Police records reveal new details about sexual assault allegation against Pete Hegseth
“The incident has roiled Donald Trump’s transition team since the former president announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary.
MONTEREY, Calif. — An emergency room nurse contacted police in 2017 after treating a woman who said that, while drinking with colleagues after a political gathering several nights earlier, she may have been drugged and was then sexually assaulted by a man she later identified as Pete Hegseth, according to records released late Wednesday by the Monterey Police Department.
A lawyer for Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for defense secretary, has said the encounter was consensual. Authorities declined to bring charges in the case. Hegseth later paid the woman an undisclosed sum as part of a nondisclosure agreement.
The documents offer the most detailed account yet of the steps police took to investigate Hegseth as part of an incident that has been roiling Trump’s team since the former president announced the former Fox News host was his pick to run the Defense Department.
Trump presidential transition
The accuser — referred to as “Jane Doe” in the 22-page batch of documents released in response to a public records request — met Hegseth at a Republican conference in Monterey, California, where he had been featured as a speaker. After observing Hegseth behaving “inappropriately” with women at the upscale hotel event, she said she confronted him, officers wrote, and the pair argued.
“Doe” recalled Hegseth telling her that he was a “nice guy,” officers wrote. Her next memory was being in an unknown room with Hegseth, according to the police report. She stated that Hegseth then “took her phone from her hands” and blocked the door, according to the documents.
“JANE DOE remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,” the report said.
The woman consumed “much more” alcohol than normal that day, she told authorities, and much of the encounter with Hegseth occurred after things became “fuzzy,” she said, according to the documents.
Days later, the accuser told a nurse that she suspected “something may have been slipped” into her drink that October 2017 night, according to the police report. The records do not indicate whether investigators asked her about her suspicion that she may have been drugged.
Hegseth told officers that, throughout the encounter, he repeatedly checked to ensure that the woman was comfortable. He expressed that he did not want to get her into trouble, according to the report. Hegseth said she showed “early signs of regret,” the officer wrote, noting that he “did not elaborate.”
Timothy Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, previously told The Washington Post that his client was “visibly intoxicated” that evening. Citing video surveillance footage that showed the two of them walking arm-in-arm, with the woman smiling and looking coherent, he claimed that the woman was the “aggressor” that evening. The newly released records confirm his description of the video footage but do not address his characterization of the woman as the aggressor.
While one witness described the woman as “coherent” and Hegseth as “very intoxicated,” the records show, Hegseth himself told police he was “buzzed” but not intoxicated.
“This confirms what I’ve said all along, that the incident was fully investigated, and police found the allegations to be false, which is why no charges were filed,” said Parlatore.
The papers do not say how police assessed the woman’s allegations and do not address the veracity of either side’s claims.
“Pete Hegseth is a highly-respected Combat Veteran who will honorably serve our country when he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, just like he honorably served our country on the battlefield in uniform,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The records support portions of a memo that a friend of the woman sent to Trump’s transition team last week. That memo alleged that the woman had tried to intervene after two other women attending the conference complained that Hegseth was being “pushy” about taking them to his room.
Police interviewed two other women at the conference who said that Hegseth had placed a hand on their thighs and invited them up to his hotel room. One told officers that she asked Doe to help ward him off, according to the report.
The accuser’s identity has not been made public, and she did not respond to messages this week. She filed a complaint with police days after the encounter.
Hegseth’s attorney said Saturday that Hegseth agreed to pay her after she threatened litigation in 2020, fearing publicity could result in his termination from Fox News, where he was then a host.
The Trump transition team was alerted to the incident after receiving the detailed four-page memo from a woman who described herself as a friend of the accuser.
The memo — a copy of which was obtained by The Post — alleged that Hegseth raped a 30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar in Monterey, where he had been speaking to a California Federation of Republican Women conference. The sender of the memo did not respond to requests for comment.
Dean Flippo, the Monterey County district attorney at the time of the incident, said over the weekend that he had no memory of the case. That’s not unusual, he added, because the office deals with a high volume of investigations. The current district attorney, Jeannine Pacioni, has declined to comment.
O’Connell reported from Washington. Aaron Schaffer, Alice Crites and Chris Dehghanpoor in Washington contributed to this report.“
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