What a remarkable turn of events. Pete Hegseth has gone from counted out as Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary to a virtual lock. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who was reluctant to support Hegseth, emerged from a meeting recently saying Hegseth should get a chance to make his case at a public confirmation hearing. “We’re having really good discussions, and we discussed several items that were really important to me,” Ernst said.
This is remarkable coming from Ernst, someone considered a leader in the fight against sexual assault in the military. Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017. The woman claimed she’d non-consensual sex with Hegseth, and that she may have been drugged. The allegation was investigated by local authorities who didn’t press charges. The accuser later threatened legal action, Hegseth paid her, and she signed a non-disclosure agreement. Hegseth told reporters: “As far as the media is concerned, it’s very simple: The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m going to leave it.” Hegseth also said he is “looking forward” to an FBI background check. Hegseth’s attorney has threatened a civil extortion lawsuit against the accuser if she keeps making unproven allegations.
So what changed? Joni Ernst is a survivor of sexual assault. Why did her opinion shift so abruptly?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m willing to make a guess. I think that in 2017 Hegseth was extorted by DNC goons who set him up. I think, now freed from any non-disclosure agreement, Hegseth has been able to talk about the extortion. I think that’s what the FBI and senators know and what turned the tide.
2017, the year of Hegseth's alleged crime, was the height of the #MeToo hysteria. As I learned, it was also a time when the media was setting up people so they could be accused of sexual crimes. In the fall of 2018 the political left tried to use me to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend. Kavanaugh had been nominated for the Supreme Court. While the Kavanaugh and Hegseth cases are different—Hegseth’s accuser can name a time and place where the assault allegedly happened—there are similar players and criminal forces.
The hit on us was simple—and a prequel to Hegseth. Get me, a former drunk who found Jesus and sobriety in 1990, to pin Kavanaugh to some awful activity in the 1980s. I could pick and choose the event and the year, even make something up. This is why when Ronan Farrow called in September 2018 he asked about me “and Brett Kavanaugh involved in sexual misconduct in the 1980s” he was so vague. I was accused by Farrow of doing something bad, somewhere, to someone, at some time in a 10-year period. Using opposition research, extortion threats and an attempted honey trap, as well as a woman named Christine Blasey Ford who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school, the American Stasi opened the doors and dropped their entire payload on us.
On September 24, 2018, I got a phone message from a sinister voice attempting to extort me. “You like fucking with people?” it hissed. “I like to fuck with people too. Give me a call. We can work out a deal.” On September 26, my lawyer asked me to come into her office. I sat down and she asked a direct question: “Who did you lose your virginity to?” Apparently there was someone claiming that “in the context of a conversation about losing virginity” I’d talked about how I had lost mine. I’d lost mine, the claim was, in a group sex situation that may or may not have been rape. Among others, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter who fell for the Russia collusion hoax, went on MSNBC to claim that as kids “while at Georgetown Prep” some friends and I had group sex with an older woman. The vile Mayer’s now the lead hound in the media dogpile of Hegseth.
I calmly told my lawyer the name of the girl I had lost my virginity to. The woman’s a terrific person and a wife and mom now, and I can only assume she vouched for me because I never heard about it again.
So what about that police report against me? Jackie Calmes, a journalist at The Los Angeles Times, has tried to find it. Calmes has a new book out, Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. The focus is Brett Kavanaugh’s and the Supreme Court in 2018. As I noted previously, Dissent is full of errors. Calmes uses as a source a man named Mike Sacks, who has never met me, Kavanaugh, or any of our friends.
Towards the end of Dissent, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the police report: “County officials never did search for any police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through three thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when [the accuser], in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.”
Wow. Not only was I a criminal mastermind at 17, I was wheeling and dealing at 15. It was probably around the same time I was living at the Playboy mansion. Our pasts and lives are different, but Pete Hegseth and I have something in common. We like women, we’ve been featured on Fox News, and we were the victims of #MeToo extortion. It was found out in both our cases, which is why the right people are in jail—and why Hegseth will be confirmed.