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Defense pick Peter Hegseth paid accuser to protect his career, his lawyer confirms
Pete Hegseth, seen here on Dec. 31, 2021, paid a woman to settle her accusation of sexual assault against him, his lawyer says.
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Brett Carlsen/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
An attorney for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, confirmed to NPR that Hegseth had paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault in order to prevent her from filing a lawsuit that could damage his career.
Hegseth, 44, has denied the woman’s allegations. The incident took place in 2017.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, had said in a statement, Hegseth reached a settlement with his accuser, including paying her an unknown amount of money in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement. This arrangement was intended to stop her from filing a lawsuit and to protect Hegseth’s position at Fox News, the Post reported.
Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, told NPR on Monday that the information attributed to him was accurate, which first reported news of the settlement. According to the Post article, a friend of the woman had shared information about the incident in a memo sent to the Trump transition team last week. NPR has not independently confirmed the contents of the memo.
No charges were filed, Trump team says
“President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration,” Trump Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement to NPR.
Hegseth’s nomination will go forward, Cheung said.
“Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed,” he said. “We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
Trump has himself been convicted of falsifying business records connected to hush money payments, to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, a case he claims is politically motivated.
What is Hegseth accused of?
In 2017, Hegseth was named in an investigation by the Monterey Police Department concerning a reported sexual assault at a golf resort in California. According to a statement from city officials, Hegseth acknowledges having sexual intercourse with the woman but insists it was consensual.
The incident occurred in the early hours of Oct. 8 at 1 Old Golf Course Road, which is the address of Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa. Police say the woman reported an injury to her right thigh. Their news release does not disclose the alleged victim’s name or age; however, she was 30 at the time and worked for the California Federation of Republican Women, assisting with logistics while Hegseth spoke at their conference.
She was staying at the hotel with her husband.
Hegseth’s relationship status at the time was complicated: in 2017, his second wife filed for a divorce “around the same time” he and his current wife had a baby, according to The Washington Examiner.
In his statement to the Post, Parlatore says that Hegseth had been drinking at the hotel bar and was intoxicated when he went to his hotel room with the woman. According to the Post, the memo from the woman’s friend said that the woman took Hegseth to the room after being informed that he was being a nuisance to other women. A few days later, she contacted the police to report a sexual assault.
After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced “an immediate horror storm” had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.
The incident in Monterey occurred about a year after Fox News settled with former Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson for $20 million over her sexual harassment claims against the network’s former chairman, Roger Ailes. Between early 2017 and 2020, the network experienced several high-profile departures linked to misconduct, including hosts Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling, Washington correspondent James Rosen and news host Ed Henry.
Hegseth is known for his TV work, and loyalty to Trump
When Hegseth was nominated last week, his selection seemingly surprised several Republican lawmakers; as NPR reported, his name was not on the known shortlist of potential nominees. But it continued a pattern of Trump’s placing loyalists and Fox News personalities in prominent positions.
Trump’s selection has put Hegseth, who lives in Tennessee with his wife and seven children, under intense scrutiny.
Prominent Democrats and military experts have raised questions that range from the meaning of his tattoos and political ethos to whether Hegseth is qualified to oversee the country’s largest employer. The Defense Department has “more than 2.1 million Military Service members and over 770 thousand civilian employees,” according to a 2020 fiscal report.
Hegseth is a Minnesota native who served as an officer in the Army National Guard, leaving service as a major in 2021 after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to his official biography. He earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University in 2013.
Those questioning Hegseth’s qualifications include Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
“I have great respect for anyone who has served our nation in the U.S. Armed Forces. However, not everyone who has worn the uniform is qualified to lead the Department of Defense,” McCollum said in a statement, adding that she is concerned that Hegseth “is ill-prepared to serve as Secretary of Defense.”
Military has its own sexual assault issues
If confirmed, Hegseth would lead a U.S. military that has been trying to reduce the alarming rates of sexual assaults from military academies to overseas deployments.
In a notable shift, the Defense Department implemented a change earlier this year that grants independent military lawyers the authority to handle sexual assault cases,
removing these matters from the chains of command of either the accused or the victim.
This change to the military justice system was backed by the current defense secretary Lloyd Austin.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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