Michael Caruso championed executing child molesters and molested a child. The boy is under twelve. He is your blood. You took him on the holidays, on the trips, on the cruise. You took him, and took him, and took him. Ron called you a legend. The legend is in a cage. Ron, you made the man.
This week Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Michael Caruso, 67, from his post as Clerk of Court and Comptroller for Palm Beach County. Caruso, a married father of seven who coached little league baseball for decades and volunteered with the Boy Scouts, was arrested Tuesday on five felony charges: kidnapping, child molestation, lewd exhibition, luring or enticing a child, and child abuse causing mental injury. Court documents identify the alleged victim as a male relative of Caruso under the age of twelve, molested multiple times during 2024 and 2025 during holidays and family trips, including a Caribbean cruise. No attorney had come forward to represent Caruso by the time of his first court appearance Wednesday in West Palm Beach.
Caruso served as a Republican state representative for Florida’s 87th district — the seat including Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort — from 2018 until he was termed out last year. He was a vocal supporter of a 2023 law signed by DeSantis allowing the death penalty for anybody convicted of the sexual battery of a child under twelve. DeSantis called Caruso “a legend” for supporting hardline legislation, and “my representative” after Caruso was the sole backer of a controversial immigration bill. DeSantis appointed Caruso as Palm Beach Clerk of Court in August 2025. He also gave multiple appointments to Caruso’s wife Tracy Stein Caruso — to the Palm Beach County Healthcare District board, as chair of its Housing and Finance Authority, and a pending seat on the Palm Beach State College Trustees board. Caruso’s seat was lost to Democrat Emily Gregory in the March 2026 election.
The Miami Herald reported that Caruso’s personal life was “marked with ugly flare-ups and at least one previous allegation of sexually assaulting a child,” documented in Palm Beach court records. In a 2013 divorce filing, Caruso claimed his ex-wife had orchestrated “a false sex abuse case” against him, the subject of a 2012 investigation. The clerk of court is the keeper of Palm Beach County’s court records. The 2012 file waited in the courthouse Caruso was given to run, on the page that bore his own name, while the governor’s office called him a legend.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the arrest Tuesday, crediting “substantial assistance” from FDLE and local law enforcement. DeSantis told reporters in Sarasota he had acted immediately to suspend Caruso on hearing of the arrest. “It was a very easy decision for me to yank him from that position,” he said. When asked whether he or anybody in his administration had been aware of any prior allegations, DeSantis replied, “Of course not.” DeSantis called Caruso “well regarded in the community” and said Caruso “is going to be in a world of hurt” if convicted.
The boy is under twelve. He is your blood. The record says you took him on the holidays, on the trips, on the cruise. The law has words for it: kidnapping, child molestation, lewd exhibition, luring or enticing a child, child abuse causing mental injury. Those are the state’s words. Say them plainly. The luring was the trust that got a small body onto a ship. The kidnapping was the taking of a child who could not refuse. The lewd exhibition was what you showed him. The molestation was what the record says you did, again and again, on the days that were supposed to be the good days. The mental injury is the word for the rest of his life.
His body is small and it is his, and the record says you used it the way a man uses a child’s body. A body that small does not heal the way grown bodies heal. The thing the state calls mental injury does not heal at all. It will still be in his head when he is older than you are now. It will still be in his head when he is a man.
Michael. There is a taste under your tongue that the motion-sickness bands never touched. The sea has stopped moving and the taste has not. It is the taste of the morning the boy’s words finally weighed more than your name.
Your hands raised for the death of men like you. They are the same hands that set the boy on the rail of the ship so he could watch the water. The hands have not been washed, Michael. They will not wash. The film is not on the skin. It is under it, and it will be under it for the rest of the nights.
At night the weight comes onto your chest, the small weight of the boy you carried up the gangway. It does not lift when you turn over. You will turn over many nights. It is the boy’s body. It is what your body knows it did, whatever your mouth says.
You championed death for men like you. The statute is on the books. You set your reputation next to it. You did not imagine the man in the dock would wear your face. The law you championed does not check faces. The state that holds you now holds the statute, and the statute is aimed at exactly what the record says you did.
You were the legend, Michael. The whistle. The mitt. The scout shirt. The committee chair. The man “well regarded in the community.” The crusader whose cause was death for the thing you were. That was the costume. It was always the costume. The costume came off in the booking room, and the legend was sixty-seven, in an orange jumpsuit, hearing the charges that describe what the costume was hiding.
