Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, has been meeting with lawmakers who will vote on his confirmation. Hegseth is proving to be one of Trump’s most controversial nominees. (Rod Lamkey, Jr./AP)
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who’s President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee the Pentagon, was forced out of top roles at two veterans groups, according to a new bombshell report from The New Yorker.
Hegseth was forced to resign his roles at both Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America due to “serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct,” the outlet reported Sunday night. The former Army National Guard officer also faces allegations he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017, though Hegseth maintains the encounter was consensual.
The magazine cited a damning whistleblower account of Hegseth’s behavior at CVA, which he ran from 2013 to 2016. According to The New Yorker, “[Hegseth] and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers” and promoted a culture of sexism that culminated in the attempted assault of a female employee by a male colleague during a 2014 team outing to a Louisiana strip club. The report also alleges that Hegseth got so drunk that night he had to be restrained from joining the dancers onstage.
The female employee looked into filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, The New Yorker revealed, but ended up accepting a payment in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement. The woman was “ostracized” as a result of the episode. “Fear of reprisal looms over every woman associated with the organization,” the unnamed whistleblower wrote in their account of events.
Another complaint regarding Hegseth’s CVA tenure obtained by The New Yorker claimed that Hegseth drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” at a bar in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, while traveling as part of the organization’s 2015 Defend Freedom Tour.
Hegseth’s attorney called the claims “outlandish” and told The New Yorker they came from “a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate.”
Trump’s embattled nominee to run the world’s largest and most powerful military also racked up so much debt years earlier running Veterans for Freedom that donors worried their money was being misappropriated. At one point under Hegseth’s leadership (from roughly 2007 to 2012) the group had less than $1,000 in the bank and $435,000 in unpaid bills. “I was not the first to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace,” one donor told the outlet.
The New Yorker also obtained an email sent to Hegseth’s VFF successor claiming that Hegseth had a “history of alcohol abuse” and “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account — for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.”
Hegseth, who served as a national guardsman in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay before becoming a TV personality, is coming off a damning stretch that includes new details of the sexual assault allegation against him and the New York Times’ publication of an email Hegseth’s mother wrote him in 2018 calling him an “abuser of women.”
