Above photo: Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be defense secretary, shows a U.S. flag lining on the inside of his suit coat as he arrives for a meeting with Sen. Bill Cassidy on Capitol Hill, Dec. 11, 2024, in Washington. Mark Schiefelbein/AP.
Why I will Protest the Nomination of Fox News commentator and Trump’s Buddy Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense.
On January 14 at 9:30am, the Fox News commentator and Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth is scheduled to be questioned by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in a confirmation hearing on President-elect Trump’s nomination for him to be Secretary of Defense.
I, along with many other women and men military veterans, will be at the hearing to strongly protest Hegseth’s nomination and demand that the Senate refuse to send the nomination forward for a vote of the entire Senate.
I am an unlikely protester. I served 29 years in the US Army and Army Reserves. I retired as a Colonel. I was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. I resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.
Sexual Assault Allegations
I will protest lackluster Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth’s nomination on several points, but my primary concern is his physical and psychological violence toward women.
I am 78 years old. I joined the Army in 1967 when less than 1 percent of US military forces were women. Now, 17.5 percent of U.S. military forces are women.
Sexual assault in the military is rampant and Hegseth has a history of sexual violence toward women. He secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017.
Even Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, in 2018, during Hegseth’s divorce proceedings from his second wife, strongly criticized his treatment of women. In an email obtained by The New York Times, Hegseth’s mother wrote:
“You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and 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 … It’s time for a someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women…As a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out. 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.”
Tim Palatore, Hegseth’s attorney, has revealed that the woman who made the allegations was paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 as part of a confidential settlement to head off the threat of what he described as a baseless lawsuit.
A 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired — one that is at odds with Hegseth’s version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth.
Considering the horrific history of sexual assault in the military, Hegseth’s payoff to someone who has accused him of sexual assault must disqualify Hegseth from confirmation as Secretary of Defense.
With sexual assault in the military a continuing problem for women…and for men, there is no way that a person who has been involved in even allegations of sexual assault should be Secretary of Defense …or President, for that matter, but that’s another issue for evangelical Christians, Catholics and pious of other religious conservatives who voted for Trump to explain to their daughters.
The number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military is likely two to four times higher than government estimates, according to a study from Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. “During and beyond the 20 years of the post-9/11 wars, independent data suggest that actual sexual assault prevalence is two to four times higher than DoD estimations — 75,569 cases in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023,” the authors wrote in the report, which was released August 14, 2024.
The Costs of War Project report comes a year after a Pentagon report found that reports of sexual assault at the nation’s three military academies rose more than 18% from 2021 to 2022, hitting a new high.
A 2016 Department of Veterans Affairs study of over 20,000 post-9/11 Veterans and service members found that 41.5 percent of women and 4 percent of men experienced some form of sexual trauma while serving. One in three women and one in 50 men have reported military sexual trauma during VA health care screenings.
And finally, if the previous concern about on sexual assault allegations isn’t enough to torpedo Hegseth’s nomination, his statements on women’s role in the military should sink his nomination.
Hegseth’s Negative View of the Role of Women in the Military
In a podcast, Hegseth, said the military “should not have women in combat roles” and that “men in those positions are more capable.” In the podcast he said that female soldiers “shouldn’t be in my infantry battalion.”
U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, a former Army National Guard member and a Purple Heart recipient, said Hegseth was “dangerous, plain and simple. Duckworth one of the first women in the Army to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She lost both of her legs and partial use of her right arm in 2004 after a rocket-propelled grenade struck her helicopter. “Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight? I’m pretty sure I was in combat when that happened,” she told CNN. “It just shows how out of touch he is with the nature of modern warfare if he thinks that we can keep women behind some sort of imaginary line, which is not the way warfare is today.”
Additionally, Senator Duckworth added, “It’s frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he’s paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him … This is not the kind of person you want to lead the Department of Defense.”
If sexual assault issues and his negative view of women’s role in the military do not convince a Senate’s Armed Services committee that Hegseth’s nomination should not go forward, then the mismanagement of funds of tiny organizations compared to the massive Department of Defense budget should take him out of consideration for the extraordinary position of Secretary of Defense.
Mismanagement of Tiny Organizations Compared to the Massive Department of Defense
In the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct while in the organizations, Hegseth was forced to resign from the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
Hegseth received a six-figure severance payment and signed a non-disclosure agreement in 2016 when he exited the organization Concerned Veterans of America. The payment came amid allegations of repeated incidents of intoxication, sexual impropriety and financial mismanagement, as well as dissension among its leaders over Hegseth’s foreign policy views.
Prior to joining Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth faced allegations of financial mismanagement from Vets for Freedom (VFF) where he worked from 2007 to 2010.
Donors were concerned their money was being wasted and arranged for VFF to be merged with another organization, Military Families United, which took over most of its management. Revenue at VFF plummeted by 2010 and by 2011, the organization’s revenue was listed as $22,000. Hegseth joined Concerned Veterans for America the following year.
Margaret Hoover, host of the PBS program “Firing Line” and a former adviser to Vets for Freedom, said in an interview on CNN that Hegseth had managed the organization “very poorly.” Hoover expressed doubt about his ability to run the sprawling Defense Department when he had struggled with a staff of less than 10 people, and a budget of under $10 million.
Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves. She retired as a Colonel with many awards including the Legion of Merit. She also served as a U.S. diplomat in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia and received the Award for Heroism for the evacuation of the U.S. and international community from the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1997. She resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”