Trump defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s mother called him ‘an abuser of women’ | Trump administration

The family dynamics of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, have burst out into the open after an email from his mother criticizing her son over his treatment of women and calling him an “abuser of women” was leaked to a newspaper.

A 2018 email from Penelope Hegseth accused her son of routinely mistreating women and displaying a lack of character.

“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,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email obtained by the New York Times.

“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,” she added, advising her son to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself”.

Penelope Hegseth told the New York Times she had written the message “in anger, with emotion” while her son was going through an acrimonious divorce from his second wife, Samantha, the mother of three of his children, and had immediately apologized to her son in a second email.

She rejected her earlier characterization of her son to the outlet. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting”.

The release of the letter comes ahead of Hegseth’s confirmation hearings in the Senate after Trump takes office on 20 January, in which the veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will come under scrutiny.

Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, is already facing questions over payments he reportedly made to a woman who accused him of sexual assault – an encounter that he insists was consensual.

Hegseth’s attorney has said his client was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident in a Monterey, California, hotel in 2017 and police who had looked into the woman’s claim had concluded that “the complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter”.

In a statement, Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said his client had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox”.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Times that the outlet was “despicable” for publishing “an out-of-context snippet” of Penelope Hegseth’s exchange with her son.