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From left: Matt Gaetz, Linda McMahon, and Pete Hegseth
Matt Gaetz wasn't the only one.
Matt Gaetz withdrew Thursday as Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general amid allegations of sex with a minor, but he’s far from the only Cabinet nominee who’s faced sexual misconduct accusations.
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"It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition," Gaetz, a former Republican congressman from Florida and a Trump loyalist, wrote on social media.
"Trump's pick of Gaetz encountered controversy from the start, over allegations that he participated in sex parties, used illegal drugs and had sex with a minor," NPR notes. "The FBI investigated these charges beginning in 2021, but the Department of Justice never brought charges."
The U.S. House Ethics Committee initiated its own investigation, but Gaetz resigned his House seat last week in an effort to stop release of the investigation's findings. The committee met Wednesday to decide whether to release the report anyway, but the vote ended in a tie, with all five Democrats on the panel in favor of release, all five Republicans against. This means the committee will not make the findings public, although the report could well be leaked. Nevertheless, Gaetz withdrew from consideration as AG. He has little experience that is relevant to the position, and he is widely disliked even by fellow Republicans.
Additional damning evidence has come out. The New York Times reports that it has obtained documents that show how "Gaetz and a friend sent thousands of dollars through Venmo to dozens of people who, according to testimony that is said to have been given to federal and congressional investigators, were involved in sex parties from 2017 to 2020." Those who received payment include a woman who was 17 when she participated in one of the parties.
And sources told CNN that the Ethics Committee had received testimony that the woman had a second sexual encounter with Gaetz when she was underage, something that had not been reported previously. CNN had asked Gaetz for comment shortly before he announced he was dropping out.
But Gaetz is hardly alone. There have also been claims against nominees Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with accusations against Elon Musk, tapped by Trump to lead a new government department. They’re all allies of a president-elect who himself has been found liable for sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll and has been accused of sexual misconduct by many other women. Birds of a feather?
Fox News host Hegseth, who is up for secretary of Defense, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Monterey, Calif., in 2017. The incident happened at a hotel where Hegseth spoke at a meeting of the California Federation of Republican Women. Afterward, he was at the hotel’s bar with several of the attendees.
The accuser, who has been identified only as Jane Doe, “received a text from two women at the bar who told her that ‘Hegseth was getting pushy about his interest in taking them upstairs to his room,’” The Washington Postreports. The Post reviewed a memo to the Trump transition team, which detailed Doe’s complaint to the local police department, and documents from Hegseth’s attorney.
Doe, who was tasked with looking after Hegseth, went over to the group and talked to them, and the two women left. Then, she “didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room,” according to the memo. The next day, she had a memory of being raped, and a rape-kit exam revealed the presence of semen. She filed the complaint with police, but no charges were brought by the Monterey County district attorney’s office.
In 2020, however, she threatened to sue Hegseth, and he made a payment to her as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Hegseth has maintained they had a consensual sexual encounter. His attorney has claimed Doe was the aggressor, but police and the DA’s office have not confirmed this. Hegseth agreed to the payment because he feared he would be fired by Fox News, his attorney told the Post.
McMahon, the cofounder of World Wrestling Entertainment and a longtime Trump ally who headed the Small Business Administration in his first term, is nominated to lead the Department of Education even though she has scant experience in that field. She and her husband, WWE cofounder Vince McMahon, have been accused of enabling the sexual abuse of underage boys who worked with the ring crew at the organization’s events.
In October, five of these former “ring boys” filed a lawsuit against the McMahons and their company in Baltimore County Circuit Court. “It alleges the McMahons knew about and failed to stop decades of sexual assault, from the 1970s to early 1990s, perpetuated by former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr.,” USA Today reports. Phillips died in 2012. An attorney for the McMahons told USA Today the accusations are “untrue and unfounded.”
Then there’s RFK Jr., nominated as secretary of Health and Human Services, despite his anti-vaccine statements and bizarre theories that the environment turns children transgender and that HIV does not cause AIDS. He has been accused of groping a family babysitter, to which he responded that he is “not a church boy.”
Finally, Musk and one of his companies, SpaceX, were sued in June by eight former employees who claim he created a hostile work environment for women and other marginalized groups — “according to the lawsuit, ‘treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size’ and ‘bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,’” Slatereports. Trump has said Musk and former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy will run a new federal department, the Department of Government Efficiency.
