It’s one thing to live a traumatic event in private, but another to have a detailed account of your trauma be made public.
This is exactly what the alleged child victim of Michael Caruso, former Florida representative and Palm Beach County Clerk of Court, will live with for the rest of his life.
Caruso was arrested last Tuesday, August 18, and stood before a Palm Beach County judge on Wednesday to deny the five charges: molestation, child abuse causing mental injury, kidnapping, and lewd or lascivious molestation and exhibition.
He was subsequently incarcerated without bond, and has since been transferred to an Orange County prison. He appeared before an Orange County judge this past Thursday, August 20 to deny the charges.
Based on the evidence and legal proceedings so far, Governor Ron DeSantis has suspended Caruso from his position.
Following this move, DeSantis and his administration controversially made public the detailed arrest affidavit, which described incidents that allegedly took place between Caruso and the victim. Though it does not explicitly disclose the victim’s name, the detailed context makes it easy to identify the child, as just their name was removed from the in-depth recountings.
The affidavit says that in three different incidents, Caruso exposed his genitals to the child, put them in the child’s mouth and urinated, and touched the child’s genitals. The child was less than 12 years old at the time, and the Miami Herald alleges the victim was younger when the events occurred.
Other allegations have since resurfaced. Before DeSantis appointed him Clerk of Courts in August of 2025, Caruso had previously been accused of child sexual abuse by his former wife during their divorce in 2012. In a counterpetition, his ex-wife accused Caruso of having “a history of physical and emotional abuse of one or more of the children.”
Caruso denied the allegations, and continues to do so in the current case as well.
At a roundtable last Tuesday, DeSantis was asked about the allegations.
“We’re the first state to reintroduce the death penalty for pedophiles, and I’m proud that I signed that into law, and I’m proud that we have very strong penalties for people that abuse children and if he’s convicted, he is going to be in for a world of hurt,” DeSantis said.
Just three years ago, Caruso had voted in favor of a proposed piece of legislation that named capital sexual battery as a capital felony. House Bill 1297, which “provides for death sentences for certain child sexual offenders,” was signed into law by DeSantis in 2023. That same year, a court ruled that victim anonymity is not guaranteed in a legal trial, but DeSantis and his administration enacted a law to allow government agencies to withhold victims’ identifying information.
The law was established to “expand a public records exemption for crime victims” to avoid the use of “the name and personal identification number of a victim and any other information that could be used to locate, intimidate, harass, or abuse the victim.”
Florida law had already set a legal precedent on the matter in 2003, making it allowing “any information that may reveal the identity of a person who is a victim of any sexual offense” to be exempt from public record and allowed to be omitted from a published legal document.
Marsy’s Law, a 2018 constitutional amendment that gave crime victims “the right to prevent the disclosure of information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family,” among other privacy rights for victims in criminal cases, further supported the goal.
Child sex abuse and trauma survivors have taken to online spaces to express their frustrations with the Florida government’s decision to make the document public.
One survivor took to the online communities of Reddit to express their deep discomfort “as a survivor of child SA (birth to 14), it took me FIFTY years to say it out loud. But it is my choice when & to whom I speak of it. I can not imagine the horror of waking up as a parent knowing your child who is under 12 (by some reports he’s 6 now, making him 4 at the time of assault) has been outed as a victim in a high profile SA case.”