Pete Hegseth – a former Fox News host and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense – has recently been accused by his own mother of abusing women and by previous coworkers of drinking on the job and sexually pursuing female colleagues. Hegseth had also been previously accused of paying off a woman who accused him of raping her while they attended a Republican conference in 2017.

Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, wrote him an email in 2018 that said, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…. I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

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While Penelope Hegseth’s email was reported on by The New York Times, she told the publication that she “immediately” sent a follow-up email to her son apologizing for what she had written and that she wrote the original email “in anger, with emotion” while he and his then-wife were going through “a very difficult divorce.”

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Samantha Hegseth filed for divorce after Pete Hegseth impregnated his co-worker, Jennifer Rauchet, an executive producer at Fox News. Pete Hegseth’s first wife also filed for divorce from him due to his infidelity. Pete Hegseth is a self-described Christian with “conservative family values.”

“For you to try to label her as ‘unstable’ for your own advantage is despicable and abusive. Is there any sense of decency left in you?” Penelope Hegseth wrote her son. “She did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand. Neither did [your first wife].”

Pete Hegseth’s co-workers also complained about his behavior while he served as president of the nonprofit organization Concerned Veterans for America (C.V.A.) from 2013 and 2016.

In a seven-page whistleblower report compiled by several former C.V.A. employees and recently uncovered the The New Yorker, Hegseth was repeatedly intoxicated during various work events and had to be carried out of events due to his inability to walk while drunk.

During another occasion, a drunken Hegseth had to be restrained so he wouldn’t join the dancers onstage at a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also accused him and other members of his management team of sexually pursuing female co-workers at C.V.A. Hegseth, who was married at the time, and his pursuing colleagues reportedly divided their female coworkers into two groups: the “party girls” and the “not-party girls.”

The report also accused him of drunkenly chanting “Kill all Muslims” at a bar.

These allegations follow recent reports that Hegseth paid an unidentified woman who accused him of rape so that she would sign a nondisclosure agreement and agree not to file a lawsuit that might have threatened his employment at Fox News.

The woman in question accused Hegseth of raping her while they attended a 2017 Republican conference. The two had been drinking, but Hegseth claimed that their encounter was consensual. Local prosecutors never brought charges against Hegseth because, they said, they didn’t have enough evidence to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

It remains unclear if all of the above allegations will endanger Hegseth’s Senate confirmation to be appointed as secretary of defense.

Hegseth believes that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles in the military and spent his college days at Princeton campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights.

As publisher of the conservative magazine The Princeton Tory in the early 2000s, he oversaw a team that railed against the “homosexual lifestyle,” and in one 2002 issue, argued that “The movement to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriages is strong and must be vigorously opposed… their lifestyle deserves absolutely no special legal status.” 

In that same issue, Hegseth wrote in his “Notes from the Publisher” that the “glorification of diversity” is “a problem that plagues most of American academia today.” He said Western ideas “deserve priority over other areas of study” because the fact that the United States is a global superpower “demonstrates the[ir] enduring strength.”

Another slammed the New York Times for its decision to start covering same-sex marriage announcements, calling it “dangerous” because it could inspire people to want to marry siblings, children, or dogs.

The October 2002 issue criticized LGBTQ+ rights protests, declaring that “boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.”

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