If this reporting is accurate, a young woman's life was detonated so that a pack of coked-up Peter Pans in flag pins could feel important for an evening.

The right will try to make it about her choices, her credibility, her text messages, because that's what they always do when a victim threatens the career of one of their golden boys.

But the Times story rips that defense to shreds: the crime scene isn't her; it's the hideous crossroads of power, money, and poverty that made her available to them in the first place.

That is what they built. That is what they protected. And every single one of them should have to read her story, out loud, into a microphone, before they dare say the words "law and order" again.

The New York Times just put a name, a face, and a pair of desperate, crooked teeth on what the Matt Gaetz scandal really is: powerful men circling a broke, homeless 17-year-old girl who just wanted money for braces and turning her into a commodity. A high school junior in Florida, one parent homeless, hustling just to get enough together to fix her smile, and instead she's pulled into a world of rich Republicans, lobbyists, and congressmen who treat her like a DoorDash delivery service for their carnal appetites. The story makes brutally clear that she "ended up having sex for money with powerful men" and now wants the public to understand how, step by step, she was victimized.

According to the reporting and the records that finally surfaced, she meets this orbit of Florida power at a party at former state legislator Chris Dorworth's house, follows the money because poverty doesn't leave her much choice, and winds up in the crosshairs of Matt Gaetz's mid-thirties frat boy "The Game" culture in Tallahassee.

The House Ethics Committee has already concluded that Gaetz sexually abused her when she was 17; that's not Twitter rage, that's an official finding of Congress based on evidence they saw and you didn't.

He still denies having sex with her, because of course he does, but the ethics report, the hacked court records, the paper trail from the defamation suits, and now this girl's own account all lay out the same ugly through-line: a child living on the economic edge, used by men whose net worths have commas in them and whose consciences apparently do not.

What makes you sick reading this isn't just Gaetz. It's the whole ecosystem. The donor-class fixer whose house party becomes the on-ramp. The lawyers who fought to keep her story buried in sealed exhibits.

The Republican machine that tried to fast-track Gaetz to U.S. Attorney General after all this, like the moral of the story is "fail up harder, king."

These are the same people who howl about "family values" and "protecting children" while a homeless teenager is literally selling sex to get orthodontic work, and the only time they notice her is when she shows up in their ethics file.

You read this and realize there is no bottom: they will clutch their pearls over drag queens and school libraries while looking the other way at a system where a girl with one homeless parent is functionally trafficked through the social calendar of Republican politics.