National Review
The Facts in the Police Report Make It Seem Very Unlikely Pete Hegseth Committed Sexual Assault
By Jeffrey Blehar
November 22, 2024 5:06 PM
On Wednesday, a public-records request by a media outlet turned up a Monterey, Calif., police report of an investigation into a woman’s accusation, lodged in 2017, of rape and/or sexual assault against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. The details (with all quotes taken directly from the report) are as follows.
On the night of October 7, 2017, Fox News host Pete Hegseth attended and spoke at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey. After the conference, Hegseth — divorced in August of that year, after having fathered a child out of wedlock with a Fox executive producer to whom he is now married — was observed by witnesses flirting at a hotel bar with two women whose names remain unknown. One is referred to in the police report as “Jane Doe.” According to the (myriad and unfortunate) details of this report, Jane Doe was staying at the hotel on conference business with her husband, and she had earlier that day sent a text saying that “our ladies are freaking drooling over [Hegseth]” and that “he creeps me out.”
Apparently something changed her mind, for according to the report, multiple witnesses observed her, along with another woman, touching his body and arms. She was then seen on security videos strolling arm-in-arm with Hegseth and smiling as he whispered in her ear. One witness said she had a vodka and champagne, but according to another witness, she did not appear visibly intoxicated, although Hegseth did. Later they disappeared upstairs for several hours, during which — both parties are agreed on this much — the two had sex in Hegseth’s hotel room before she returned to her husband’s bed in her own hotel room.
Four days later, Jane Doe went to a hospital and told a nurse she thought she had been sexually assaulted by Hegseth; the nurse reported this to the police. She said she hadn’t realized anything had happened at first, but having sex with her husband a few days later “triggered her memory of the incident.” Police investigators were brought in the next day, and after interviewing Jane Doe, her husband, another woman, and Hegseth — as well as checking the surveillance-camera footage and other employee witnesses — they referred the case to the local district attorney’s office, which chose not to pursue charges. Was it a cover-up? Is Pete Hegseth actually a rapist?
It doesn’t seem so. The truth in cases like these is often troublingly unknowable, coming down to the age-old “he said, she said” conundrum, at which point these debates dissolve into a battle of political priors and tribal affiliations. This time, for once, however, the answer to the question of what really happened can be determined with near certainty, for it lies within the internal details of the police report itself. The investigators did not have to guess on this one, because every unfortunate detail — even Jane Doe’s delayed rape allegation itself — adds up: If the report is accurate, then Hegseth is almost certainly innocent in this case, at least of the crime of sexual assault.
I recommend the entire police file to you, with the understanding that it is formatted in a series of evolving reports, and the full picture doesn’t become clear until the final one (“Supplement 02” of the redacted incident report, dated October 18) fleshes out the story with information taken from interviews with all involved. According to the woman who was with Jane Doe, Jane Doe thrust herself between that woman and Hegseth as (in the woman’s words) a “crotch blocker” to prevent Hegseth from hitting on the woman — he had already invited her up to his hotel and been turned down — and diverting his attention to Jane Doe instead. Jane Doe was also a high-profile member of the community, an “advocate” whom “most of the members wanted to talk to.”
These are the raw facts of the allegations, at least as put forward in the police report — and the primary reason I have taken my time in summarizing them carefully is precisely because you are unlikely to encounter a clear summary of what is known to have happened, versus what is alleged, anywhere else. According to the letter from the city attorney’s office, the facts are further bolstered by “another agency’s Police Report, Kaiser Permanente Report, an audio recording, surveillance footage, a photograph, and memoranda of analysis from the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office,” all of which remain confidential and exempt from a public-records request.
On its face, one might argue that the woman’s charge — that what took place in Hegseth’s hotel room was a nonconsensual encounter — remains at least barely plausible, in the sense that we presumably can never know for sure what took place behind closed doors. But the facts also admit of a vastly more obvious situation: This woman, it appears, had a wild affair with a television star behind the back of her own husband, who was waiting up for her in their own hotel room, and then felt horribly guilty about it afterward.
And there is one ugly detail in the police report that helps to confirm it, one you might have missed but that the police did not, and which explains why everyone walked away from Jane Doe’s deeply unfortunate face-saving and likely false allegation. The police noticed that Hegseth’s account of events was independently corroborated by Jane Doe’s husband, who obviously never could have known he was being cheated on. Remember, Hegseth told the police a key detail: that after their sexual encounter concluded, Jane Doe was already expressing feelings of guilt, so they rehearsed a story for her to tell her husband: “JANE DOE stated she would tell her husband that she [had] fallen asleep on a couch in someone else’s room.”
That’s Hegseth’s version of events. Meanwhile, in an earlier interview with Jane Doe’s husband, he himself independently took note of what Jane Doe offered him as an excuse for her lateness: “Must have fallen asleep.” In other words, she stuck to the script she and Hegseth had agreed on. (Jane Doe’s husband also noted to investigators that she did not seem at all intoxicated.)
That pretty conclusively clears Pete Hegseth of the charge of rape. What it does not clear Pete Hegseth of, however, is the charge of moral decrepitude. Hegseth — already out of his depth as a Pentagon outsider unfamiliar with the byzantine folkways of the Department of Defense — would be well advised to, shall we say, consider his position regardless of the fact that he should be defended on this particular charge. This is a man who gleefully beds the wife of a stranger who sleeps a few rooms away, and then conspires with the woman to lie about the affair. While the United States Senate should not wrongfully impugn Hegseth for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit, the senators are well within their rights to ask whether a man with a sexually reckless streak to put David Petraeus to shame is the right choice to lead the Department of Defense.
Hegseth Sexual-Assault Allegations: The Facts | National Review
No comments:
Post a Comment