Wait, Matt Gaetz Is Married? And She’s Who?

On Thursday, Matt Gaetz announced he was taking himself out of the running to be attorney general in the second Trump administration, in apparent recognition that the controversy over the sexual misconduct allegations against him was showing no signs of slowing. But that wasn’t the day’s only twist in the saga of the former Florida congressman. A bunch of people also learned about the existence of Ginger, Matt Gaetz’s wife.

His what? On Twitter, Ginger Gaetz quote-tweeted her husband’s announcement of his withdrawal, adding a picture of her and Gaetz walking up the steps of the Capitol building and the words “The end of an era,” along with a sparkle emoji. Yes, she annotated her husband’s sex crime–related downfall with a sparkle. This may be the first you’re hearing of Gaetz’s missus, but it’s kind of amazing how that one emoji tells you everything you need to know.

If you do want to know more, though, we’ve got you covered: Ginger Gaetz, née Luckey, who at 30 is 12 years younger than Matt, met her future husband in 2020 at a fundraiser held at Mar-a-Lago. One of their early dates was to a birthday party for Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, and the two eloped the following year. According to USA Today, Ginger grew up in California, studied accounting at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has worked in various finance-focused jobs. She is the sister of Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and a prominent Trump supporter. She also has an estranged sister who is very much not a fan of Matt Gaetz. If you want to know even more about Ginger, the rest of her Twitter feed is a fascinating text: On it, she often seems somewhat normal (relatively speaking) and even likably sassy: She skateboards, and she loves the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show! But then she’ll post a pic of herself with Rep. Lauren Boebert and you’ll be like, Oh.

So why didn’t people know about her till now? To be fair, some did. I personally was vaguely aware of her because I remembered that, in the photos of Matt Gaetz wearing a hideous pink sport coat to a screening of Barbie last year, he was standing next to a woman in a flashy pink ensemble of her own. Ginger hated the movie’s feminist messaging, by the way, as she later shared on Twitter; she was especially appalled by Ryan Gosling’s beta-male take on Ken. But her existence still came as a shock to many this week, considering just about every detail of how her husband acts. Let’s say you somehow put aside for a second that he’s been accused of having sex with a 17-year-old whom he may have met at a sex party and paid via Venmo. Many of his behaviors that didn’t rise to the level of investigation also screamed “bachelor”: Colleagues in Congress have criticized him for bragging to them about his sexual escapades. Remember the whole thing in 2020 when he revealed that he had a previously unmentioned 19-year-old son, Nestor? He kept referring to himself as a single parent. I guess he got engaged after that, but still: What? And Republican men who are accused of being sex pests normally can’t stop talking about their wives. Do we actually have to hand it to Matt Gaetz for not dragging his wife around constantly as a shield? No, we don’t, but it is kind of surprising.

After doing a deep dive on Ginger’s social media, I did start to formulate a theory of why we haven’t heard about her more. Her feeds are mostly full of enthusiasm for the Republican Party and praise for her husband, but she also has a bit of a mean streak. More than once, she has tweeted before-and-after photos of her husband, juxtaposing pictures from a few years ago, when he weighed more and his face was less chiseled, alongside more recent images of him, post-glow-up, supposedly attributable to their marriage. I get that it’s supposed to be funny, but, well, it’s not nice to make fun of how anyone used to look, and when it’s your spouse, it’s definitely going to make people wonder if you hate each other. It’s a shame that so many people’s introduction to Ginger Gaetz was brought on by such a disastrous turn of events for her spouse—we’ve met this fun new wife character and potential villain in her own right just as her husband’s time in the spotlight looks to be ending. But worry not: Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of them, or her.