Ron DeSantis says Michael Caruso, the Palm Beach County official he appointed a year ago and who was arrested Tuesday on five felony child abuse charges, passed a clean background check before he got the job.
Caruso, 67, was taken into custody Tuesday morning by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and local police. Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the arrest on social media, saying the investigation is ongoing. About an hour later, DeSantis suspended Caruso from office by executive order. He faces five felony counts: kidnapping, lewd or lascivious molestation, lewd or lascivious exhibition, luring or enticing a child, and child abuse causing mental injury. The alleged victim is a young relative. Caruso is being held without bond and faces a possible life sentence if convicted. He has not been convicted of anything, and the case is at its earliest stage.
The job he held is a significant one. The clerk of the circuit court and comptroller runs a county’s court records and its finances. In Palm Beach County that means a roughly $219,000 salary, an $80.1 million budget, and about 670 employees. Caruso, an accountant by trade, was first elected to the Florida House in 2018, the same year DeSantis became governor, and served until the governor appointed him clerk in August 2025 as he hit term limits. He was running unopposed for a full term and was arrested on primary election day.
He and DeSantis were close. Caruso backed the governor on immigration legislation that other House Republicans opposed and sided with him during his feud with the House Speaker. DeSantis publicly called him a legend. Caruso’s wife, Tracy Stein Caruso, currently holds two DeSantis appointed positions and is awaiting Senate confirmation for a third.
Asked at a news conference whether he knew about any allegations before making the appointment, DeSantis said of course not. He said Caruso “had a clean vet, he was well regarded in the community,” and that nothing of the kind appeared in the vetting materials.
That is the claim now under scrutiny. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Caruso’s ex-wife, Beverly Caruso, accused him during their 2012 divorce proceedings of sexually assaulting one of their children. A Delray Beach police investigation and a review by the state child welfare agency in December 2012 deemed the allegation unfounded after the child and other witnesses denied that any abuse occurred. Records also show Caruso has been the subject of other reports to the state child welfare agency that were never made public.
The word unfounded does real work there, and it is worth being precise about it. In child welfare terms, unfounded means investigators did not find enough evidence to substantiate the claim. It is not a finding that nothing happened. What matters for the vetting question is something simpler: that allegation lived in a divorce file and in state agency records, both of which are the kind of thing a background check on a candidate for a county constitutional office is meant to turn up. Either it was not found, or it was found and did not disqualify him. DeSantis has said it was not in the materials he saw.
There is one more piece of this that has traveled further than any of it. In 2023, as a member of the Florida House, Caruso voted in favor of the law making sexual battery against a child under 12 punishable by death in Florida. DeSantis pointed to that law himself this week, telling reporters Florida was the first state to reintroduce capital punishment for people convicted of abusing children, that he was proud to sign it, and that Caruso would be in for a world of hurt if he is convicted.
Caruso spent decades in exactly the kinds of roles that put an adult around children. He coached Little League baseball for 30 years and volunteered with the Boy Scouts for eight, and he sat on the Delray Beach Police Advisory Board.
Uthmeier, announcing the arrest, said holding a position of public trust provides no shield from accountability. The open question is how someone gets handed that trust in the first place, and who was supposed to be checking.
