Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, was pushed out as the head of two veterans’ advocacy organizations amid internal allegations of mismanagement and personal misconduct, The New Yorker reported Sunday.
A whistleblower report obtained by the magazine alleged that, during his time leading one of those nonprofit advocacy groups, Hegseth was repeatedly intoxicated at work events and gatherings with staff. It also alleges that he sexually pursued female staffers, and that the organization ignored another staffer’s alleged sexual misconduct.
The report is the latest scrutiny into Hegseth, a veteran and former Fox News host with no prior government experience, ahead of what’s expected to be a tough Senate confirmation process. It comes on the heels of reports detailing a sexual assault allegation from 2017, which Hegseth has denied and in which no charges were filed.
Asked by CNN for comment about the magazine’s reporting, a Hegseth adviser said, “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through the New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.” Hegseth’s team had provided The New Yorker with an identical statement.
The seven-page whistleblower report was compiled by former employees of Concerned Veterans for America, the advocacy group where Hegseth was president from 2013 to 2016, and sent to its senior management in February 2015, The New Yorker reported. The magazine did not name the employees, and CNN has not independently reviewed the report.
The report, according to The New Yorker, alleges that Hegseth had to be restrained from joining the dancers on stage at a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team — and that the organization ignored a female employee’s allegation that another member of Hegseth’s staff attempted to sexually assault her at that strip club.
It claims that his management team “sexually pursued” employees and divided the organization’s female staffers into two groups — “party girls” and “not party girls,” The New Yorker reported.
In a separate complaint, which The New Yorker reported was emailed by a different employee to Hegseth’s successor as head of Concerned Veterans for America in late 2015, the employee alleged that while on a work trip to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Hegseth and someone traveling with the group’s Defend Freedom Tour closed down a hotel bar and yelled multiple times, “Kill all Muslims!”
In the letter, the staffer criticized Hegseth’s “despicable behavior” and said it “embarrassed the entire organization.” The staffer also wrote about another incident where Hegseth “passed out” in the back of a party bus and then urinated in front of a hotel where the organization’s team was staying, according to the magazine.
The New Yorker reported that when reached for comment, the author of the letter, who was not named by the magazine, said: “If you print that, I will deny I wrote it.”
Hegseth’s time running Concerned Veterans for America came after an earlier, controversial tenure leading Vets for Freedom, a nonprofit backed by Republican billionaire megadonors.
A former associate of the group, the magazine reported, said the group’s donors became concerned about money being wasted on rumored parties that “could politely be called trysts,” and other inappropriate expenses. With the group mired in more than $500,000 in debt by early 2009, donors chose to wind it down and transfer most of its management to another veterans’ group. Hegseth’s role was reduced, and he ultimately departed years later.
Margaret Hoover, a CNN political commentator who was an adviser to Vets for Freedom between 2008 and 2010, told CNN’s Erin Burnett last month that Hegseth ran the organization “very poorly” and lost donors’ confidence. She said the organization had less than 10 employees and a budget of less than $10 million.
“And he couldn’t do that properly,” Hoover said, raising questions about his ability to lead the Defense Department. “I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an $857 billion budget, and 3 million individuals, based on what I saw in those years.”
CNN previously reported that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her in the early morning hours of October 8, 2017, in Monterey, California, where Hegseth had a speaking engagement the night before. The accuser told police that Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone and then sexually assaulted her.
The Monterey County district attorney told CNN last month said that her office declined to file charges against Hegseth in January 2018 because “no charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” She declined to comment further. Hegseth insists that the encounter with the unnamed woman was consensual.
Years later, Hegseth paid the accuser in a settlement agreement that included a confidentiality clause, his attorney Timothy Parlatore told CNN in a statement last month. Parlatore said Hegseth settled because it was during the “Me Too” movement and he didn’t want to lose his job at Fox News if the accusation became public. The statement did not share how much the accuser was paid as part of the settlement, although Parlatore said it was “a significantly reduced amount.”
Hegseth’s alleged conduct toward women came under further scrutiny over the weekend, when The New York Times reported that his mother sent an email to her son in 2018 that sharply criticized his treatment of women.
Penelope Hegseth told her son in the email that there are “many” women whom he has “abused in some way” and encouraged him to “get some help,” according to the email published by The Times.
According to The Times’ report, Penelope Hegseth wrote, “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.”
Penelope Hegseth on Friday told The New York Times that she wrote the email “in anger, with emotion” and that she had immediately apologized in a separate email. She went on to defend her son, saying her own characterization of his treatment of women in the 2018 email “has never been true.”
CNN’s Alayna Treene contributed to this report.