Aidan Maese-Czeropski

The former Senate staffer became infamous when a video of him having sex on Capitol Hill leaked. He doesn't regret much.

- BY BROCK COLYAR

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, pre-holiday 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.”