Penelope Hegseth, the mother of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, accused the media of mistreating her family during a Wednesday interview in response to the leak of a disparaging email she sent to her son in 2018.
Penelope emailed her son on April 30, 2018 as he went through a divorce to condemn his alleged mistreatment and belittling of women “for his own power and ego,” The New York Times first reported. Six years later, his mother told “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy that she wrote to her son “in haste” during a difficult time for their family and said that she wants to “discredit” the media for allegedly threatening her before publishing the email.
“I am here to tell the truth, to tell the truth to the American people and tell the truth to the senators on [Capitol Hill], especially our female senators,” Penelope said. “I really hope that you will not listen to the media and that you will listen to Pete … Let’s go back 7 years, which, if we all went back 7 years, we would see that we are not the people that we are today. But they were going through, Pete and his wife at the time, were going through a very difficult divorce. It was a very emotional time, and I’m sure many of you across the country understand how difficult divorce is on a family. There’s emotions, we say things, and I wrote that in haste, I wrote that with deep emotions, I wrote that as a parent.”
“I want to say something about the media, and part of today is to discredit the media and how they operate. When they contact you, I let a few phone calls go, but then they call you and say — they threaten you. That’s what they do. They say, ‘unless you make a statement, we will publish it as is.’ And I think that’s a despicable way to treat anyone, threats are dangerous and they’re hard on families,” Hegseth’s mother continued.
Penelope said that she wrote a follow-up email to Pete about two hours later to apologize, and assured viewers that herself and her son have a great relationship. She told The New York Times in a phone interview that she disavows her statements made in her initial email about his treatment of women.
“It is not true. It has never been true,” she told the Times. “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.”
Hegseth’s ex-wife, Samantha Deering, filed for divorce in 2017 after her then-husband had impregnated former Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet, who he later married in 2019, according to The Independent. The defense nominee reportedly admitted to having five affairs during his first marriage to Meredith Schwartz, who filed for divorce in 2008, according to Vanity Fair.
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