The Storybook Start—and Bitter End—of Pete Hegseth’s First Marriage

At Forest Lake Area High School in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Pete Hegseth and Meredith Schwarz seemed like the perfect couple. He played varsity football and basketball; she was on the student council and a nominee for homecoming queen. They were both academic all stars bound for the elite schools (Princeton for him, Barnard for her). The class of 1999 voted the pair “most likely to marry.” A yearbook photo shows Hegseth wearing a football jersey with his arms around Schwarz’s waist. They look like lovestruck teenagers in a John Hughes movie.

In 2004, just as their classmates predicted, Hegseth married Schwarz at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota, according to two attendees. By this point Hegseth was transforming into a culture warrior. His burgeoning interest in right-wing politics seemed to coincide with his waning college basketball career. (Princeton’s student newspaper reportedly described him as a “a recruiting afterthought” who had “patiently toiled in obscurity” while on the team.)

After 9/11, Hegseth enlisted in Princeton’s ROTC program and became a company commander. He also wrote opinion columns for The Princeton Tory, the campus’s conservative publication. He expressed strident views against feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. “By advocating government support of the traditional family unit, a return of the acceptability of the ‘homemaker’ vocation, freedom from oppressive government oversight, moral responsibility, and the revival of religious faith, conservatives provide a working blueprint for a free and prosperous future,” Hegseth wrote in 2002.

Hegseth and Schwarz’s young marriage was short-lived. In December 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted that he cheated on her, according to four sources close to the couple. (APM Reports previously revealed that the infidelity was listed as grounds in the couple’s divorce proceedings.) The sources told me that Hegseth’s infidelity left Schwarz emotionally and psychologically scarred. “She was gaslighted by him heavily throughout their relationship,” one of the sources told me. “As far as everyone else was concerned, they were viewed by many as this all-American power couple that were making big things for themselves.” (Schwarz declined to comment. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story, and instead provided a statement that impugned my record as a reporter.)

At the time Schwarz filed for divorce, Hegseth was dating Samantha Deering, whom he met while working in Washington, DC, at Vets for Freedom, a group that lobbied to maintain the military’s “counterinsurgency” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three kids. In 2017, Deering filed for divorce after Hegseth fathered a child with his Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019 at Trump’s golf course in Colts Neck, New Jersey.

Hegseth’s personal life might have remained a little-noticed case of a conservative media personality not practicing what he preaches. But as the Senate prepares for hearings to confirm the former Fox & Friends weekend host’s appointment as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, the whole of his biography and his beliefs have become a matter of public debate. In the role, Hegseth would oversee a military with roughly 1.3 million active duty personnel and a nearly $900 billion budget. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth suggests the military should pursue a Christian mission. “Our present moment is much like the eleventh century,” he wrote, adding: “We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American Crusade.”

On November 14, I reported that Trump transition officials were blindsided by an allegation of sexual misconduct by Hegseth against a woman at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California, in October 2017, at the same time Hegseth was still married to Deering and shortly after Rauchet gave birth to his son.

According to an anonymous memo sent to the transition, which I later reviewed, the woman said Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault happened while her husband and two young children were asleep in the hotel. Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told Breitbart News that the woman pursued Hegseth. Parlatore also pointed out that the Monterey police investigated the case and declined to bring charges, but Hegseth later paid the woman to keep the incident confidential. Visiting with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Hegseth declined to discuss the allegations in detail. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m going to leave it,” he told reporters.

As lawmakers prepare to scrutinize Hegseth’s record in the coming weeks, more of it has come into the public light. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Hegseth’s mother had written an email to him around the time of the dissolution of his second marriage, accusing him of mistreating women for years. His mother, Penelope Hegseth, told the paper she had regretted the email and apologized to him. On Monday, a New Yorker story detailed whistleblower allegations made against Hegseth by staff at Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, another nonprofit he ran later in his career, that accused him of public intoxication and financial mismanagement. One former employee wrote that they had seen Hegseth drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims” at a bar in 2015. (Parlatore provided a statement to the magazine calling the allegations “outlandish claims.”)

Looking at Hegseth’s biography in the weeks since his nomination, his first marriage has proven to be a particular inflection point—and an early example of the fault lines that continue to rest just beneath his public persona. According to sources I spoke to, Hegseth changed over the course of his roughly 12-year relationship with Schwarz. The story of their marriage has a key place in the Pentagon nominee’s ambitious rise.

Hegseth and Schwarz began dating near the end of their freshman year of high school, a source close to her told me. “He has a heart of gold and is the sweetest guy I know,” she later wrote in the Forest Lake yearbook. “Meredith is as beautiful, caring, intelligent, and loving inside as she is outside,” Hegseth wrote. During college, the couple dated long distance and saw each other during weekends and summers.

