At Forest Lake Area High School in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Pete Hegseth and Meredith Schwarz seemed like the perfect couple. He played varsity football and basketball; she was on the student council and a nominee for homecoming queen. They were both academic all stars bound for the elite schools (Princeton for him, Barnard for her). The class of 1999 voted the pair “most likely to marry.” A yearbook photo shows Hegseth wearing a football jersey with his arms around Schwarz’s waist. They look like lovestruck teenagers in a John Hughes movie.
In 2004, just as their classmates predicted, Hegseth married Schwarz at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota, according to two attendees. By this point Hegseth was transforming into a culture warrior. His burgeoning interest in right-wing politics seemed to coincide with his waning college basketball career. (Princeton’s student newspaper reportedly described him as a “a recruiting afterthought” who had “patiently toiled in obscurity” while on the team.)
After 9/11, Hegseth enlisted in Princeton’s ROTC program and became a company commander. He also wrote opinion columns for The Princeton Tory, the campus’s conservative publication. He expressed strident views against feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. “By advocating government support of the traditional family unit, a return of the acceptability of the ‘homemaker’ vocation, freedom from oppressive government oversight, moral responsibility, and the revival of religious faith, conservatives provide a working blueprint for a free and prosperous future,” Hegseth wrote in 2002.
Hegseth and Schwarz’s young marriage was short-lived. In December 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted that he cheated on her, according to four sources close to the couple. (APM Reports previously revealed that the infidelity was listed as grounds in the couple’s divorce proceedings.) The sources told me that Hegseth’s infidelity left Schwarz emotionally and psychologically scarred. “She was gaslighted by him heavily throughout their relationship,” one of the sources told me. “As far as everyone else was concerned, they were viewed by many as this all-American power couple that were making big things for themselves.” (Schwarz declined to comment. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story, and instead provided a statement that impugned my record as a reporter.)
At the time Schwarz filed for divorce, Hegseth was dating Samantha Deering, whom he met while working in Washington, DC, at Vets for Freedom, a group that lobbied to maintain the military’s “counterinsurgency” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three kids. In 2017, Deering filed for divorce after Hegseth fathered a child with his Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019 at Trump’s golf course in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Hegseth’s personal life might have remained a little-noticed case of a conservative media personality not practicing what he preaches. But as the Senate prepares for hearings to confirm the former Fox & Friends weekend host’s appointment as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, the whole of his biography and his beliefs have become a matter of public debate. In the role, Hegseth would oversee a military with roughly 1.3 million active duty personnel and a nearly $900 billion budget. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth suggests the military should pursue a Christian mission. “Our present moment is much like the eleventh century,” he wrote, adding: “We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American Crusade.”
On November 14, I reported that Trump transition officials were blindsided by an allegation of sexual misconduct by Hegseth against a woman at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California, in October 2017, at the same time Hegseth was still married to Deering and shortly after Rauchet gave birth to his son.
According to an anonymous memo sent to the transition, which I later reviewed, the woman said Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault happened while her husband and two young children were asleep in the hotel. Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told Breitbart News that the woman pursued Hegseth. Parlatore also pointed out that the Monterey police investigated the case and declined to bring charges, but Hegseth later paid the woman to keep the incident confidential. Visiting with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Hegseth declined to discuss the allegations in detail. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m going to leave it,” he told reporters.
