Pentagon officials speaking on condition of anonymity are claiming that should Pete Hegseth be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he will demolish the efforts by the Department of Defense to stamp out sexual assault. According to Politico, “Officials fear that Hegseth, whose nomination had already caused controversy due to his opposition to women serving in combat, could also hurt efforts to recruit women into the military.”
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“When you have a leader that has already been credibly accused of sexual assault and then already has other signals in his background that he’s not concerned about the contributions that women can make to national security, it could create bad signals up and down the chain of command,” said one Defense Department official, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I imagine there is already profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform.”
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“To have someone who now at least has had a police investigation and paid a victim, enforced a [nondisclosure agreement] regarding a sexual assault sends a horrific message,” said a former DOD official. “It likely means that any progress the department has made regarding sexual assault, sexual harassment is going to be at best, repealed, if not completely eliminated.”
Let’s stop the tape for a moment. Hegseth was not “credibly accused of sexual assault.” As he said, police investigated the incident, and there were no grounds to charge him.
A newly released police report detailed a 2017 alleged sexual assault by Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely clear, and that’s where I’m going to leave it,” Hegseth said. pic.twitter.com/2drvimh1T8
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) November 22, 2024
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He admits to having had a consensual roll in the hay that ended up in him entering into a monetary settlement and a nondisclosure agreement. It is not nefarious to pay a settlement to make an allegation go away if you think that allegation will torpedo your career. The incident took place in 2017, at the height of the so-called “Me Too” movement, where a mere accusation was enough to render a man unemployable.
The police report is available at the end of the story, I encourage you to read it as it will become a big deal in January.
None of this is to justify Hegseth’s actions, only to point out that when the alleged victim does not assist a police investigation, it is hard to get to credibly accused. Given that witnesses and hotel video show no evidence of inebriation or force, we’re left with a situation that is certainly tawdry but hardly criminal. For instance, these are the text messages sent by the complainant to her husband, who was in the same hotel as the event after the incident happened. “TBD” are the initials of someone who had previously tried to have sex with her.
The funniest part of the police report on the (completely laughable) allegation against Pete Hegseth is the woman referring to Hegseth is “TDB lite” and “TDB mini” then “TDB tooooooooool” in texts to her husband the night of the incident. oof, that hurts. pic.twitter.com/sXpoS2aav4
— Jennifer Van Laar (@jenvanlaar) November 22, 2024
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If this incident meets the standard of being “credibly accused” inside of DOD, they have an immense problem that makes any commander or supervisor guilty by the mere fact of being accused.
The easy solution to prevent an outbreak of problems like this in DOD is for men and women to not hook up in hotel bars and have casual sex while a spouse and children are in the same hotel. Sounds easy enough to me.
If women feel threatened because Hegseth has expressed the correct and historical opinion that women do not belong in direct combat with the enemy, that is their problem, and they should look for other employment. Bootstrapping the view that has dominated civilized cultures since people could write into a “hostile work environment” complaint is just silly.
So what provokes a fairly senior official to take a swipe at what is probably the new Secretary of Defense with utterly bullsh** allegations? And by bullsh**, I mean allegations unlikely to derail Hegseth’s nomination. Let’s read more.
During the Biden administration, the Pentagon set up a 90-day independent review board to address sexual assault, which removed the job of trying sex crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse from military commanders and put them in the hands of specialist military lawyers. The military has also launched an effort to hire thousands of psychologists to help deal with sexual assault.
“The military has come a long way to provide spaces for victims to be able to see some change and feel empowered,” said a second former DOD official. “Military sexual trauma is now something that is universally recognized where it wasn’t in previous decades.”
Katherine Kuzminski, director of the Military, Veterans, and Society program at the Center for a New American Security, a left-leaning think tank, pointed out that women at the Pentagon are concerned over a number of policies that will be under fire in the Trump administration. They include rules around women serving in combat and the litany of diversity programs within the department
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But the effort to build the so-called Integrated Primary Prevention Workforce to serve at bases in the United States and around the world is already challenged by commanders who want to move their people into combat jobs. And there are still some in the military branches who dismiss sexual assault as a real problem.
“The Army is doing OK on hiring but isn’t close to full up,” the first DOD official said. “Those are new billets and there is constant pressure not to hire people or shift resources. Commanders want to do things that aren’t prevention work.”
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I suspect the answer is here: “is already challenged by commanders who want to move their people into combat jobs.”
They know Hegseth is hostile toward DEI programs. They anticipate he will be hostile to the rape-industrial complex that has metastasized inside the Armed Forces to the extent that it is widely known that male supervisors are reluctant to impose discipline on female subordinates because they will fall victim to the “credibly accused” trap and their careers will be over.
This complaint is a brushback pitch aimed at Hegseth. The subtext is clear, “if you cut our programs it is because you are a sexual predator who wants to victimize women.”
Whatever Hegseth’s shortcomings, this kind of crap makes me totally support his nomination.
Megyn Kelly’s Report
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Read the Police Report
Hegseth Police Report by Nick Pope
