More Dribbles Out On An Affronted Ingenue

As I've been saying, the affronted ingenues who come out of the woodwork with steamy allegations against Trump and other Republican nominees soon enough turn out not to be ingenues, whatever else they may be. This is starting to look like it's the case with the as-yet unnamed woman who, through a friend, has passed allegations against Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago, which in turn have been leaked to the press.

It appears that the fullest accounts are in Vanity Fair, behind a paywall, and the Washington Post. The Post's version goes like this:

The alleged incident is said to have occurred when Hegseth attended a California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey, and allegedly took place between just before midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the following morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa, according to the police statement, first reported by Vanity Fair. The allegation to police was made Oct. 12, 2017, the report said.

The police statement did not provide any other details beyond noting that the complainant had a bruise on her right thigh and that there was no weapon or property involved.

The Post could find no reference in court files to the matter. The police statement does not disclose the complainant’s name, citing her identity and age as “Confidential.” The Post also generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault.

. . . Hegseth has been married three times, according to court records. He married his first wife, Meredith, in his early 20s and they divorced in 2009, according to Minnesota court filings. The couple agreed that the reasons for the split were an “irretrievable breakdown” of the marriage and Hegseth’s “infidelity,” according to a filing in their divorce case. She declined to comment.

He married his second wife, Samantha, in 2010. Hegseth fathered a child with another woman, Jennifer Rauchet, then a Fox News producer, in August 2017, during that marriage. According to court records, Samantha Hegseth, who did not respond to a request for comment, filed for divorce in September — a month after the child was born. Following his second divorce, Hegseth married Rauchet.

So at the time of the alleged incident, Hegseth was unmarried, although soon to marry his third wife. Another Post story, this one behind a paywall but quoted on X, gives more detail:

At some point in the evening, the complaint alleged, Jane Doe received a text from two women at the bar who told her that “Hegseth was getting pushy about his interest in taking them upstairs to his room.” Jane Doe, who was nearby, came over and talked to those two women, and after they left, she “remembered sensing that Hegseth was irritated,” the memo said. What happened next is in dispute.

According to the memo, Jane Doe “didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room.” The memo said that her memory of six to nine hours “was very hazy,” and that her husband was searching for her and was relieved when she finally showed up.

The following day, the woman returned home and “had a moment of hazy memory of being raped the night before, and had a panic attack,” the memo said.

The woman then went to the emergency room, where she received a rape-kit examination that “was positive for semen,” the memo said. The woman gave county authorities a statement about what happened, according to the memo sent to the transition team.

This leaves open the problem that the woman was at the hotel with her husband and children, but according to the chronology in the police report, she was in Hegseth's room at the hotel from just before midnight to 7:00 the next morning. Various accounts say that her husband had been frantically looking for her throughout this time. NBC News quotes Hegseth's attorney:

[Timothy] Parlatore denied the allegation, saying, “This is a situation where a consensual encounter occurred and, unfortunately, the woman had to come up with a lie to explain why the woman had not come back to her husband’s room that night.”

“It wasn’t reported until days later until there was pressure from her husband. It was fully investigated by police and video surveillance as well as multiple eyewitness statements show that she was the aggressor,” he added.

According to the chronology we have, the incident took place over the night of October 7-8, but it wasn't reported until October 12. The New York Post adds further comment from Parlatore:

Parlatore alleged that the accuser was simply trying to save face with her husband.

“She woke up to a whole bunch of texts from her husband saying, ‘Why didn’t you come back to our room?’ Afterward, she had to come back and lie,” he added, citing a police report that is not publicly available.

Days after the encounter, the accuser filed a complaint to the police, who investigated the situation and ultimately, the local district attorney declined to pursue charges.

Two years later, in 2020, the accuser threatened to pursue Hegseth in court, which resulted in his settlement payment to her in exchange for the woman signing a non-disclosure agreement.

“If she were to come out and start repeating these false claims, or if this in any way derails the confirmation, then, yeah, we will probably be following a pretty massive lawsuit against her for defamation and civil and extortion,” Parlatore said.

Megyn Kelly refers to -- and appears to be reading from -- another source, possibly the separate Washington Post story, at about 4:50 in the YouTube below:

After the encounter, she "expressed concern because she had not gone back to her room where her husband and children were, and that Hegseth told the cops that she planned to tell her husband she had fallen asleep on the couch in another guest's room," according to the statement.

Well, some of us have been there; the idea that someone would concoct that sort of story isn't outside the bounds of possibility, and this has been the continuing problem with all the E Jean Carrolls, Stormy Danielses, and Christine Blasey Fords -- people have seen this sort of thing in their own experience. It's worth noting that jurors are selected in court cases on the basis that they're expected to bring their own life experience to deciding whether witnesses are credible.

The best we can conclude is that neither Hegseth nor the woman displayed good judgment, although the woman was by all accounts sober, while Hegseth's judgment was impaired. This doesn't excuse Hegseth in particular, but it doesn't make him guilty of a crime. Given the public's reaction to the variious allegations against Trump -- they tended only to improve his standing in the polls -- I have a feeling the public has plenty enough good sense to write this off.