Rep. Carolina Amesty, who touted her success as a business owner and educator in her campaign for the Florida House last year, filed false information with the state about her family’s small Christian university, claimed to run a thriving restaurant that actually was closed and failed to ensure taxes were paid on the $1.3 million home she lived in, an Orlando Sentinel investigation found.
The first-term Republican lived for nearly three years with her parents in a five-bedroom pool home near Windermere purchased last year by Central Christian University, an arrangement that prompted controversy during her campaign.
Central Christian, an unaccredited school in Pine Hills, is run by Amesty, 28, and her father. It operates out of a former church building that seemed nearly deserted during four visits by Sentinel reporters and had a broken window on their last visit in mid-July.
The university has not paid the 2022 property tax bill on its upscale Mediterranean-style house where Amesty lived and now owes Orange County more than $18,000 in taxes and late fees.
This spring, Amesty also failed to pay the property taxes on the shuttered fast-food chicken restaurant she owns, so for three months the Orlando restaurant called Pollo Juan and the university owed the county more than $37,000.
Amesty paid off the restaurant’s $19,199.34 bill on July 5, about a week after the Sentinel asked the lawmaker about her delinquent taxes. As of August, that business still owed the Orlando Utilities Commission more than $5,700 in unpaid utility bills.
As a candidate, Amesty won endorsements from prominent Republicans such as Richard Corcoran, a former state education commissioner and lawmaker, and Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer. Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, made separate campaign appearances at Central Christian last fall.
In office, Amesty has supported DeSantis in his fight with Disney and in other culture-war battles. Winning a district that President Joe Biden carried in 2020 helped give her rising-star status in the GOP, and she was even mentioned as a potential future House speaker. She’s running for re-election next year.
Living in luxury
Amesty’s public face is one of wealth and accomplishment. The home where she lived during the campaign and her first legislative session sits in a guarded community near Isleworth and boasts more than 5,400 square feet of living space.
At age 27 she loaned herself $200,000 to jumpstart her campaign, a financial boost that helped her easily defeat four Republican rivals in the primary and then her Democratic opponent in November. She now represents House District 45, which takes in much of west Orange, including Disney World, Horizon West and Windermere as well as northwest Osceola County.
Amesty did not respond to the Sentinel’s repeated attempts to reach her for comment on this story. Reporters called her, texted her, emailed her a detailed list of questions and requested to speak with her at the university campus and at her district office, where they left letters seeking an interview and printed copies of their questions.
More than eight hours after this story published online, Amesty posted a response on her social media accounts, calling it a “hit job” based on “misunderstandings.”
A Venezuelan immigrant who moved to Florida as a young child, Amesty ran for office praising “faith, family and freedom” and promising to be a “strong, conservative voice” in Tallahassee. She told voters she met her fiancé, a wealthy car dealer who became one of her top campaign donors, at a 2020 rally for former President Donald Trump, and she vowed to defend the “DeSantis agenda,” if elected.
When DeSantis made a campaign appearance at Central Christian in October, Amesty gave a fiery speech that trashed the “radical left mob” that is “doing its best to destroy the truth.” She also blasted Charlie Crist, DeSantis’ Democratic challenger.
“Here at Central Christian University we understand the importance of teaching the truth,” she said, according to videos of the event.
But Amesty has not been truthful about her businesses, her finances, or even the date of her graduation from the University of Central Florida, the Sentinel found.
Her university’s tax forms don’t account for all of the school’s money, experts who study non-profit organizations told the Sentinel. The school’s political activities, including rallies with DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, also appear to violate federal rules for non-profits, they said.
Public records raise questions about how she could afford a six-figure loan to her campaign, an amount nearly double what she claimed to earn for that year, or how the university could afford a home on the 17th hole in Keene’s Pointe for Amesty and her parents.
Until three years ago, the family lived in a modest house near Pine Hills and faced a string of financial problems, among them a lawsuit claiming the university was behind on its rent and owed more than $50,000.
The Sentinel found many of Amesty’s claims contradicted by court, property, tax and other public records.
False filings with state
“I am a businesswoman, educator,” Amesty said as she introduced herself at a political forum last summer. “I serve as vice president of Central Christian University.”
Most of Amesty’s employment and income is tied to family businesses, most notably Central Christian, whose website says it was founded in 2003 by Amesty’s father, Juan, the university’s president. Juan Amesty could not be reached for comment.
Carolina Amesty says she began working at Central Christian in 2014, at age 20, before she had a college degree.
The university in late 2021 sent documents to the Florida Commission for Independent Education that claimed as faculty four men who told the Orlando Sentinel they did not work there. The documents – with Carolina Amesty listed as the contact person – were required by the state for private colleges seeking to offer non-religious courses.
