Sugar dating website at center of Gaetz scandal rife with sex trafficking and fraudsters, ex-PR rep alleges

The so-called “sugar dating” website at the heart of the sex scandal that has engulfed former Rep. Matt Gaetz was a hotbed of trafficking, fraud and other malfeasance, a former public relations rep for the company has alleged.

SeekingArrangement.com, as it was known at the time, was used by Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) pal Joel Greenberg, who is serving out an 11-year prison sentence on charges related to sex trafficking, to introduce the Sunshine State pol to various women, per a House Committee on Ethics draft report released this week.

“It’s a very nefarious place,” Brook Urick, 33, who spent roughly five years at the company and has since penned a book, told the Post. “[It] has been for almost two decades.”

“The girls come to it with the assumption that they are going to find a man who is just going to simply give them money for existing,” she explained. “And then, lo and behold, it comes to fruition, but it’s a scammer.”

The House Committee on Ethics explained in its bombshell report that “platforms such as SeekingArrangement.com are known to ‘mak[e] it easier for traffickers to exploit victims and connect with buyers.’”

Since Gaetz’s admitted partying and womanizing days, SeekingArrangement has rebranded into Seeking.com and at least outwardly appeared to tone down some of its past excesses, Urick surmised. Still, she speculates that some of the toxic culture has continued.

Passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) clawed back Section 230 immunity protections for websites that facilitate sex trafficking, helping to prompt changes at the site.

Fear within the company’s leadership over the federal indictments against former owners of classified advertising Backpage, which had allegedly been used for prostitution, also inspired changes, according to Urick.

“I am not on the website now,” Urick said, describing it as “kind of traumatizing” for her, noting that outwardly, “the marketing and everything has just completely changed.”

“It just leads me to believe they didn’t really need to do any marketing like they used to do the salacious ways, because the word was already out there, and the most common way that a new user joins the website is through word of mouth.”

Urick started working at the company as a 22-year-old in late 2013 and continued working there for about five years before getting laid off. Back when Urick was on the sugar dating site’s public relations team, the company had mounted aggressive marketing campaigns.

The PR team carefully cherry-picked users for case studies that it would then shop over to media outlets, held events like a sugar baby summit, cut ads playing on youthful fantasies of getting rich, and even worked to scrub out negative comments online.

“It’s just so damaging to young women because they don’t have a consequence mindset when they’re 18 or under 18, and unfortunately, that is the time when they can make the most money on these types of platforms,” Urick reflected.

Minors on the platform

When signing up for the sugar dating platform, users were forced to affirm that they were 18 years or older. Coupled with the robust anonymity of the platform, Urick argued that underage women were easily able to slip through the age verification process.

Urick recounted that while she was on the PR team, a girl who was 17 reached out to the company seeking to get cast in something. After discovering that, they had to tell her to wait until she was 18.

“If an underage person is going on the website, they can just lie. And if they do happen to get kicked off the website for whatever reason, they can just make another account, because it’s all anonymous,” Urick added.

Seven years ago, a reporter from The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, put a fake name on the platform and pictures of herself from when she was 15 and 16 to get into a nightclub ball for sugar babies promoted by SeekingArrangement.

The outlet also stumbled upon users who kept finding minors on the platform. SeekingArrangement claimed at the time that it was difficult to remove those accounts because it had to track those underage girls down manually, per the outlet.

Following that expose from The Sunday Times, SeekingArrangement embarked on a Facebook campaign dubbed “No Underage Dates” which was aimed at discouraging adults from dating minors.

Perhaps the most infamous accusation against Gaetz is that he had sex with a minor during a July 2017 party. Notably the Ethics committee said it did not have evidence the Florida pol was aware of her age.

Gaetz has denied having sex with that woman — described in the ethics report as “Victim A.” The Post contacted the victim’s lawyer for comment.

Sex workers on the platform

While SeekingArrangement promoted sugar dating and the idea of beautiful young women getting “pampered” and financial stability from older, wealthier men, it did not outright push pay-for-sex schemes.

Instead, it gave winks and nods at that and encouraged users to take some of the more deviant practices off the platform to shield it from liability, according to Urick.

Moreover, the platform would lure women to it by pushing dubious case studies that gave them the impression they could get sugar dating without necessarily having to have sex with older men.

“The other girls look at this case study and they say, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s so smart and pretty, and she doesn’t even have to have sex,” Urick said. “It’s just like lies built on lies.”

“It’s shifting their perception of what it means to be in the sex industry and to be a sex worker. And it’s telling them it’s not when it is — that’s a problem.”

Urick posited that many of the women and even some of the men who engage in that kind of behavior often convince themselves that it’s not sex work because they don’t want to believe they are and there’s nuance to many of the situations.

“Sometimes the amount, for instance, is not discussed or set, but the man just gives her $1,000 and it’s not that they had a set amount, it’s that she knows that he will give her a good amount of money, and he knows that $1,000 will satisfy her,” she explained.

“There doesn’t need to be any words exchanged.”

This was a similar dynamic to the picture that the House Committee on Ethics painted of Gaetz in its draft report.

It alleged, for instance, that a 21-year-old asked Gaetz to help with her tuition bills. After they had sex, the former congressman allegedly wrote her a $750 check, according to the draft report.

In another instance, Gaetz arranged for his staff to help a woman with whom he allegedly engaged in sexual activity obtain a passport, per the report. That woman “did not initially know” he was a congressman, per the report.

Gaetz, who has vehemently accused the ethics panel of mounting a smear campaign against him, later seized on question-and-answer snippets he had access to where some. of the women in question attested that they weren’t engaged in sex work with him — at least from their perspectives.

Sex trafficking

Urick has alleged that SeekingArrangement had been used for sex trafficking purposes by predators.

“A lot of times it just looks like one guy going onto the website, procuring a bunch of young girls and inviting them to parties or whatever, and then, in person, you find out what they’re willing to do,” Urick explained.

“Are they willing to be paid for sex? Are they willing to take drugs? Are they willing to allow abuse?” she added, referring to the victims. “Most of the time, they’re willing participants at first.”

Those parties can become very boozy and oftentimes drugs are involved.

After women get trafficked or abused, predators then work to manipulate or coerce them into silence, including by preying on victims’ fears of getting charged for their actions.

This is also where some of the issues with anonymity also came into play with SeekingArrangement. Those practices sometimes made it hard for victims to get justice against their abusers and traffickers, Urick claimed.

“When bad things happen on the website and for instance, a girl gets raped, she comes to the website and she says, ‘I met this guy on the website, I don’t know his real name, I don’t know anything about him, he drugged me, he raped me’ — the website doesn’t do anything about it,” she claimed.

“The website says, ‘Oh, well, why don’t you go file a police report and get a subpoena, because that’s the only way we’ll give you his information,’” Urick added. “[The victims] are scared, they’re ashamed, so they don’t ever come forward, and that keeps the predators doing it again and again.”

Urick was laid off from the company in early 2019 and released a book titled, “Wink Wink Nudge Nudge: Sexual Exploits and Secrets from Inside a Sugar Daddy Website” in October. She now says that she is mortified about her past work for SeekingArrangment.

She had been under a nondisclosure agreement with the company but has not faced legal repercussions over her book.

The Post reached out to SeekingArrangement on numerous occasions for comment but never heard back.

Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment.