Photo: Photograph courtesy of the subject
It’s hard to say that I learned a lesson,” Aidan Maese-Czeropski tells me recently over FaceTime, staring somewhere off-camera and scratching an eyebrow. He’s calling from a hostel in Australia, where he’s sitting poolside under palm trees. It’s 10 a.m. and already 80 degrees on the island continent, but as far as I can tell through the screen, he doesn’t break a sweat, even while recounting the salacious chain of events that led him 10,000 miles away from Washington, D.C., where, not that long ago, the 25-year-old worked on Capitol Hill.
In 2021, Maese-Czeropski was hired by the office of then–Maryland senator Ben Cardin. He worked for Cardin until December 2023, when a sex tape Maese-Czeropski recorded at work and shared with friends leaked, causing a ruckus in D.C. It was a slow, preholiday news week amid the Biden doldrums, so the tape became the top headline in the next morning’s Politico Playbook. He quit his job and, soon after, left the country. A year and a half later, he’s clearly gotten comfortable enough to talk about the scandal freely. Throughout our conversation, he insists he has no regrets, save for getting caught. “Who cares?” he asks me over a dozen times. “The only person I negatively affected was myself. I bear those consequences. But I don’t regret fucking in the Senate.”
Until his last act, Maese-Czeropski’s path to D.C. was pretty traditional for a studious gay boy with a good education and a calling to civil service. His parents, both nurses, didn’t pay much attention to politics, but he read Politico every day. In high school in Palo Alto, his preferred subject was history — World War I, he tells me excitedly, is his “favorite world war. It basically felt like a bar fight, where one country declared war on another, which declared war on another, which declared war on another.” Politics, he discovered as a young person, is “gossip for nerds.”
For college, he got into the international-studies program at Johns Hopkins before transferring to Berkeley for environmental studies. He interned briefly for Dianne Feinstein and after graduation worked on the 2020 Biden campaign as a field organizer. He found the work exhausting — “I’m never doing that shit again” — but adds proudly that he called every state correctly, except for Georgia.
The next logical step was a job on Capitol Hill. Because he’d briefly gone to school in Maryland, he landed at Senator Cardin’s office as an assistant and later a legislative correspondent for foreign affairs. “When you first get started, you’re like, Okay, I’m going to be a civil servant; I’m going to help the people,” he says. Now, though, it’s impossible to get him to say anything remotely positive about the experience. Cardin, he says, was an “irrelevant” party-line Democrat headed for retirement. His co-workers were “self-obsessed and pathetic.” Even before the scandal, he says he’d become disenchanted by the system, quagmired as it is by partisanship and bureaucracy. “The pay is shit. The hours are shit. It’s shit knowing that you’re not actually doing anything,” he says. “I was so eager to go to work, get the job done, and go home.”
In September 2023, Bob Menendez, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was indicted on bribery charges; Cardin inherited Menendez’s committee and its staff, leaving Maese-Czeropski without much work. Listening to him recount his days getting paid by Congress to do nothing — “I would beg the chief of staff and whoever for work. I had nothing to do” — is cause enough to wonder whether Elon Musk’s blathering about government inefficiency is, on its face, well founded. What is it they say about idle hands? “I would come in nine hours a day, sit there bored out of my fucking mind. So yeah,” Maese-Czeropski deadpans. “I’m going to entertain myself and fuck in a room.” Specifically: Hart 216 — the same room where James Comey testified about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The sex act itself took place on a desk more recently occupied by Amy Klobuchar. (It is somewhat simple, apparently, to book a room in the Senate under the auspices of an important meeting.) Afterward, he gave his partner (the only subject he is unwilling to talk about) a tour of the Capitol, then “I went back to my desk and fucking sat there.” It wasn’t even noon yet. “It’s not like I was skipping work,” he says.
Unwisely, perhaps, he didn’t keep the video to himself. And neither did his date. Within days, it was leaked to the Daily Caller. Laura Loomer spread his name on social media. “We are just disgusted about your VILE behavior as a staffer to a United States senator,” crowed George Santos on X. (“A Sex Tape Is One of the Least Offensive Things to Happen in That Senate Hearing Room,” Jezebel countered.) The tabloids called him the “Senate Twink.” The right took the opportunity to claim vindication for Madison Cawthorn, who had recently called Congress a cesspool of orgies and cocaine. Semafor soon reported that Capitol Police had investigated another sex tape made by a staffer in Republican representative Dan Newhouse’s office. (The agency would eventually say it was unlikely Maese-Czeropski broke any laws.)
“I became catatonic,” Maese-Czeropski says of the moment he realized he’d been caught. “My brain shut down.” It was Friday and he was working from home, so he submitted his resignation over email. “At first, my parents asked, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’” he says, but realizing the extent of the damage, namely how many death threats he was receiving, his father eventually flew out to D.C. in support. Along with a childhood friend, they “holed up” in an Airbnb, sometimes going on clandestine walks in sunglasses, masks, and hats.
Things intensified after Maese-Czeropski issued a half-apology on LinkedIn, which read, in part, “This has been a difficult time for me, as I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda.” Even to other gays online, it seemed like a cop-out. He now claims that the statement was written by Cardin’s office. “It was a horrific message that basically said, ‘Oh, I’m only being attacked because I’m gay.’” (A former Cardin spokesperson says, “What was posted, and when, was wholly up to him.”)
At first, Maese-Czeropski tried to ignore the backlash. “I basically watched TV nonstop” — his favorite season of Survivor, “Marquesas,” on repeat — “because I needed to tune out everything that was happening.” He set out to Eat, Pray, Love his way out of the scandal. On a whim, he booked a one-way trip to Cape Town. He’d never been, he says, and it sounded warm. (Eventually, what he now recognizes as PTSD caught up to him and he spent a brief stint in a psych ward.) He then backpacked through southern Africa, Portugal, and the Canary Islands. Along the way, he met a friend, who told him he might enjoy Sydney. On another whim, he moved there. The Aussies have treated him well. “This story breaks the ice,” he says. “People aren’t over-the-top political or religious. They’re more likely to be friends with me if I start off with that.” With time, he’s decided to lean into the reputation. A few months ago, he launched an OnlyFans under the username Senate Twink Official. “I’m going to try and bank off this name,” he tells me.
Maese-Czeropski’s therapist has encouraged him to believe that he might have sabotaged his career on purpose. “In some sense, I fucked in the Senate because I was miserable and wanted a way out,” Maese-Czeropski says. He’s trying to hold no grudges and has no desire to suss out his leaker. “I had a half-second where I was like, I know so many people who’ve fucked in the Senate. I could throw people under the bus to water out my own scandal,” he tells me. “I feel guilty that the thought crossed my mind.” For now, he has no plans to leave Australia and is hoping to put some of his OnlyFans money (the conversion rate is great) toward future travel. His next stop is Tonga. “People ask me, ‘What now? You can’t work in politics.’ But I was so depressed when I worked in politics,” he says. “It’s almost a blessing in disguise. Now, I’m living in Australia, living the good life.”
