(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Pete Hegseth Is the Perfect Trumpworld Monster [1]
['Ana Marie Cox', 'The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent', 'Michael Tomasky', 'Timothy Noah', 'Robert Mccoy', 'Hafiz Rashid']
Date: 2024-11-25
The last time I saw Hegseth was in 2019. We were friendly from having crossed paths in cable news greenrooms over the years, and I was wooing him for a glossy magazine piece. He was clearly interested in the attention, perhaps in more ways than one. Fox News wound up nixing my proposed profile, and that was wise. Even on the set of Fox & Friends, he’s a loose cannon eager to provoke (throwing axes with dangerous abandon, bragging about his refusal to wash his hands). He was considerably looser after martinis and bourbon. I was stone-cold sober. The hug goodbye lingered; his emphasis on how good it was to see me left me with a buzzy sense of unexpressed energy.
Now we know his hands can get very dirty. In 2017, a woman identified as Jane Doe made a police report that described Hegseth committing sexual assault. There are some superficial similarities to my evening (the drinks, the flirting, the slippery nature of a late-night boozy chat). Of course, the broad outlines of that interaction are overly familiar to any woman who’s ever had a friendly conversation with a man convinced that his self-assessed attractiveness and charisma (and maybe enough drinks) will slip him under the iron gate of “no.” If women told friends about these things every time they fell short of assault, we’d never shut up about anything else. According to reports, in fact, Hegseth’s nomination is already very much on the minds of the Pentagon’s women. Said one unnamed Pentagon official to CNN, “I imagine there is already profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform.”
Hegseth later agreed to pay Doe an undisclosed sum in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. In the police report, he copped to almost every untoward detail of her story with the important exception of locking her in his hotel room and taking her phone. He insisted to police that Doe was cognizant of what was happening and that, in his opinion, the contact was “always” consensual and she was “comfortable” with it. In an amazing bit of unintentional and evocative honesty, he granted that the woman showed “early signs of regret” before leaving.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/188499/pete-hegset...
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
