🍻 In This Week’s Hill Spill: A Twist in the Guilfoyle Saga, Iowa Gets Messy and Gaetz vs. His Accusers’ Lawyer

🍹 Welcome to this week’s Hill Spill, Capitol Hill’s favorite Thirsty Thursday newsletter! We randomly lost internet for a hot min there, so apologies for the delay in getting all this tea to you! But we stayed up to make sure it landed in your inboxes, because we are committed to bringing you the littest of political gossip.

This week, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s AmEx saga took a turn, and some of our GOP sources think the donor who leaked her texts could have some legal issues as a result. Iowa Democrats are zeroing in on Zach Lahn’s personal life, and Matt Gaetz and the lawyer behind a new lawsuit against him got in a Twitter feud.

Pour yourself something strong and let’s get into it. 🍸

Zach Lahn’s messy personal life is starting to look increasingly like a liability for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

Democrats are looking to highlight affair allegations and the swiftness of his second marriage as they try to flip Iowa blue. The whole timeline has also been floating around social media. 

Lahn has built the campaign around family. His website leads with a big blended-family photo, the kids posed with him when he turned in his ballot signatures, and he launched from the front steps of his farmhouse on his daughter’s birthday.

He’s also been warning on the trail about a “concentrated effort by the left to undermine the institutions in our society, starting with the family.”

“It seems like everything about this guy is just — he’s a total phony,” a national Democrat who has worked in Iowa told us on condition of anonymity. “He’s someone who lives in Kansas. He’s a sex toy salesman. And he spent his entire career working on political campaigns outside of Iowa. And he’s trying to sell himself as someone who’s a family person in Iowa, but the timeline of his first marriage shows that he is completely out of step with Iowa values.”

“Really, he’s a man who probably cheated on a pregnant wife or a wife with a newborn, and then went to invest in a sex toy company,” another Iowa Democratic operative said.

Lahn’s first wife, Lauren, filed for divorce in Kansas in March 2020 with the divorce settling on June 8, 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal. Eleven days later Lahn and Annie Koch applied for a marriage license in Montana.

Annie is the ex-wife of Chase Koch, the son of Charles Koch. She and Lahn co-founded the Wonder School in Wichita in 2018. Chase Koch’s money was behind it. Lahn was still emailing prospective Wonder parents as recently as July, according to the Kansas Reflector. 

In May 2021, Lahn and Annie took title to the rest of the Belle Plaine farmstead he’d started buying with his first wife. In July 2024, Annie bought a house in Kechi, near Wichita, and listed it as her primary residence on the mortgage documents. A year later they sold it to an LLC for $1. Kansas Reflector first reported the details.

“I didn’t do it right the first time,” Lahn said on the Barn Talk podcast in May. He said his former spouse supports the campaign and that they “have a great relationship now, but it took time.” There’s “not one thing somebody could say about me that I haven’t said 10 times over already myself,” he added.

Lahn has said he and Annie have a blended family of seven kids and a parenting agreement that means regular trips to Kansas, and that none of it will keep him from doing the job if he’s elected.

The Des Moines Register reported in May that Lahn put $1 million into FirmTech. It’s a men’s sexual health company. Wearable rings that track erectile health, plus a separate “pleasure” line. An SEC filing shows a Lahn-owned LLC held 25% of the company.

“What I’ve invested in is not a sex toy. It’s a grade two medical device,” Lahn has said. His campaign said he left the board in September 2023 over marketing and direction, before any “pleasure” products launched, and that he can’t pull the money out.

FirmTech’s first product, the Performance Ring, launched in March 2022. It sells under the “pleasure” tab on the company’s website. A 2022 FirmTech blog post called erection rings “sex toys.”

He told The Des Moines Register that he flies between Iowa and Wichita to see his kids from his first marriage. “It’s an hour flight for me,” he said.

On “Iowa Press” he accused Rob Sand of going after “my minor children.” The Gazette went back through three Sand events and could not find examples of him mentioning the kids. 

“It seems like this is going to be a really close race,” the national Democratic source told us. “I don’t think Iowans are going to be lectured about family values from an out-of-state sex toy salesman who got married in Montana just 11 days after his divorce was finalized.”

The Lahn campaign did not respond to two requests for comment.

Matt Gaetz is not taking a civil lawsuit accusing him of human trafficking quietly.

News of the suit dropped on Thursday and he was on X looking to poke holes in the complaint shortly after.

Two women — Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 — accuse him, Joel Greenberg, and Chris Dorworth of a sex-trafficking scheme from 2017 into early 2019. Jane Doe 1 was 20 and Jane Doe 2 was 22 when they met Gaetz in the summer of 2017. The suit was filed in the Middle District of Florida by attorney Spencer Kuvin.

The complaint says on the September 2018 Bahamas trip “there were no separate cash payments on the trip. The trip itself was the payment for sex with Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2.” On the January 2019 New York trip an associate “told the women that they first had to ‘service’ GAETZ before going to a nightclub.”

Payments listed include captions like “Being my friend,” “Car deductible,” and “Love you.” The complaint says those labels were used “to disguise the purpose of the payments.”

Gaetz posted one of those photos: “Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I’m shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram.” The Miami Herald called it an effort to dox the Jane Does.

Kuvin told him to “please keep posting things” because his team is “copying everything to make sure to show it to the Federal Judge.” He asked if Gaetz had counsel so they could serve him.

Gaetz said he “enjoy[s] the public discourse” and asked if the photo was of Kuvin’s client “celebrating her vacation” and whether Kuvin knew the photo existed when the suit was filed. Kuvin said he’d been told Gaetz has counsel and that further discussion should go through attorneys.

