“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way,” Pete Hegseth’s mom, Penelope, wrote in an email to her son in 2018, “I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”
The email’s publishing comes as Hegseth, a Fox News host and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the defense department, is also facing a rape complaint against him filed to police in October 2017 on his already rough journey to joining the next administration in Washington. (Hegseth, who later paid the woman a settlement, has held that he was falsely accused and that it was a consensual sexual encounter.)
Penelope Hegseth now says she regrets writing the email, which was penned during Hegseth’s second divorce and was recently obtained by the New York Times from another person with ties to the family.
“You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote, noting that she still loves her son and will pray for him. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
At the time, Hegseth was in the midst of a contentious divorce from his second wife, Samantha—they share three children together. Samantha, the Times’ Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate write, “filed for divorce after her husband impregnated a co-worker, part of a pattern of adultery that dated back to his first marriage.”
In an interview with the NYT on Friday, Hegseth’s mom said that she quickly sent another email apologizing for what she had written in the first, adding that she had acted “in anger, with emotion,” in response to difficulties in the divorce proceedings. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said, defending her son. The contents of the first email, she now says, were “disgusting” and that her son is “a good father, husband.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email to the outlet that the Times was “despicable” for publishing “an out-of-context snippet” of a mom’s correspondence with her son, noting that she had “expressed regret for her emotional message and apologized.”
Just over a year after the initial email was sent, Penelope praised her son at his job during a Fox News Mother’s Day special. “Pete was a spitfire, in a good way,” she said, the pair joking that he’d been a troublemaker. She shared that she’s “always been proud of Pete” and that “most of all, I love the way he loves this country. I do. I don’t know anyone who loves this country as much as Pete.”
Hegseth, now 44, is an Iraq War veteran and formerly served as the head of the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America. With no senior military or government leadership experience, some in the Pentagon and the broader defense world were shocked at Trump’s choice.