Central Christian is a mostly online school that charges $12,000 for an undergraduate program and more for extras, such as a $1,500 graduation fee that “includes cap, gown & tassel,” its catalog says. As an unaccredited school, its students cannot use federal student loans, and it does not offer other financial aid. It also warns students that its credits may not be transferable to other colleges.
The university’s enrollment is unclear. The state documents showed Central Christian anticipated enrolling about 145 students, but its website claims more than 500.
A Spanish-language promotional video for the school featuring Carolina Amesty and a Spanish version of its website suggest Central Christian appeals to students in Latin America. On visits to the North Hiawassee Road campus this year, Sentinel reporters did not see college students nor much sign of activity.
Central Christian’s list of faculty sent to the state included the names and academic credentials of 10 professors. But three people on that list told the Sentinel that, while they spoke with Amesty about possible positions and provided her resumes, they were not hired.
Scot Hamilton, who has taught psychology at colleges and a South Florida high school, said it was “galling” that his name and academic credentials, which include a degree from Georgetown University, were included on the document sent to the state.
Joe Durso, a former mayor of Longwood, and Danny Singh, an English teacher at a private Central Florida school, also confirmed they never worked at Central Christian.
A fourth man on the list, J.T. Shim, a Central Florida business consultant, said he was not an employee when the list was sent to the state more than a year ago. Shim said last week he had just been hired by Central Christian and planned to start teaching in the business program later this month. But on Tuesday, after this story published online, Shim said he would have to “defer” his start date at Central Christian because of a conflict.
The Commission for Independent Education is part of the Florida Department of Education, which did not respond to questions about whether it would take action against the university for providing false information.
The university’s websites also made false claims.
Its English-language website said four employees had identical degrees from Cornell, Purdue and Stanford universities, though the name of the prestigious California institution was misspelled. The website claimed professor Samuel Torres, for example, had a bachelor’s degree in statistical science from Purdue, a master’s in mathematics and logic from Cornell and a Ph.D. from Stanford.
Officials at Cornell, Purdue and Stanford, however, all said the 67-year-old had not earned degrees from their institutions.
Torres did not respond to an email, a phone message or a note left at his Orlando home requesting comment.
That section of the website was deleted after the Sentinel asked Amesty in an email about those employees’ credentials.
A Spanish version of Central Christian’s website claimed it operated nine campuses, in foreign countries and in several states. It said there were two campuses in California, one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco.
But California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates private colleges there, said it had no record of Central Christian ever operating there.
House prompts questions
In March 2022, Central Christian bought the house in Keene’s Pointe, a luxury community on the Butler Chain of Lakes featuring a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course.
Amesty and her parents had been living there for more than a year by the time of the purchase, leasing it first, she said last year.
In September 2021, Amesty and her fiancé, Jay Rosario, 54, celebrated their engagement at a catered party at the house, according to Instagram posts that show bouquets of roses, platters of cheese and appetizers and a tower of pink frosted cupcakes.
Her residence became a source of controversy during her 2022 campaign.
A mailer during the Republican primary attacked her because she “took a free multi-million dollar home from her Not-for-Profit University.”
During the general election, her Democratic opponent, Allie Braswell, suggested Amesty was unfairly living in a home that would not be liable for property taxes because it was owned by an educational organization.
Florida law says that educational institutions that use property “exclusively for educational purposes are exempt from taxation.”
The university did not seek an educational exemption for the property in 2022, but it did this year, and the Orange County Property Appraiser denied that request on June 30.
The property appraiser said the single-family home was being used as a residence and “not providing an educational purpose” as required by law, according to its letter to the university. The university has appealed that decision.
During the campaign, Amesty denied there was anything wrong with her family living in a home owned by the university. She compared it to Rollins College’s president living in a house on its Winter Park campus.
But experts said that is a poor comparison.
Colleges often provide homes for their presidents but they are typically on campus or close by, allowing the top executive to be part of college life and to host fundraising and other events for the college community, said Lloyd Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame whose expertise includes non-profit organizations and the intersection of election and tax laws.
Rollins’ Barker House, built on campus in 2004, for example, provides private living quarters on its second floor and space designed for public events on its first floor. It is exempt from property taxes, according to the Orange County property appraiser’s website.
Central Christian’s home in a gated community is about 15 miles, and a 30-minute drive, away from its campus on Hiawassee Road.
That makes it difficult to argue that it is part of the university, Mayer said.
Last year, Amesty also downplayed questions about why she was living with her parents, saying it was part of her Hispanic culture to remain with her parents until she got married.
In May, she changed her address and is now registered to vote at another house in Keene’s Pointe. That house has a utility account registered to Rosario, records from the Orange County utilities department show.
