Secretary of Abuse

A shocking new set of allegations of spousal abuse, contained in a sworn affidavit from Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, once again imperils Hegseth’s nomination.

Photo by Ben Davis / AP

As recently as Monday, Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth seemed a shoo-in. After a contentious hearing and cringeworthy capitulation from earlier Hegseth skeptics such as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), Hegseth had received a near party-line thumbs up from the Armed Services Committee. Confirmation by the broader Senate seemed all but assured.

Then a new bombshell dropped. Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, Danielle Diettrich Hegseth, previously married to Hegseth’s brother, gave a sworn affidavit to senators on Tuesday. (For clarity, I’ll refer to her in this piece as Diettrich.) In it, Diettrich accused Pete Hegseth of being abusive toward his second wife Samantha. The abuse had reached a point, Diettrich said, where Samantha had a safe word at the ready if she needed to be rescued.

The affidavit also laid out in detail several instances where Hegseth was publicly intoxicated, sometimes in uniform, and how he used racist and Islamaphobic language around Diettrich.

Per NBC News, which broke the story, Committee staffers had been in contact with Hegseth’s former sister-in-law for several days before the affidavit was received and distributed to senators. Diettrich said she had submitted her affidavit at the request of the ranking Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), on the Committee. “I have been assured that making this public statement will ensure that certain senators who are still on the fence will vote against Hegseth’s confirmation,” she wrote.

According to the New York Times, six Republican senators who learned about these new allegations have indeed raised concerns privately about them, potentially putting Hegseth’s nomination at risk. Meanwhile, Republican leaders are eager to press forward and confirm Hegseth, brushing off the allegations as non-credible and politically motivated.

Skeletons, and his former wife, in the closet

One of the most explosive and compelling allegations in the affidavit concerns an incident, recounted by Diettrich, where Hegseth’s former spouse Samantha “feared for her personal safety” and “hid in a closet from Hegseth” to escape him. In her statement, Diettrich described Hegseth as “erratic and aggressive.”

The danger to her safety was high enough that Diettrich, Samantha, and an unnamed third party had worked out a plan. Samantha had a code word that she would text to them to come rescue her if needed. On one occasion, Samantha did text that safe word, and Diettrich contacted their friend to put the rescue plan in motion.

There is no allegation from Diettrich that she ever witnessed Hegseth committing physical or sexual abuse upon his spouse, and before the Diettrich affidavit dropped, Samantha Hegseth told NBC News that there had been no physical abuse in her marriage to Pete Hegseth. The reporting does not indicate, however, whether there was any emotional or verbal abuse in their home.

Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who has also represented Donald Trump, claimed the affidavit is false and noted that Samantha never alleged abuse, signed court documents as part of their divorce that there was none, and reaffirmed this in her interview with the FBI, though she did say that Hegseth abused and continues to abuse alcohol. Parlatore described Diettrich as “an anti-Trump far-left Democrat” who “had an ax to grind against the entire Hegseth family.”

The Times noted that a Minnesota family court judge in 2021 had affirmed that neither of the Hegseths claimed to be a victim of domestic abuse and there was no probable cause to believe one spouse “has been physically abused or threatened with physical abuse by the other.”

On the other hand, it is common for women suffering from abuse to not involve authorities and to avoid risking the wrath of their husbands or ex-husbands, precisely because they fear they will not be believed or their complaints will go unaddressed. But this is more than a simple case of Diettrich’s word against his. Hegseth’s own mother Penelope wrote Hegseth an email in 2018 remarking on how he had abused women for years:

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”

Samantha Hegseth currently shares custody of their three children with Pete Hegseth. She could not be reached for comment before NBC and the Times published their articles about the Diettrich affidavit.

Passed out drunk, in uniform

In her affidavit, Diettrich also recounted how Hegseth was often inebriated to the verge of unconsciousness, including once while in uniform. She described how he made a racist joke about Mexicans in her presence and had told her he was worried about Muslims having more children than Christians. Hegseth was sometimes aggressively in her face while in military dress. And she was told that Hegseth had been found on one occasion at a strip club, drunk and in uniform, receiving lap dances.

According to Diettrich, Hegseth drank so much at a family dinner at a Minneapolis restaurant back in 2013 that an Uber driver had to pull over on a highway so Hegseth could throw up. That same year, Hegseth danced drunk with a gin and tonic in each hand, then dropped the glasses on the dance floor and had to be dragged out of the bar.

