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The disclosure of the email comes as Mr. Hegseth and his allies, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, are mounting a concerted effort to help him win approval by the Senate. Mr. Trump will not be able to formally submit his nomination until after taking office on Jan. 20.
Several key Republican senators have said that the sexual assault allegation in Monterey is not an obstacle to Mr. Hegseth’s nomination because it was never proven. But Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican of Iowa who has said she was sexually harassed while in the military, told Politico: “Any time there are allegations, you want to make sure they are properly vetted, so we’ll have that discussion.”
Mr. Hegseth married Meredith Schwarz, his high school sweetheart, in 2004, one year after they both graduated from college. Ms. Schwarz sued for divorce less than five years after their wedding. The 2009 court judgment cited Mr. Hegseth’s infidelity as the reason for the breakdown of the marriage.
The following year, Mr. Hegseth married Samantha. Within five years, they had three boys.
Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly said he is a Christian who adheres to conservative family values. In a short-lived bid for the Republican nomination for a Minnesota seat in the U.S. Senate in 2012, he credited his parents for instilling those values in him, saying, “I didn’t learn conservatism out of a book.”
In an essay that same year, he acknowledged that he had erred by fathering a child “out of wedlock” with Samantha, who had been his co-worker at a nonprofit group called Vets for Freedom, after his first marriage ended.
“Had I been raised in a family where faith, fidelity and fatherhood were not valued, my choices could have led to family breakdown,” he wrote in a publication about fragmented families for the Center of the American Experiment, a nonprofit group.
By late 2016, Mr. Hegseth, a Fox News contributor and aspiring anchor, was having an affair with Jennifer Rauchet, an executive producer at Fox News. He was named as the weekend anchor of Fox & Friends in early 2017 — a post he held until earlier this month, when Mr. Trump announced he wanted him to head the Defense Department.
Ms. Rauchet, who has three other children, delivered a baby girl in August 2017, one month before Samantha Hegseth filed for divorce. Mr. Hegseth married Ms. Rauchet in 2019 at a ceremony at Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck in New Jersey.
The acrimonious divorce from Samantha took 10 months to finalize and led to the appointment of a parenting consultant to help negotiate disputes over dividing time with the children.
Mr. Hegseth’s mother, who is a longtime executive business coach, wrote her email three months before the final divorce decree. It began: “Son, I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent.”
She said that “Sam is a good mother and a good person,” adding that she knew that her son thought that “we” had taken her side. That was “bunk,” she wrote. “We are on the side of good and that is not you.” The email did not say who “we” referred to, beyond herself.
“It’s time for someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women,” she wrote. “We still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character.” If the email “damages our relationship further,” she added, “so be it.”
She described his abusive behavior over the years as “dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling” women.
She told him not to bother to reply, because “you twist and abuse everything I say anyway.”
In the years that followed, Pete and Samantha Hegseth continued to fight over care of the children, according to documents in their divorce record. In 2020, after Mr. Hegseth sent a text to his ex-wife calling her “pathetic and selfish,” the court-appointed consultant said she wanted to see “an action plan from Pete regarding cessation of hostile and degrading communication to and about Sam.”
In an affidavit filed with the court, Mr. Hegseth said that he had slipped up, regretted the text, and had not always been as respectful as he could have been. He said, “I am committed to learning from my mistakes and communicating with Sam in a positive manner.”
(Sharon LaFraniere, who has been reporting on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections for cabinet positions, welcomes tips at nytimes.com/tips. She reported from Washington. Julie Tate provided research from Washington.)
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