The Sentinel could not determine, based on publicly available marriage licenses and social media posts, whether Amesty and Rosario have married.
Rosario is a father of three who, when his marriage was dissolved in 2017, earned about $600,000 a year and owned a million-dollar lakefront home in Clermont and a timeshare unit in Hawaii, according to his Lake County divorce file. In 2019, he sold his Wesley Chapel Nissan dealership for $12.8 million, Pasco County property records show.
Rosario could not be reached for comment.
‘Things that are odd’
Rosario joined Central Christian University’s board of directors in March 2022, a week after Amesty filed to run for the House, and he signed the university’s $993,750 mortgage document when it purchased the Keene’s Pointe house the following month, state and county records show.
The university is a non-profit organization as is Central Christian Academy, an affiliated private, K-12 Christian school. The school relies on state vouchers to cover tuition payments for a majority of its students and could benefit from the expansion Amesty and other GOP lawmakers approved this year.
The school and the university share the Hiawassee Road campus, which sits on property owned by a third non-profit, Central Christian Holding Corporation. All three entities are controlled by Amesty and her family, state business records show.
The publicly available tax forms for the three Central Christian enterprises show “a number of things that are odd,” said Mayer, who reviewed the organizations’ tax forms for the Sentinel.
More than $900,000 is unaccounted for in their 990 tax forms for 2021, the most recent year available. The university, without explanation, reported its assets and fund balances dropped from almost $1.6 million in 2020 to less than $700,000 in 2021.
The tax forms should document where that money went, Mayer said, but instead give the impression the money “has simply vanished.”
The university and K-12 school also reported paying $432,000 in “occupancy fees” in 2021, but the holding company, which would have received that rent, only reported getting $180,000.
In 2021, the K-12 school reported no employees. The school collected at least $106,613 in state scholarship money that year to cover student tuition bills, according to Step Up For Students, which administers most of Florida’s voucher programs.
The university reported it paid Juan Amesty $112,000 that year, and Carolina Amesty $107,000, the documents show. But a year earlier, the university’s tax form showed no salary for Carolina Amesty and just $30,000 paid to her father, in his same role as president.
Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch, a watchdog organization for nonprofits, echoed Mayer’s concerns after also reviewing Central Christian’s tax forms at the Sentinel’s request.
Styron, an accountant, said Central Christian runs three overlapping entities all controlled by a small number of family members, apparently without whistleblower or conflict of interest policies.
“That is really a recipe for a disaster,” she said.
Like Mayer, she found numbers in the documents that didn’t make sense.
The holding corporation, for example, reported exactly $2,045,853 for its assets and the same figure for its liabilities.
If both numbers are correct, that’s “the coincidence of the millennia,” Styron said.
“It really makes me question how reliable the financial reporting is.”
Nonprofit organizations can be exempt from paying federal and state taxes, including income and sales taxes, she said, but in exchange, they need to be transparent about their finances.
Like the tax forms, the financial disclosure form Amesty filed with the state a year ago – a requirement to run for office – includes numbers that prompt questions.
Most notably, they fail to document how she was able to write a six-figure check to her campaign.
She claimed $3.7 million in net worth in 2021, but almost all of that was her estimated value of her businesses. The lion’s share came from the $3 million value she assigned to her chicken restaurant, which was closed when she filled out the disclosure forms.
On the form, she also noted her $107,000 salary and said she had $133,648 in checking and savings accounts – but owed $122,209 in loans.
2 UCF graduation dates
During her campaign, Amesty said on social media sites that she graduated from UCF in 2016. But UCF said she didn’t earn a degree until three years later. She is in UCF’s December 2019 commencement program, listed as having earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science.
Amesty’s LinkedIn page, which had the 2016 date, was changed after UCF alerted her that the Sentinel had asked to confirm her graduation year.
Amesty moved to the Orlando area when she was 3 years old, she said. In 2007, her parents purchased a home near Pine Hills – one they sold for $287,500 in 2021 – and Amesty lived there until the family moved to Keene’s Pointe in late 2020, according to voter registration records.
Her parents seemed to struggle financially for years, Orange County court records show. In 2017 on a judge’s order, deputies went to the house and repossessed a dining room table and eight chairs because of unpaid Rent-A-Center bills.
That same year, Central Christian University, with Carolina Amesty as chairman of its board of directors, was sued for failing to pay rent at the Hiawassee Road site, records from Orange show. The university later purchased that property after securing a loan.
Central Christian still owes the Internal Revenue Service $1,853.52 for past due Medicare and unemployment taxes, according to a 2015 document on the Orange County Comptroller’s website.
