Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate for defense secretary, has a sordid, drunken history of mismanaging veterans organizations that left staff “disgusted” by his allegedly lecherous behavior, according to a report.
The New Yorker obtained records from two nonprofit advocacy groups Hegseth led—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—that describe financial mismanagement, inappropriate sexual advances and—at one point—Hegseth drunkenly yelling “Kill all Muslims!” at a bar while on an official tour in Ohio.
Both groups eventually forced Hegseth to step down, the magazine reported. A lawyer for Hegseth dismissed the allegations as “outlandish claims” and attributed them to “a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate.”
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Hegseth’s potential nomination was already facing questions about a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her in a hotel room after an event in 2017. He denies her claims and says the incident was consensual.
A whistleblower report about Hegseth’s time leading Concerned Veterans for America from 2013 to 2016, The New Yorker wrote, said he was repeatedly drunk while on the clock, sometimes needing to be carried out of official events.
It further alleged that Hegseth, who was married to his second wife at the time, and other members of the group’s management team sexually pursued their female employees, informally dividing them into two camps they described as “party girls” and “not party girls.”
The whistleblower report claims that while Hegseth was its leader, the organization ignored staff’s concerns about the workplace, including an allegation by an employee that another staffer tried to sexually assault her at a Louisiana strip club. She was paid a settlement and signed an NDA, but the report says she experienced reprisal in the workplace thereafter, encouraging a toxic environment.
The alleged victim of the attempted assault also separately had to restrain Hegseth at one point in the strip club because “he was so drunk he tried to get on the stage and dance with the strippers,” the whistleblower complaint reportedly says.
Another female staffer, The New Yorker wrote, was said to have been sexually harassed by a colleague, but was afraid to make a complaint “because she desperately needs her job.”
The report was compiled by multiple former employees and sent to the group’s senior management in 2015.
A separate letter of complaint sent to Concerned Veterans for America in 2015, and which The New Yorker also reported on, reveals a shocking picture of Hegseth at his alleged surly, drunken worst: while at a bar in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in May 2015, on an official visit with the organization, he allegedly chanted “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” while visibly intoxicated.
The report details several incidents where staff said they had to remove or carry a drunken Hegseth, so inebriated he couldn’t walk and in some cases passed out, from events.
Hegseth resigned from Concerned Veterans for America under pressure in 2016, The New Yorker said, citing three sources aware of the circumstances, including one who contributed to the whistleblower report.
“I’ve seen him drunk so many times,” one of the contributors to the report told The New Yorker. “I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.”
That covers just one of the two organizations Hegseth ran.
At Vets for Freedom, where he held the top post from 2007 to 2012, Hegseth ran up mountain-sized debt and was subject to rumors of spending on parties, or what one former associate of the group told The New Yorker “could politely be called trysts.”
A group of donors to the group hired an accountant to review its books after concerns came to a head in late 2008.
Shortly thereafter, in a January 2009 email, Hegseth sent a letter to the donors admitting the group owed over $430,000 in unpaid bills and had credit card debts of up to $75,000 while having less than a grand in the bank. Hegseth’s letter reportedly told the donors they would have to give him more cash or face the organization they backed shutting down.
One agreed. But the backers persisted and arranged to merge Vets for Freedom with another veterans' group, Military Families United, so that most of the management responsibilities were taken away from Hegseth, The New Yorker reported.
Responsibilities—and compensation—were slowly taken away from him until he left in 2012.
Hegseth moved on to a series of progressively prominent on-air roles at Fox News.
“He had a kind of what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas kind of attitude, while his wife and kids were in Minnesota,” one former Fox News colleague told The New Yorker. “He was a huge drinker. I can’t say if he had a problem, but he was very handsy with women, too. I’ve certainly seen him drunk.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Hegseth’s lawyer for comment.
