President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, leaves the Russell Senate Office Building on November 21, 2024 in Washington, DC.
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Pete HegsethAn already perplexing choice by the president-elect Donald Trump to lead The PentagonFacing the new Newspaper report Explaining his alleged alcohol abuse, Sexual improprietyand mismanagement while running two veterans’ nonprofit groups.
The report was published late Sunday night The New YorkerCiting a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint written in 2015, Hegseth says he was repeatedly drunk “to the point of carrying out organizational events” while serving as president of Concerned Veterans of America.
“At one point, Hegseth had to be drunkenly restrained from joining the dancers on stage at the Louisiana strip club he had brought his troupe to,” The New Yorker reported, citing a whistleblower report the magazine said. A number of ex-CVA employees and senior management of the group were sent.
“Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the firm’s female staff, dividing them into two groups — ‘party girls’ and ‘non-party girls,'” wrote The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.
CNBC has not seen the whistleblower report, nor the separate letter of complaint detailed by the magazine.
Hegseth later had to step down as CVA president in 2016 because of “concerns about his misconduct and alcohol abuse at work,” the magazine said, citing three sources of knowledge, one of whom had contributed to the whistleblower. Report.
CNBC previously requested comment from Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, who declined to comment to NBC News.
Parlatore cited a statement to New Yorker magazine that said it came from a person identified by the lawyer as an adviser to Hegseth.
“We are not going to comment on the outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s,” the statement said. “Get back to us when you try your first attempt at real journalism.”
Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC on The New Yorker article.
Trump tapped Hegseth, a decorated US military veteran who most recently worked as a Fox News anchor, to be the next secretary of the Defense Department in November.
Her proposed nomination immediately came under fire after it was revealed that police in Monterey, California, had investigated Hegseth for sexually assaulting a woman in October 2017 at a hotel where the Republican Women’s Convention was being held.
Hegseth, who told police he had consensual sex with the woman, was not criminally charged after that investigation.
He told reporters on Capitol Hill on Nov. 21: “As far as the media is concerned, I’ll put it very simply, the matter has been thoroughly investigated and I’ve been completely cleared, and I’ll leave it at that.”
At the time of the 2017 incident, Hegseth was in the midst of divorcing his second wife. Two months before the alleged assault, his current wife, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, had given birth to her and Hegseth’s child.
The Monterey County district attorney declined to file criminal charges against Hegseth in January 2018 in a statement in late November because “none of the charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Several years later, Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed amount of money “as part of a civil confidentiality settlement and maintains his innocence,” Perlatore said in mid-November.
Hegseth’s attorney told NBC News at the time that Hegseth “ultimately decided to enter into a settlement for a significantly reduced amount” “at the height of the MeToo movement.”
A police report on the sexual assault investigation, made public in November, says investigators spoke with hotel workers who saw Hegseth and the accused in the pool after two separate guests complained of a loud disturbance.
The worker “stated Hegseth was highly intoxicated,” and the woman he was with “had not been drinking … and was very coherent,” the police report said.
However, the woman later told police she could not remember what happened when she went to Hegseth’s room with him.
“Since she cannot remember most of the events of the night, she believes something may have slipped into her drink,” police wrote in their report.
