In October 2017, a 30-year-old woman arrived at a hospital in Monterey, California, and requested a rape kit. According to a police report, she said she had been sexually assaulted four days earlier after attending a Republican women’s conference at a Hyatt Regency hotel. The perpetrator, she told police, was Pete Hegseth, a Fox News commentator who had been a speaker at the convention.
The encounter, which did not result in charges against Hegseth and which he has admitted occurred but claimed was consensual, is now in the spotlight due to Hegseth’s surprise nomination as president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense. Will it affect his candidacy?
It seems unlikely. It’s clear at this point that allegations of sexual misconduct are no hindrance to being considered for the upper echelons of American power. The Trump cabinet may well include multiple men who have allegations of sexual misconduct against them, and it’s not even a surprise.
After all, just look at Trump himself, who was found liable by an Manhattan civil jury earlier this year of sexual abuse against author E. Jean Carroll. Trump has been accused over and over again of everything from making lewd comments to sexual assault, yet none of this disqualified him in the eyes of the millions of mostly men who chose him to fill the nation’s highest office for a second time.
Still, the sexual misconduct claims floating around the members of the proposed Trump cabinet this time around seem particularly egregious. The claim against Hegseth came into clearer focus on Wednesday, when Mediaite reported the details of the redacted police report and shared it in full.
According to the police report, the woman said she had gone to a bar attached to the hotel where she spotted Hegseth, who she had observed acting inappropriately with women throughout the day by doing things like “rub” their legs. In a text message, she typed that Hegseth gave off a “creeper” vibe, the report says. At the bar, she said, she approached Hegseth and “commented on how she did not appreciate how he treated women.”
Though she did not recall drinking to excess, the woman said, according to the police report, that things began to get “fuzzy” at the bar, and she remembers arguing with Hegseth by the pool after leaving the bar. The next memory she had was being alone with Hegseth in a hotel room. The report states she had her phone in her hand, and she claimed Hegseth asked her who she was texting and took it from her. She then claimed she tried to leave the room, saying no repeatedly, but Hegseth blocked the door with his body. Her next memory, according to the report, was Hegseth having sex with her, his dog tags hanging over her. She said he ejaculated on her stomach and threw a towel at her, before asking if she was okay. The woman went to the hospital four days later. She had been suffering nightmares and memory loss since the alleged assault, she said according to the report.
When police interviewed Hegseth, he claimed the encounter was consensual, a claim his attorney repeated to Mediaite, saying, “The incident was fully investigated and police found the allegations to be false, which is why no charges were filed.” Indeed, charges were never filed against Hegseth, and he eventually paid the woman an undisclosed sum in a nondisclosure agreement.
The allegation against Hegseth was reported before the Mediaite story—although not to the level of detail. But prior to Thursday, the allegations were a bit overshadowed by the sexual misconduct allegations against another (now former) Trump cabinet pick: Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz, the now-ex Florida congressman who Trump announced last week he’d be nominating for attorney general, has been under investigation since 2021 by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct (you can read the full breakdown of the allegations against him here, which he has denied). Until recently, Gaetz was also being investigated by the Justice Department for alleged sex trafficking involving underage girls, though no charges were filed and Gaetz has denied wrongdoing. The House Committee is still debating whether to release the findings of their investigation, following Gaetz’s resignation from the House after his nomination, and Democrats are pushing to have the report released to the public.
On Thursday, Gaetz abruptly announced he would be withdrawing from consideration, citing not wanting to be a distraction to the incoming Trump administration. However, CNN noted that the news came on the heels of their reporting another allegation against Gaetz involving sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old girl.
But, incredibly, it’s not just these two men. Robert Kennedy Jr., the former independent presidential candidate and Trump’s newly minted pick for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, has also been accused of sexual misconduct. Over the summer his children’s former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, alleged to Vanity Fair the political scion had groped her while she was working for him as a 23-year-old, something Kennedy has declined to comment on.
“I know that there are hardworking people who don’t have skeletons in their closet,” Cooney told USA Today in an interview published Wednesday. “And I wish we were electing people with fewer skeletons in their closet.”
There certainly are, but that doesn’t mean that those with such skeletons are facing any real consequences for their alleged actions. It’s been seven years since #MeToo, spurred in part from women’s anger over Trump’s ascendance, promised a national reckoning over sexual assault. Women shared their stories, screamed their pain, and tried to make a change in the way that we talk about rape and sexual violence.
Now women may soon be living under a presidential regime that includes men who have been accused of all manner of sexual misconduct and have managed to reach the highest levels of power anyway. Looking at the proposed Trump cabinet, it feels as if little has changed.
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