Diettrich’s recollections bear striking similarity to previously reported whistleblower accounts of Hegseth’s public intoxication, including a strip club incident, which I detailed in an earlier piece. Those accounts describe how a publicly intoxicated, violent Hegseth once shouted that he wanted to “kill all Muslims” and was out of control or had passed out at holiday parties and strip clubs.

The person Diettrich describes also sounds a lot like the perpetrator described in a Monterey, California police report, compiled after an alleged rape of a woman by Hegseth in 2017. Hegseth paid his accuser an undisclosed amount as part of a non-disclosure agreement but denies any sexual assault ever occurred.

That explains the questioning

In reading the reporting on the damning Diettrich affidavit, a moment during the Hegseth confirmation hearing flashed in my memory. At one point during his questioning of the nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked Hegseth whether he had ever engaged in any acts of physical violence against any of his wives, to which Hegseth emphatically said “absolutely not.”

Sen. Kaine then asked whether Hegseth would agree that if someone had committed physical violence against a spouse, it would be disqualifying.

Rather than answer that question, an increasingly rattled Hegseth merely repeated the assertion that “absolutely not have I ever done that.”

When Sen. Kaine pressed again, Hegseth said, “Senator, you’re talking about a hypothetical.”

Kaine responded, “I don’t think it’s a hypothetical. Violence against spouses occurs every day, and if you as a leader are not capable of saying that physical violence against a spouse should be a disqualifying fact for being [Defense] Secretary of the most powerful nation in the world, you’re demonstrating an astonishing lack of judgment.”

I had wondered at the time what information Kaine might have that the public as yet did not regarding Hegseth and potential spousal abuse. It seems Sen. Kaine was quite aware that something was in the works—perhaps even a delicate discussion with Diettrich who had not yet provided her sworn affidavit.

You can watch the exchange here.

Note: This link takes you to a “mirror” site of Twitter called Xcancel, which I am informed is based in Iceland, that provides all of the content on that site with no advertising dollars going to Elon Musk. It may take a few extra seconds to load.

An incomplete FBI report

The Diettrich affidavit also raises a significant question about the thoroughness of the FBI investigation around Hegseth. The authorities had interviewed Diettrich, and she had already provided all of this explosive information to them, so why wasn’t it in the Bureau’s final report?

Sen. Reed stated that the affidavit “confirms my fears” that the FBI background check on Hegseth had been incomplete. Committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took to social media to raise awareness about the affidavit, noting that it confirms a pattern of abuse and establishes that the FBI did not conduct a full investigation, and therefore a vote on Hegseth should be put off until there is a complete investigation.

Here are Sen. Warren’s remarks, again on the Xcancel site:

Ramming Hegseth through

While Democrats like Reed and Warren are calling the new information disqualifying and seeking a fuller vetting of Hegseth, Republican leaders are eager to move the Hegseth nomination forward.

The Times reported that on Monday, the Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said that he was aware of the new allegations and that “if they were substantiated and taken seriously, we’d look at them.”

(Narrator: Republicans generally do not take such allegations seriously.)

And some GOP senators are now even drawing parallels between Hegseth’s nomination and that of another famous accused abuser. “This is starting to feel a lot like a Kavanaugh situation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said on Tuesday after Democrats threw up procedural hurdles to slow down considerations of nominees on the Senate floor.

One of Hegseth’s chief apologists, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, made his intentions clear. “Pete is going to be the secretary of defense, period,” Mullin said.

If Hegseth is voted through, it will once again be because GOP senators such as Susan Collins (R-ME) voted him through despite credible allegations of abuse by a witness, or because someone who has been recently cozying up to the GOP like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) turns his back on the millions of women voters who helped get him elected.

Even if Hegseth is confirmed as expected, the stain upon him now will be permanent. No fewer than two members of his own family have now accused him of abusive behavior, and everyone who has worked with him or been around him already knows he has a very serious problem with alcohol.

Paired with his utter lack of qualification for the job, if confirmed Hegseth will likely face strong and determined institutional resistance as he seeks to oust long-serving, professional and capable military leaders and to reshape the military as a MAGA fighting force.