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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.
The fans see the games, the crowds, the food and the beer. But behind every World Cup watch party is a team working long before kickoff and well after the final whistle. We go behind the scenes at a beer hall in Brooklyn to see what it takes to serve a room full of soccer fans on game day.
Members of the group Patriot Front ride the subway as a commuter looks on, in Washington, D.C., on July 4.
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Cheney Orr/Reuters
The sight of hundreds of masked men roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., on July Fourth weekend, wearing khakis, blue shirts and uniform patches, was chilling to some of the city’s residents.
For many Americans, it was the first they heard about Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization that was born out of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. A now-viral Reuters photo prompted reflections on the experience of a lone African American woman who was photographed in a Metro subway car, surrounded by white supremacists.
The planned demonstration of force was timed to bring a fringe group of extremists into public view as the nation marked 250 years of its independence. Indeed, the stunt succeeded in earning the group media coverage across mainstream outlets, amplifying its brand and potential to reach new recruits. On this occasion, the members refrained from engaging in violence and property damage, projecting an image of law-abiding, orderly activism.
But those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see.
“That is not who they are in private,” said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.”
Patriot Front’s history of violence and property damage
Kamdang’s organization sued members of Patriot Front for vandalizing a public mural dedicated to the tennis legend and Black activist Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., in 2021. Ashe, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985, was born in Richmond and his legacy is a continuing source of pride to members of that community.
“A couple of Patriot Front members showed up under cover of night and vandalized the mural,” Kamdang said. “They painted white stencils all over. … They literally tried to whitewash him and they put their symbols of hate all over — their stencils, their slogans. And all the while they were caught on video. And that video leaked using some of the most horrible language that you can imagine.”
In many jurisdictions, law enforcement can seek additional hate crime charges or sentencing enhancements in cases where illegal acts appear to have been motivated by racial bias. But in this case, Kamdang said, Patriot Front members faced no criminal charges and their identities were only revealed when online activists later infiltrated the group and leaked internal records.
In another civil case, Patriot Front was ordered to pay almost $2.76 million to an African American musician whom they assaulted in Boston in 2022, at another July flash rally they staged. Despite a police detective concluding that the attack “appeared to be more likely than not motivated in whole or in part by Anti-Black bias,” nobody was criminally prosecuted.
Neo-Nazi ideology in patriotic colors
In 2020, Kristofer Goldsmith said that a fellow veteran invited him to partner up on infiltrating Patriot Front. Goldsmith, who later established the Task Force Butler Institute to recruit Army veterans to counter fascist groups through open source online research, was not closely familiar with the group at the time.
“Frankly, when my friend used the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ I thought he was using hyperbole,” Goldsmith said. “It wasn’t until I saw them doing things like debating the merits of national socialism versus fascism versus monarchy that I truly understood that neo-Nazi was not hyperbole, that these people actually praise Hitler. … These people have dedicated their lives to promoting white nationalist, fascist and genocidal ideology.”
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was formerly a leader of a group called Vanguard America, which was prominent in planning and a presence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. That gathering, the largest public white nationalist event in generations, turned fatal when one extremist drove a car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer. Ultimately, Goldsmith said that rally further smeared public perception of the white nationalist movement as violent and un-American — lessons that Rousseau took to heart.
“Rousseau needed to rebrand Vanguard America,” Goldsmith said. “So he basically stole all of its assets, its digital assets … and made it into Patriot Front and literally painted everything in red, white and blue so that it would be more attractive.”
The group has also shown up at natural disaster sites, namely in Central Texas last summer, ostensibly to assist local residents. Goldsmith said these missions and the group’s outward aesthetic are meant to project an idea of patriotism and service. He said the group maintains a strict code of conduct. Among other things, they do not display swastikas or give Hitler salutes in public.
“The goal of their propaganda, of their public actions like this, is to beat MAGA and conservatives and Republicans into defending them and to saying, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with this group. They clearly love America,’” he said.
Patriot Front described as a “cult” and a “pyramid scheme”
The show of force in D.C. has raised questions about the group’s financing, and whether members’ travel was sponsored by outside individuals or groups. In fact, Goldsmith and Kamdang said that members of Patriot Front appear almost entirely to shoulder the cost of operations and Rousseau’s lifestyle. They said it’s most likely that those who traveled to D.C. had to cover their costs themselves.
“All of them funnel resources to the top,” Kamdang explained about the group’s general financial structure. “In order to be a Patriot Front member, you have to engage in acts of what they call ‘activism.’ And usually what that means is vandalism: putting up banners, spreading the slogans of hate all over the country. And in order to do that, they will have stickers, stencils, branding. All of that has to be approved from the top down, and all of it has to be purchased from the top down. So all the members who do this multiple times a month send cash to Thomas Rousseau for essentially stickers and stencils.”
Goldsmith said that from his time infiltrating the group, the costs could run up to hundreds of dollars a month per member. Kamdang, who said that attorneys are actively seeking to collect judgment in the settlement over the Arthur Ashe mural, noted that Rousseau appears not to hold any additional paying jobs.
“This seems to be what he’s doing full time,” Kamdang said. “So he appears to be being propped up full time by his members.”
Goldsmith likened the financial operation to a pyramid scheme. But he said even more substantial than the financial investment that Patriot Front members are required to make to retain membership is the control they give up over their time and personal choices.
“I describe it as a cult, not to be offensive, but because it is like Rousseau needs to have complete control of all of his members,” Goldsmith said. “[The group] requires its members to give up all of their lives, all of their relationships. All of their priorities in life need to be focused towards growing the organization or continuing the organization [and] enriching its leadership. So, it’s costly.”
NPR reached out to Patriot Front for comment. The group did not respond by deadline.
Goldsmith also noted that Rousseau often gives lengthy speeches that members are expected to listen to, via online platforms.
To Kamdang, the publicity that Patriot Front earned through the group’s D.C. stunt presents a danger: It amplified a presentation of the group that was deliberately crafted to make Patriot Front appear orderly and patriotic.
“I think the reason why it got a lot of attention is because Patriot Front was very careful in their language,” he said. “They try to mask their replacement theory, the white supremacy and in ‘Americana’ terms and patriotism. But that is not who these guys are.”
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
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