into sex trafficking allegations about Gaetz was released.
The account that published the post on Threads has "Parody" in its bio (archived here). In terms of the claim, the account followed up with another post admitting that the Gaetz X post was fake. A screenshot of the post is included below:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Mon Nov 18 19:34:29 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories searched Gaetz's X account (archived here) for the phrase "age gap," which generated no results. We also did a search using keywords on Google News, archived here, which found no credible reporting to confirm the claim.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to Matt Gaetz can be found here.