Its 2022 property tax bill on the Keene’s Pointe home is more than four months overdue and stands at $18,218.21.
The closed restaurant
During her campaign, Amesty attacked her Democratic opponent, suggesting Braswell’s financial problems made him unfit to be a lawmaker. He has “4 bankruptcies and failed economic decisions in his life and now pretends he is qualified to pass a balanced budget!” she wrote on Twitter last October.
She boasted of her ties to Trump, posting on social media an invitation to his 2016 inauguration, her visit to The Mar-a-Lago Club in early 2022 and her endorsement by the former president’s son Donald Trump Jr., who held a fundraising event for her in August in Orlando.
And she bragged about her business acumen.
“I started my own restaurant in the middle of very tough times, and by the grace of God, I was able to thrive,” Amesty said at a Tiger Bay Club political forum in July 2022 that featured the Republicans vying for the district 45 seat.
But by that time the Pollo Juan restaurant, which sold fried chicken and Venezuelan specialties, had been closed for more than two months.
Just before Amesty declared her candidacy, Pollo Juan paid off most of the $10,400 it owed the Florida Department of Revenue for delinquent sales and re-employment taxes, with the balance cleared in July 2022.
A message posted to the restaurant’s Instagram account in April 2022, just as her campaign got underway, said the chicken restaurant was “temporarily closed for renovations.”
That same month Pollo Juan, which Amesty said she’d owned since 2019, bought the building and land it had been using, paying $840,000. Amesty and her father signed a five-year, $799,600 mortgage on the property.
But the business did not reopen, according to its Instagram account, and a “for sale” sign now sits outside the restaurant near Orange Blossom Trail and John Young Parkway.
The building’s electricity and water service was disconnected in March, OUC said, after the restaurant failed to respond to past-due notices or pay its $4,665 bill. The bill is still unpaid and, with late fees, in August totaled $5,711.53.
Amesty, who estimated the restaurant was worth $3 million in 2021, dropped that to $2.2 million on her 2022 disclosure forms filed in July. The property now is listed for sale for $2.5 million on a real estate website.
The Orange County Property Appraiser, however, estimates its market value at about $871,000.
Ben Wilcox, the research director for Integrity Florida, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization, said it is not against the law to inflate achievements while running for office. But it doesn’t look good, nor does it give voters a full picture of a candidate.
“It’s a disservice to the public to not be completely honest about your financial and professional situation,” he said.
Campus campaign rallies
Two weeks after filing to run for the first time, Amesty said that she’d brought in more than $250,000 in campaign donations.
“The community is responding to my conservative message and vision for Central Florida,” she wrote in a message posted on April 6 to her social media accounts.
Her haul dwarfed her opponents’ fundraising totals; she raised more by early April than any of her Republican rivals did before the August primary.
But most of that eye-popping figure was from the $200,000 loan Amesty gave to her own campaign. Thousands more in donations came from her parents, her brother and sister-in-law and Rosario and his two grown children, Florida campaign finance records show. In all, 85% of the total she boasted about came from herself or that group.
Rosario also chaired a political committee supporting his fiancé’s candidacy, kicking in $82,000 personally and through two of his businesses.
This spring and summer, a Hummer, a van and trailers decorated with Amesty’s face and political slogans were seen parked on Central Christian’s campus.
That parking arrangement likely violates IRS rules, which say 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations like Central Christian cannot participate in political campaigns, said Mayer, the Notre Dame professor.
The campaign events Amesty’s university held are even more troubling, said both Mayer and Styron, the Charity Watch executive.
In 2020, the university hosted Pence for a “Latinos for Trump” rally, an event still celebrated on its website.
Two weeks before last fall’s election, DeSantis campaigned at the school, urging sign-waving supporters to “stand strong” until “we bring this home,” video of the event shows. Two days before that, his wife, Casey, made a stop at Central Christian.
At the event with Florida’s first lady, Amesty told the crowd that to “keep Florida free” there was only one choice. “Re-electing Ron DeSantis for governor this Nov. 8!” according to videos on her campaign Instagram account.
Only the IRS can decide what is a violation of its rules, Styron said. But campaign rallies hosted by the non-profit and endorsements of political candidates seem an obvious breach, she added.
Amesty, who does not yet have an opponent for the 2024 election, has raised nearly $45,000 for her reelection bid. Her early donors include the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, Teco Energy, the Seminole Tribe of Florida and ABC Liquors.
After her election last year, Amesty’s campaign website celebrated her victory and declared that she had what it takes to do well in Tallahassee.
“As a self-made entrepreneur and now elected official,” the website’s message read, “she has the experience and the drive to keep District 45 on track for a brighter and more prosperous future!”