The file was already in the record. The 2012 investigation was in the record. The 2013 divorce filing was in the record, the one where you said the case against you was “false.” The allegation sat in the court records of Palm Beach County while you were being called a legend. The file did not travel. It waited. It waited in the courthouse you were handed, in the archive you were sworn to keep, on the page that bore your own name.
Ron, hear what you have done.
The boy is under twelve. He has a name you have not learned because the affidavit is sealed and the case is pending. He will not appear on your press conference podium. He will not be photographed in the capitol. He is not a political asset. He is a child, and he was molested by the man you made the clerk of court for Palm Beach County.
You signed the bill, Ron. You stood at the podium with Michael Caruso behind you and you signed the law that put a man to death for doing what Michael Caruso is now charged with doing. You held the ceremony in your voice, in your office, with cameras recording. You used Caruso’s name as the proof the bill had bipartisan support from the right people. You celebrated him. You made him the example.
Now the example is in the Palm Beach County Jail, and the boy is somewhere trying to understand why his uncle touched him on a cruise ship during the holidays.
You have three young children, Ron. You and Casey. Your boy, your girls. They are small. Picture the boy. He is your son’s age, roughly. He is on a cruise ship with his family because his family invited him, because his family is the kind of family that takes children on cruises. His uncle is there. His uncle has the room key. His uncle comes in at night when the parents are asleep. Picture your son, Ron, sitting on that bed in the dark of a cruise ship cabin, while the man you appointed runs for higher office in your party and you call him a legend on the podium in Tallahassee.
Feel it in your mouth, Ron. A scratch at the back of your throat. Your stomach doing the slow turn it does when you have read the affidavit and you have remembered that you wrote the law, that you signed the law, that you made the man who is charged with this very thing the most powerful unelected Republican in Palm Beach County.
You said “of course not” when a reporter asked if you knew about the 2012 allegation. You said “of course not” as if the man who had been investigated for sexually abusing a child in 2012 was a stranger who wandered into your administration, as if you had no duty to know, as if the duty to know belonged to someone else.
It was yours, Ron. You appointed him. You appointed his wife. You put him in a position to be photographed with you, to be celebrated in the Florida House, to be quoted in the press release for the death penalty bill. You did that because he was useful. He was useful to you, and the boy was invisible to you, and the boy paid for being invisible.
You said it was “a very easy decision” to suspend him. A very easy decision, Ron. A child was molested on a cruise ship over two years. A clerk of court you appointed is in jail. A 2012 allegation that you did not look for sat in the Palm Beach County records waiting for you to find it. And the decision you made on Tuesday was very easy.
The hard decision would have been to look. The hard decision would have been to read the divorce filing. The hard decision would have been to ask what the 2012 investigation was about before you put the man in charge of the courthouse. The hard decision was in 2025, not in 2026. The hard decision was the appointment.
You did not make the hard decision, Ron. You made the easy one. And a child paid.
You are not a strongman, Ron. You are a small man who signs death warrants for men charged with what your friend is charged with. You are a small man who holds the cameras for the bill signing and walks away before the affidavit is unsealed. You are a small man with a tall podium and a louder voice than the boy has. The boy is the one who carried the weight of your friendship with Michael Caruso in his body.
You will not pay for what you did, Ron. The boy will pay for what you did. That is the deal you struck when you made Michael Caruso your representative. The boy paid. You got the legislative victory. He got the cruise ship cabin in the dark.
I see the boy. I will not look away. The first witness in 2012 was a piece of paper in the Palm Beach courthouse, and they did not believe the paper. I am the witness who will not look away now. The boy did not stop speaking. He spoke until the officers wrote it down, and the record was written, and the legend is in the cage because a child’s words finally weighed more than a legend’s name.
“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” — Matthew 7:15, 20
The sheep’s clothing was the uniform. The mitt, the whistle, the scout shirt, the committee chair, the governor’s praise. The fruit is the record.
“When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’” — Mark 10:14
The boy is such as these. He is in the kingdom. He has always been in the kingdom. The men who took him stand outside the door, and the door does not open for them.
“It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” — Luke 17:2
The boy was on the cruise ship. The bill was signed in Tallahassee. The legend is in the Palm Beach County Jail. Ron, you tied the millstone. It is on your hand, and you tied it there.