Moral crusaders, years apart, undone by own sex scandals | Fred Grimm

It wasn’t the sex. Rather, it wasn’t just the sex that drenched Kathy and Jeff Willets and the vice mayor of Fort Lauderdale in infamy.

It was the sex combined with tawdry circumstances and a mighty dollop of hypocrisy that transformed the Broward scandal into a national sensation.

That was the great history lesson of 1991 that Bridget and Christian Ziegler failed to heed in 2023 as the Florida Republican Party’s most fearsome power couple (except, of course, for Ron and Casey) descended into their own self-destructive opprobrium.

Thirty-two years ago, investigators uncovered a list of more than 100 “clients” who had paid $150 a whack for sexual intimacy with office-manager-turned-stripper-turned-prostitute Kathy Willets at her suburban Tamarac home. While her cop-turned-pimp-turned-voyeur-husband Jeff secretly watched from a bedroom closet.

But it was the arch hypocrite on the client list who fascinated supermarket tabloids and TV titillation-mongers like Geraldo Rivera and Maury Povich.

Holier-than-the-rest-of-us Doug Danziger had made a name for himself on the Fort Lauderdale City Commission as a moral crusader — the bane of strip clubs, adult bookstores, pornographic video shops, late night bars and other purveyors of impiety.

But the vice mayor’s reputation as sin-killer-in-chief was undone by media descriptions of Deacon Doug, born-again arbiter of everyone else’s morality, having a wallow with a BSO deputy’s wife on an undulating king-size waterbed.

The Willets could have warned the Zieglers of Sarasota that a tsunami of notoriety was about to engulf their lives and sabotage their colossal ambitions. Except their downfall, a fast train coming, will be much more profound than Danziger’s ignominious exit from city politics.

When a Google search of political aspirants yields terms like “threesome,” “three-way” and “ménage à trois,” up-and-comers might be better described as down-and-soon-to-be-outers. Worse still, Sarasota police listed the participating trio as Bridget, Christian and “REDACTED” because of the third person’s status as a possible victim of sexual assault at the hands of Christian.

Christian’s ouster as chair of the Republican Party of Florida could come Sunday when the party’s executive board meets in Orlando. In a desperate and likely futile letter claiming sexual assault allegations against him were lies, Christian wrote, “We have a country to save, and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up.”

The letter did nothing for poor Bridget, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a gaggle of vigilantes hellbent on banning schoolbooks that explore race, gender or any form of sexuality not featured on “Leave It To Beaver.” Her problem is that her Lothario husband’s defense against criminal charges hinges on the premise that the moral crusading Zieglers are actually raving hypocrites.

Christian claims the sexual encounter with his Sarasota accuser was consensual. Not rape. Both Christian and Bridget told police that, after all, this same woman had joined them in a ménage à trois last year. They had planned another tryst on October 2, except Bridget couldn’t make it.

The accuser claimed that when she refused a solo Christian, he forced her. He countered that the sex was consensual. Just like last year’s threesome.

And maybe that explanation will keep him out of jail, but the Zieglers’ references to a three-way affair hardly jibes with their cultivated persona as Mr. and Mrs. Family Values.

Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis appointed Bridget to his to-hell-with-Disney oversight board, thinking she was the kind of culture warrior who’d force the media giant to adhere to his idea of family entertainment. Threesomes, however, don’t fit the DeSantis agenda.

She hasn’t resigned from the oversight board — not yet — nor did she quit her seat on the Sarasota School Board despite a 4-1 (non-binding) vote Tuesday to toss her. (Discussions at the meeting included multiple variations of “hypocrite.”)

Sure, the beleaguered Zieglers’ future looks bleak, but the 1991 Willets case might show them a way forward. The Willets’ often whacky lawyer, Ellis Rubin, contrived a very, very novel legal defense: They couldn’t help themselves, given that Kathy suffered from acute nymphomania brought on by a Prozac prescription, while poor Jeff (who died of cancer last year in Toledo, Ohio) was impotent. Something had to give.

Rubin’s argument failed to keep the Willets out of jail, but its very absurdity brought more notoriety, which Kathy parlayed into a second career as a celebrity stripper. And a layout in Playboy Magazine.

As the Zieglers’ political ambitions go kaput, they should consider a Willets-style second career as sex celebrities. Say what you want about Kathy and Jeff, but unlike Danziger and the Zieglers, they weren’t hypocrites.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.