The women argue the free Bahamas trip itself was the payment for sex. They also treat the “Car deductible” Venmo — $300 sent to Jane Doe 2 three days after the women were in a car accident on the way to Miami in May 2018 — as one of the disguised payments.

Gaetz supporters note the complaint’s own language that there were no separate cash payments on the Bahamas trip. On the deductible they say the women got in an accident driving to see him and he just covered it a few days later. They also note the complaint says the men “forbade the women from using phones or taking photographs” despite the Instagram post allegedly posted by one of them.

Greenberg is the former Seminole County tax collector who pleaded guilty in 2021 to sex trafficking a minor. He’s serving an 11-year federal sentence. Dorworth is a former Florida state representative and lobbyist. The complaint says his Central Florida home was the site of a party where the alleged activity took place.

Gaetz resigned from Congress in November 2024 the same day Trump announced him as AG nominee, then withdrew a week later. He’s now a host on OAN. The House Ethics Committee report from late 2024 said it found substantial evidence that “from at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him” and that “in 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.” He’s denied all of it and argued the Ethics investigation was politically motivated. DOJ looked at him earlier and closed without charges.

Kuvin has said the texts in the case are “incredibly damaging.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Veteran pollster Michael Cohen (the one who used to work for Tony Fabrizio, not the former Trump lawyer who went from foe to ally) came on and laid out a tough map for Republicans.

He’s expecting a tight Democratic pickup in the House and a Senate that ends up 50-50, with JD Vance breaking ties. The polling looks messier than usual — several key Senate races are basically coin flips, Republicans remain harder to reach because many of them don’t trust surveys, and the sample sizes in a lot of House races are small. That combination makes the numbers feel shakier than they already appear.

He also walks through which Senate seat he sees as most likely to flip, why he’s not ready to write off Susan Collins yet, and where the biggest surprise of the night could come from. Plus why we might not really know who the polls are missing until a few days after the election.

We also get into the wildest candidate he’s ever polled for and it is some absolutely wild lore that is very fitting for the Halloween season!

Also everyone should check out his book Modern Political Campaigns!

Kimberly Guilfoyle seems to have more issues than Vogue these days. The AmEx texts, the AI excuse, the resignation — the optics have been brutal all around. But some of our GOP sources tell us the guy dropping receipts may have some significant legal issues of his own pretty soon.

This story has a lot of weird twists and turns so stay with us.

Eric Deters — who was initially supposed to be our podcast guest this week before he went dark on us, but later provided comment for this story — is the Kentucky donor who shared the Signal messages in which Guilfoyle asked him to wire $100,000 to her American Express right before her confirmation hearing. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote, per the texts first published by the Wall Street Journal.

He didn’t send the $100k and later called it pay-to-play. Guilfoyle’s side said the messages weren’t real. She told the White House they were AI. Our sources found that lol.

She resigned this week after the White House requested her resignation. Deters then sued her and her lawyers for defamation over the claims that the texts were fake, that he was a “known blackmailer,” and that he owed her money. He announced it in a video on Thursday.

In that video and some of the media he has done since this saga popped off, including an interview with the Bulwark, Deters has been open about pressing the White House to extradite a Pakistani doctor named Abubakar Atiq Durrani, a spine surgeon who practiced around Cincinnati. Federal prosecutors charged him with healthcare fraud over unnecessary spinal surgeries (including on kids) and he fled to Pakistan before trial. Hundreds of former patients sued him.

Deters has represented a lot of them for years and has made getting Durrani back — he calls him “the Butcher of Pakistan” — a personal project. On the Bulwark he said he had emailed Susie Wiles, Don Jr., and Guilfoyle with a deadline to help with the Durrani victims and warned he’d go to the media if they didn’t. The doctor’s insurer has already sued Deters over his tactics in that fight.

He has also said he’ll go after other people in the administration, including JD Vance, if they ignore him, and that he’d drop the Guilfoyle fight if they extradited Durrani.

On NewsNation, Deters told host Katie Pavlich: “I am not going to let JD Vance off the hook.” He also warned that if the administration didn’t move on extradition and an investigation, “I am going to not only sue Kimberly Guilfoyle, I am never going to shut up.”

Republicans aren’t loving his style on this.

“Like this dude is literally bragging about trying to extort the govt,” one GOP source close to the White House told us, alledging: “He is more guilty of clearly illegal activity than Guilfoyle.”

Scott Jennings flagged the same thing on CNN Wednesday, stating there was “something about the allegations from Deters that have been a little unsettling to me.” He noted Deters has been saying he emailed the White House chief of staff and warned, “If you don’t take these actions that I demand of you, I’m going to enact retribution, political retribution, by releasing this information.”

The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Deters rejects the framing.

“It’s not extortion,” he told us. “Google what extortion is.”

He says it’s just hardball for the patients. A couple of the Republicans who flagged this to us also said Guilfoyle’s side of the AmEx texts isn’t clean either. Neither of them is exactly covering themselves in glory here.

We will be staying tuned and continuing to dig into the tea on this wild saga.

A lawmaker we were gossiping on the phone with while writing all of this suggested a Paper Plane so we ran with it. We’re hitting the trail with a member of House GOP leadership next week and already looking forward to bringing you some litty city coverage from Florida, so a drink that sounds like it’s going somewhere felt on brand.

Bonus: it’s orange, and we’re fully leaning into the October color scheme both in our wardrobe and with our cocktails, which we like to match since sometimes we are basic.

Equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and fresh lemon juice, shaken hard and poured into a coupe. Bright, a little bitter, easy to drink, and exactly the right shade of for the season!

Ingredients:

Shake with ice, strain into a coupe. Garnish with an orange peel if you’re feeling it. Cheers.