Fox host Pete Hegseth – Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense – has repeatedly argued women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles due to the military’s problems with sexual assault – yet his lawyer recently confirmed he, himself, paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assaulting her at a California conference in 2017.

A recent statement from Hegseth’s attorney confirmed that the Fox News host “paid the complainant as part of a civil confidential settlement agreement and maintains his innocence.”

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Fox & Friends’ Pete Hegseth made a fan of Trump by denouncing “socially correct garbage.” He also thinks women shouldn’t be in combat roles.

Hegseth’s lawyer has argued the encounter was consensual and that the accuser is “trying to squeeze Mr. Hegseth for money.”

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Nevertheless, Hegseth claimed in a 2016 speech that sexual assault in the military was a major concern of his.

“We shouldn’t be having military sexual assault. Everybody understands that. We need to be taking care of it,” he said. “You think you bring women into infantry, different units, you might exacerbate that a little bit? I’m not saying that’s anybody’s fault, but that’s an unintended consequence of that priority also.”

Three years earlier, he posited the same idea while speaking to Fox host Megyn Kelly, who questioned the ethics of holding women back from advancing in the military because “some bad apples are sexually assaulting them.”

Hegseth responded that “the end state of the military is not equality” but rather “the ability to fight and win wars.”

He doubled down on this position on women in combat just last week, although this time he more or less abandoned the guise of wanting to protect women.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he asserted in a recent CNN interview. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated…. We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. But our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where, traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.”

Hegseth’s stance has led several woman veterans to voice concerns, including Elisa Smithers, who served in Iraq in 2005 when a ban on women in combat was still in place.

Smithers said she essentially served in combat unofficially as a “female searcher” with the National Guard. But she later did not have access to the same benefits afforded to male combat veterans by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

“They will still need these women in these roles,” Smithers told CNN. “So, we’ll go back to this, like, pseudo attaching them to the unit. And then this perception by the men that, you know, the women are not in combat roles.”

Army veteran Elizabeth Beggs added that women are more than capable and that they have “been in combat since the beginning of history.”

“Not all women are capable – just like not all men are capable,” she said.

Another veteran and military sexual assault survivor, who chose to remain anonymous, warned that Hegseth’s attitude could exacerbate the culture of sexual assault he claims to want to fight.

“Whenever a man does not see a woman as an equal, that’s where you’re going to see that kind of culture continuously get worse,” she said. “It’s going to hurt the military force.”

Navy Veteran Wendy Coop said Hegseth could also be opening a dangerous floodgate.

“We have to look at the individual and stop saying your gender determines your ability to serve in the military,” Coop said. “And then what happens is that people say, ‘oh, well, they don’t belong in the military?’ They also don’t belong in the police force. They also don’t belong as firefighters. They don’t belong in the Secret Service.”

Hegseth, 44, served as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a member of the Minnesota National Guard. He joined Fox News in 2015 and hosts the network’s Fox & Friends Weekend program, where Trump has been a frequent guest.

In addition to purging women from combat, he also said he wants to “get DEI and [critical race theory] out of the military academy so you’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.”

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