Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is currently President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense, once drunkenly shouted “kill all Muslims!” in the middle of a bar while serving as the president of a veterans’ group, The New Yorker reports.
This is just one of many jaw-dropping allegations included in Jane Mayer’s deep-dive investigation into Hegseth’s unprofessional and lewd behavior while leading two separate non-profit advocacy organizations, which includes claims of constant intoxication, financial mismanagement and inappropriate sexual conduct that prompted both groups to eventually boot him from leadership.
Additionally, the New Yorker story reveals more details about the alleged 2017 sexual assault that has threatened to derail Hegseth’s nomination, including the ex-Fox star’s attempts to frame his accuser as a “serial fabricator of sexual-assault charges” despite law enforcement saying that claim is “spurious” and not supported by evidence.
Much of the new revelations in Mayer’s piece center on a whistleblower’s report on Hegseth’s tenure as the chief of Concerned Veterans for America, which lasted from 2013 to 2016. According to the previously undisclosed report, which was compiled by several CVA employees and sent to the group’s management in 2015, Hegseth’s repeated drunken behavior had become an embarrassment to the rest of the staff.
On top of that, he used his position to essentially prey on young female staffers, dividing them into two groups — the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” The whistleblower report further claimed that CVA had become a hostile workplace, especially for women, with allegations that attempted sexual assaults and harassment had largely been ignored.
Meanwhile, in a separate letter of complaint to CVA management, one former employee “described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!’”
While much of the article centers on Hegseth’s boorish behavior and intoxication while leading CVA and a small nonprofit called Vets for Freedom, which has been described as an “AsroTurf” group backed by conservative billionaires, it also highlighted allegations that Hegseth grossly mismanaged the finances of both organizations.
“V.F.F. soon ran up enormous debt, and financial records indicate that, by the end of 2008, it was unable to pay its creditors,” Mayer noted. “The group’s primary donors became concerned that their money was being wasted on inappropriate expenses, including rumors of parties that ‘could politely be called trysts,’ as the former associate of the group put it. The early sympathizer said, ‘I was not the first to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.’”
Eventually, Hegseth was phased out as head of VFF after he admitted to donors in 2009 that the group had only $1,000 in the bank but owed $434,833 in unpaid bills. It was Hegseth’s poor management of the organization that led some of the group’s former advisers to express “grave concerns” about his ability to lead a department as large as the Pentagon.
“I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors,” conservative political commentator and ex-VFF advisor Margaret Hoover told CNN recently. “The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.”
The whistleblower report about Hegseth’s tenure at CVA, meanwhile, alleges that Hegseth was repeatedly intoxicated at many of the organization’s official events. “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” one of the whistleblowers told the New Yorker, adding: “When those of us who worked at C.V.A. heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell No!’”
While the complaint notes that CVA eventually instituted a “no alcohol” policy at its events in October 2014 due to the public behavior of Hegseth and other managers, Hegseth lifted the policy the following month. The night before the midterm elections that year, he got so inebriated while out with three young female staffers that it took two male staff members to carry him up into a hotel room after he was “completely passed out” in a van and “slumped over” a female employee.
Later that month, during a trip to Louisiana to assist with a Senate runoff race, Hegseth took his team to a strip club, where according to the report “he was so drunk he tried to get on the stage and dance with the strippers.”
A female staffer who helped restrain Hegseth at the strip club, meanwhile, alleged in the report that another male staff member tried to sexually assault her that night. She claimed that her CVA manager was dismissive and argued the male staffer wasn’t responsible for his actions due to his drunkenness. The report states that she eventually received a settlement after filing a formal complaint and hiring outside counsel.
According to the New Yorker, Hegseth ultimately resigned in 2016 under pressure from his post as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America.
As for the allegation that Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman at a California hotel in 2017, eventually resulting in him secretly paying off the accuser in 2020 to avoid a lawsuit, Hegseth and his lawyer Tim Parlatore told Mayer that “sources” told him the Monterrey police didn’t charge Hegseth because they learned “his accuser had previously brought a false rape charge against someone else, thus undermining her credibility.”
According to Mayer, though, the Monterey County District Attorney’s office told her Parlatore’s “claim is spurious” and that the “office had no such evidence” about additional false sexual assault charges levied by the accuser.
