In November 2024, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew his name from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general, as federal investigators said they discovered payments he made to a number of women in exchange for sex.
Gaetz also was under investigation in 2021 to determine whether he violated federal sex-trafficking laws that make it illegal to induce someone younger than 18 to travel across state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. Gaetz allegedly paid for a 17-year-old girl to travel with him about two years earlier.
The controversy resulted in many online scrutinizing Gaetz's voting record. For example, viral TikTok and Reddit posts from November 2024 shared the potentially ironic fact that Gaetz was the sole "no" vote on an anti-sex-trafficking bill in 2017.
(Reddit)
Another meme shared on X in 2021 highlighted the same vote:
The claims that Gaetz was the only vote against such a bill were accurate.
In 2017, Gaetz was the sole "nay" vote on an anti-human-trafficking bill. (Twelve representatives — five Democrats and seven Republicans — did not vote.) The Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act designated a trafficking prevention coordinator at the Department of Transportation and created a committee for states and transportation groups to develop best practices on combating human trafficking.
Gaetz's vote can be seen on Govtrack.
He defended his vote in a Facebook live video in December 2017, saying, "Unless there is an overwhelming, compelling reason that our existing agencies in the federal government can't handle that problem, I vote no because voters in Northwest Florida did not send me to Washington to go and create more federal government. If anything, we should be abolishing a lot of the agencies at the federal level like the Department of Education, like the EPA and sending that power back to our state governments."
The bill ultimately passed and was signed into law by tTrump in January 2018.
Given that Gaetz's "no" vote was well-documented by various sources, we rate this claim as true.