A police report released Wednesday night provided graphic details about a sexual assault accusation against Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for defense secretary.
The report also documents Mr. Hegseth’s vehement denials that he coerced the woman who made the accusations into a sexual encounter at a Monterey, Calif., political conference seven years ago. Mr. Hegseth was never charged with a crime.
According to the report, the woman, whose name was withheld, told the police that she ended up in Mr. Hegseth’s hotel room after he spoke at the conference hosted by the California Federation of Republican Women at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in October 2017. The woman, referred to throughout the report as Jane Doe, said that Mr. Hegseth took her phone, blocked the hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her, ejaculating on her stomach. She said her memory was hazy, and that she had drunk far more alcohol than usual throughout the day.
Mr. Hegseth told the police that he repeatedly sought the woman’s consent for sex and told her that they could stop if it was a problem that he did not have a condom. Video footage at the hotel earlier that evening showed them at one point leaving a hotel bar with their arms locked together, the report said.
Mr. Hegseth said that he believed the woman led him to his room, and that he had no plans to have sex with her, the report said. “He might have thought that with someone else, but not Jane Doe,” it said.
The woman’s allegation, the outlines of which surfaced last week, have complicated Mr. Trump’s intention to have Mr. Hegseth lead the Defense Department next year. Mr. Hegseth’s attorney said Sunday that his client had paid the woman an undisclosed amount after she threatened to file a lawsuit against Mr. Hegseth in 2020 simply because he feared he might lose his job as a Fox News anchor if the allegation became public. Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is standing behind Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Monterey city attorney’s office, released the police report in response to public information requests from news media organizations. The city attorney said that because the report had been released to Mr. Hegseth in March 2021, it was no longer private. The name of the complainant and others interviewed by the police were redacted.
The complaint initially came to the police from a Kaiser Permanente hospital that the woman visited four days after the sexual encounter. The woman went to the hospital to request a sexual assault examination, according to the report.
She told a hospital nurse that she believed that “something” might have been slipped into her drink as she does not remember most of the night’s events, the report said. She said she remembered being in Mr. Hegseth’s hotel room and seeing his dog tags hanging around his neck as he was over her.
The woman could not remember whether intercourse occurred, the nurse’s account said. After Mr. Hegseth ejaculated, the woman said that he told her to “clean it up,” and she found her way back to her hotel room.
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