After graduation, Hegseth’s Army National Guard unit deployed to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the military housed detainees from the post–9/11 conflicts. Shortly before Hegseth shipped out, he and Schwarz married—an act that made them outliers among their early-20s Ivy League (and adjacent) peers. “I didn’t know many people who were married,” one of Schwarz’s college friends told me. But Schwarz and Hegseth were registered Republicans and religious Midwesterners (She was raised Roman Catholic; he was Baptist). Getting married seemed like the natural next step.

Hegseth and Schwarz were both intensely driven. Before Hegseth began his military service, Schwarz landed an investment banking job at JP Morgan in New York. In 2005, Hegseth volunteered to go to Iraq where he would lead missions in Baghdad and Samarra, a city north of the capital. Hegseth earned two bronze stars, but his unit was also criticized for employing aggressive battlefield tactics, earning the nickname “Kill Company.” Afterward, Hegseth moved to Washington, DC, to lead Vets for Freedom. The downside was that his marriage remained long distance. One of Schwarz’s friends recalled that it was evident that Hegseth wanted to go into politics. “He’s charming,” they said. But Hegseth also displayed his hard-right politics. “We would argue about women’s reproductive rights. He had some regressive views on birth control. His position was basically, if you got pregnant it was your fault.” Another person close to Hegseth recalled him joking that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

In hindsight, Schwarz’s friends said, Hegseth’s behavior during the marriage provided warning signs. Two sources recalled a night when Schwarz and Hegseth went out with Hegseth’s Princeton friends in New York and Hegseth disappeared for hours without explanation. According to the sources, Schwarz began frantically calling hospitals looking for her husband. At dawn, Hegseth returned to her apartment and berated Schwarz for making a big deal of his absence.

In the spring of 2008, Schwarz got what she believed was good news. According to two sources, Hegseth told her he wanted to move with her to Minneapolis so he could attend the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Schwarz was elated that they could finally live together in the same city, a source said. She quit JP Morgan, sold her New York apartment, and moved to Minneapolis, where she got a job at the food conglomerate General Mills. But Schwarz soon became concerned when Hegseth made no signs of leaving DC and was evasive about his plans, the source said. According to this source, Schwarz felt gaslighted by Hegseth’s constantly shifting stories. “In her journal she was begging God to help her figure out what was happening,” one of Schwarz’s friends recalled.

That November, Hegseth broke the news to Schwarz. According to a source, he showed up at Schwarz’s parents’ house in Forest Lake wearing his Army uniform and admitted his infidelity. Schwarz was understandably devastated. Hegseth appeared devastated too. The following day, Schwarz’s younger brother called Hegseth. “The conversation lasted four hours,” a source familiar with the call said. “Pete said he no longer believed in God and family values. He claimed he no longer wanted to seek the limelight. He said, and this quote is as clear as day, ‘I’m a fucked up individual.’”

Schwarz’s first impulse was to make the marriage work, two sources said. Although she was crushed by Hegseth’s infidelity, she was still in love with him. But sources said that her hope soon faded. First, Schwarz saw charges for a local hotel room on her credit card that she didn’t recognize. When she confronted Hegseth, he was evasive. Two sources told me that Schwarz later learned that Hegseth had booked the room for Deering, with whom he had been having an affair. Finally, Hegseth revealed that he had had five affairs while they were married.

Schwarz told him to only communicate through her divorce lawyer. According to two sources, Hegseth wanted to split their assets 50-50. Schwarz did have leverage, though. According to two sources close to her, Hegseth repeatedly asked her to sign an NDA, but she refused. Their divorce judgement filed in Hennepin County reads: “There exists an irretrievable breakdown of the parties’ marriage relationship…due to Respondent’s infidelity.”

Hegseth’s ascent from the Fox News studio to the threshold of the highest echelon of American power was only possible in a Republican Party redefined by Trump, who has also been married three times and has been accused by 27 women of sexual misconduct. (Trump denies the allegations.)

So far, Trump is sticking by Hegseth. But his confirmation is far from certain. Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid allegations that Gaetz paid a 17-year-old to have sex with him (Gaetz denies the allegations). According to Pentagon rules known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery can be subject to court-martial. Gary Barthel, a managing partner at the Military Law Center in Carlsbad, California, told me, “the military routinely enforces UCMJ Article 134, which prohibits extramarital sexual conduct. Such cases can be prosecuted via court-martial or the command can pursue administrative disciplinary action and/or administrative separation action.”

In the first Trump administration, confirmations often played out as showcases for political opposition, a pattern that may well repeat itself as Trump assumes office with both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans and a deep bench of controversial appointees. More moderate senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, along with combat veteran Joni Ernst and institutionalist Mitch McConnell, may use Hegseth’s nomination to build some guardrails on Trump’s presidency. But if recent history is a guide, they also could capitulate. Either way, the Forest Lake Area High School class of 1999 could be watching one of their own on the biggest stage in the world.