[WARNING: article contains graphic language and details.]
. . .What you’re going to hear now and in the coming days from the national media is that there are “graphic” details in a police report related to an alleged sexual assault involving Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming nominee for Defense secretary. It’s certainly graphic, but the media will bet you won’t bother reading the report, which in reality looks really bad for the alleged victim and effectively clears Hegseth of criminality.
The 22-page report details an incident from seven years ago when in 2017, Hegseth, then a Fox News celebrity, attended an event for a Republican women’s group as a featured speaker. The way the media have relayed the event so far is that a woman in attendance has accused Hegseth of drugging her at an afterparty before raping her in his hotel room. Outside of the alleged victim’s admittedly incomplete recollection, none of the testimony or evidence included in the police report supports that claim. In truth, all of it indicates that the accuser lied to her husband, who was in her hotel room, while she galavanted at night with Hegseth and other attendees before voluntarily joining him in his room to have consensual sex.
The report’s events took place in early October 2017, and it includes multiple eyewitness testimonies and text message evidence of what took place before and after the alleged assault. The alleged victim is identified only as Jane Doe. After a night of moderate drinking, during which Doe says she at some point felt she may have been surreptitiously drugged, Doe said she remembered few details but that she recalled inexplicably finding herself in Hegseth’s hotel room, that he ejaculated on her body, and that she thereafter went to her own room to join an unnamed person in bed. Text messages she shared with police indicate the person was her husband and that there were other parties in the room, likely children. . .
The rest of the report is an overwhelming refutation of that version of events. Included are text exchanges with her husband, wherein she repeatedly mentions Hegseth, but omits that she was spending time with him at the after-parties; testimonies from other women in attendance who said Doe never appeared overserved and in fact seemed completely coherent throughout; surveillance video footage that showed Doe and Hegseth walking around with locked arms; and a hotel staff member who recalled engaging Doe and Hegseth by the pool, at which time Hegseth was belligerent and Doe guided Hegseth away from the conflict.
The report ends with Hegseth’s version of events, in which he admits he only initiated sex with Doe after she took him to his room and says that the two of them repeatedly expressed reservations about the intimacy. He said that the two of them agreed the affair needed to remain secret. If there’s one corroborated piece of Doe’s story, it’s that Hegseth also recalled that she asked him if he had a condom. (Read more from “The Police Report About Pete Hegseth’s Alleged Sexual Assault Vindicates Him of Criminality” HERE)
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
