At Forest Lake Space Excessive College within the suburbs of Minneapolis, Pete Hegseth and Meredith Schwarz appeared like the right couple. He performed varsity soccer and basketball; she was on the scholar council and a nominee for homecoming queen. They had been each educational all stars sure for the elite faculties (Princeton for him, Barnard for her). The category of 1999 voted the pair “almost definitely to marry.” A yearbook photo reveals Hegseth sporting a soccer jersey together with his arms round Schwarz’s waist. They appear to be lovestruck youngsters in a John Hughes film.
In 2004, simply as their classmates predicted, Hegseth married Schwarz on the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota, in line with two attendees. By this level Hegseth was reworking right into a tradition warrior. His burgeoning curiosity in right-wing politics appeared to coincide together with his waning faculty basketball profession. (Princeton’s pupil newspaper reportedly described him as a “a recruiting afterthought” who had “patiently toiled in obscurity” whereas on the workforce.)
After 9/11, Hegseth enlisted in Princeton’s ROTC program and have become an organization commander. He additionally wrote opinion columns for The Princeton Tory, the campus’s conservative publication. He expressed strident views in opposition to feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. “By advocating authorities help of the normal household unit, a return of the acceptability of the ‘homemaker’ vocation, freedom from oppressive authorities oversight, ethical duty, and the revival of non secular religion, conservatives present a working blueprint for a free and affluent future,” Hegseth wrote in 2002.
Hegseth and Schwarz’s younger marriage was short-lived. In December 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted that he cheated on her, in line with 4 sources near the couple. (APM Stories previously revealed that the infidelity was listed as grounds within the couple’s divorce proceedings.) The sources instructed me that Hegseth’s infidelity left Schwarz emotionally and psychologically scarred. “She was gaslighted by him closely all through their relationship,” one of many sources instructed me. “So far as everybody else was involved, they had been seen by many as this all-American energy couple that had been making large issues for themselves.” (Schwarz declined to remark. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, didn’t reply to an in depth checklist of questions for this story, and as a substitute offered an announcement that impugned my file as a reporter.)
On the time Schwarz filed for divorce, Hegseth was courting Samantha Deering, whom he met whereas working in Washington, DC, at Vets for Freedom, a gaggle that lobbied to keep up the navy’s “counterinsurgency” technique in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three children. In 2017, Deering filed for divorce after Hegseth fathered a toddler together with his Fox Information producer Jennifer Rauchet. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019 at Trump’s golf course in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Hegseth’s private life may need remained a little-noticed case of a conservative media character not training what he preaches. However because the Senate prepares for hearings to substantiate the previous Fox & Mates weekend host’s appointment as Donald Trump’s secretary of protection, the entire of his biography and his beliefs have develop into a matter of public debate. Within the position, Hegseth would oversee a navy with roughly 1.3 million energetic obligation personnel and an almost $900 billion price range. In his 2020 ebook American Campaign, Hegseth suggests the navy ought to pursue a Christian mission. “Our current second is very similar to the eleventh century,” he wrote, adding: “We don’t need to battle, however, like our fellow Christians a thousand years in the past, we should. We want an American Campaign.”
On November 14, I reported that Trump transition officers had been blindsided by an allegation of sexual misconduct by Hegseth in opposition to a girl at a Republican girls’s convention in Monterey, California, in October 2017, on the similar time Hegseth was nonetheless married to Deering and shortly after Rauchet gave start to his son.
In accordance with an nameless memo despatched to the transition, which I later reviewed, the girl mentioned Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault occurred whereas her husband and two younger kids had been asleep within the resort. Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told Breitbart Information that the girl pursued Hegseth. Parlatore additionally identified that the Monterey police investigated the case and declined to deliver costs, however Hegseth later paid the girl to maintain the incident confidential. Visiting with senators on Capitol Hill final month, Hegseth declined to debate the allegations intimately. “The matter was totally investigated, and I used to be utterly cleared. And that’s the place I’m going to depart it,” he told reporters.
