Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick Pete Hegseth Received Email Saying He Mistreats Women — From His Mother

“On behalf of all the women (and I know there are many) that you have abused in some way,” Pete Hegsethhis mother, Penelope, he wrote One e-mail to her son in 2018, “I say…get help and take an honest look at yourself…”

The release of the email comes as Hegseth, Fox News host and president-elect Donald Trumphis choose to lead the defense department, it is also faces a rape complaint against him was filed with police in October 2017, on his already fraught journey to join the next administration in Washington. (Hegseth, who later paid the woman a settlement, claimed he was falsely accused and that it was a consensual sexual encounter.)

Penelope Hegseth now says he regrets writing the email, which was written during Hegseth’s second divorce and was recently obtained of New York Times from another person related to the family.

“You are an abuser of women – that’s the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man who cheapens, lies, cheats, sleeps and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote, noting that she still loves her son and will pray for him. “You are that man (and have been for years), and as your mother it pains and embarrasses me to say this, but it’s the sad, sad truth.”

At the time, Hegseth was in the midst of a contentious divorce from his second wife, Samantha – they have three children together. Samantha, the one Times‘ Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate writes, “filed for divorce after her husband impregnated a co-worker, part of a pattern of adultery dating back to her first marriage.”

In an interview with NYT On Friday, Hegseth’s mother said she quickly sent another email apologizing for what she wrote in the first, adding that she had acted “in anger, with emotion” in response to the difficulties in the procedure. divorce. “It’s not true. It was never true,” she said, defending her son. The content of the first email, she now says, was “disgusting” and that her son is “a good father, a husband”.

Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email to the outlet that Times was “contemptuous” for publishing “an out-of-context excerpt” of a mother’s correspondence with her son, noting that she “expressed regret for her emotional message and apologized”.

A little over a year after the initial email was sent, Penelope praised her son at his service during a Fox News Mother’s Day special. “Pete was a spit, in a good way,” she said, with the pair joking that he was a troublemaker. She said she has “always been proud of Pete” and that “most of all, I love the way he loves this country. Yes. I don’t know anyone who loves this country as much as Pete.”

Hegseth, now 44, is an Iraq War veteran and formerly head of the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America. With no senior military or government leadership experience, some in the Pentagon and the wider defense world were shocked by Trump’s selection.